French
Very easy to read. Difficult to very difficult in terms of listening comprehension. Average to difficult in spoken and written output.
German
Easy to read. Very easy listening comprehension. Easy spoken output. Average to difficult written output.
Italian
Very easy to read. Easy listening comprehension.
Norwegian
Very easy to read. Can be difficult for listening comprehension. Very easy to write.
Spanish
Very easy to read. Very easy listening comprehension. Very easy to speak.
I base this on personal experience.
I grade things as easy to listen to if they are somewhat regular and somewhat pronounced in spoken form like in written form (Spanish, German, Italian) and hard if not. They are easy to read because there are loads of cognates and shared vocabulary. Sentence structure is very similar (almost identical in Norwegian, very close in French and slightly different with multiple clauses in German) making it easy to decipher messages.
Feel free to chip in with languages you have experience of.
The cases are annoying if you study those silly tables associated with German but the language itself is very easy to hear in terms of word separation when people talk.
Even though I donât know the other languages in your list, my feeling is that French should definitely be one of the hardest when it comes to listening comprehension. I think the number of homophones is way bigger than English. They also cut lots of words when speaking. The guy in the video which I posted the link below summarizes this quite well by saying âFrench people try to get rid of the letter âeâ as often as they can.â Besides, the difference between written language and oral language in French is significantly larger than that of English. Not saying âneâ and âilâ in some contexts can be understandable to some extent, but adding unnecessary words like âmoiâ, âtoiâ, âlĂ â, âquoiâ at the end of sentences as in âCâest important, çaâ, âJe sais pas, moiâ is a very common thing. And on top of all this, they sprinkle lots of nonsensical words like âheinâ, âbonâ, âbahâ, âenfinâ when they talk which can be pain in the ass for French learners. For more information, these two links are very useful in this regard:
I read French fluently yet i can often not understand something i can read perfectly when i hear it spoken. I studied German once years ago and i hear every single word in German when i listen to it.
Well, obviously i mean regular High German. For some reason when you say something about a language here on LingQ people assume you are talking about and including every single possible native speaker and dialect.
Saying French is hard would obviously not count someone who speaks insanely slowly and enunciates every word, the same as saying German is easy doesnât count an 80 year old Bavarian farmer.
Weâre talking in general here. On average. Run of the mill. Normal.
You could point to an academic writer of any language though, and claim that itâs difficult. I would say reading is relatively easy, but I donât agree that listening is âvery easyâ as OP said. The huge regional differences can make listening to every-day speech kinda challenging.
Out of all the posts I see in language learning forums, this kind is the one i dislike the most. I find it so presumptuous in some kind of way. Even if I use my mother language as a base, a neo-latin one, I am never able to say if that or this one is easy to read, or listeningâŚ
I guess weâre all individuals at the end of the day. Something that person A finds quite hard may be easy (or easier) for person BâŚ
There is probably a wide spectrum of language learners, ranging from a genius types like DrewPeacock, who typically reach near native level in several languages after a couple of weeks study, through to people who could put in countless hours of toil over several years yet still have the level of a punch-drunk terrapinâŚ
