What makes learning a new language hard?
What is the hardest language to learn for native English speakers? Last week we talked about pronunciation issues; now let鈥檚 have a look at grammar and writing systems. 聽 聽
Languages have gender if they separate nouns into classes, which then affects adjectives and other parts of speech. Germanic languages often have three genders 鈥� masculine, feminine, and neuter 鈥撀爓hich don鈥檛 necessarily correspond to human gender. As Mark Twain famously quipped, 鈥淚n German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.鈥� In English, if a girl is eating a turnip, she is eating it; in German, it is eating her. 聽
It gets even more challenging when you add case, a system in which nouns and their modifiers change to indicate the role they play in sentences. When we see 鈥淭he dog bites the man,鈥� we know who鈥檚 doing the biting because of word order; in Latin, it鈥檚 all about the noun endings. Vir is 鈥渕an鈥� and canis is 鈥渄og,鈥� so canis virum mordet is 鈥渄og bites man,鈥� while canem vir mordet is 鈥渕an bites dog.鈥� Latin has six cases, and nouns follow one of five patterns of declension, which if you multiply leads to ... confusion. Other languages have even more cases; Tsez, spoken in the Caucasus, has 18, which can be combined in various ways to produce around 126. 聽
Other languages force speakers to encode information that English doesn鈥檛. You can鈥檛 just say 鈥渨e鈥� in the Solomon Islands鈥� language Kwaio 鈥� choices include 鈥渨e two (but not you),鈥� 鈥渨e three, (including you),鈥� and 鈥渨e many.鈥� You can鈥檛 speak Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian language, without knowing your relation to the sun since the language uses the cardinal directions to locate things, as in 鈥渢here鈥檚 an ant on your south leg鈥� or 鈥渢he spoon is northeast of the fork.鈥� 聽
Then there鈥檚 writing. Unfamiliar alphabets 鈥� Greek, Korean Hangul 鈥� are fine once you memorize the symbols. But some languages use abjads instead, which are basically consonant alphabets. Arabic, for example, omits all but long vowels in its written form. If you鈥檙e a native speaker, it might be easy to see that 鈥淐nda鈥� is 鈥淐anada.鈥� For the rest of us, it can be like playing a game of Wordle. And some languages employ logograms, which don鈥檛 reflect sound at all but rather possess particular meanings. Mandarin has over 50,000 characters, though you 鈥渙nly鈥� need to recognize 3,000 or so to be able to read a newspaper.
So which is hardest? The U.S. Foreign Service ranks Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean among the toughest for English speakers, estimating that they take 88 weeks to learn, versus 24 for 鈥渆asy鈥� Spanish and Danish. The real answer is probably, whatever language you鈥檙e trying to learn at the moment.聽
