I’d put Russian and probably other Slavic languages, Latin, and other inflected Indo-European languages between your #1 & #2. Their highly inflected grammar makes them more challenging to learn. But if you look at some of the non-Indo-European languages, including your #2 group, it quickly becomes apparent that Russian, e.g., has more in common with English than is immediately apparent.
BTW, the LangFocus blog (“Hello, and my name is Paul…”) has an article directly addressing this thread’s question: “What Language Should I Learn?”
His YouTube channel is where I’ve learned a lot about the very different structures of other languages without having to have actually studied them. ))
Yeah, the IKEA example is a good one. I learned French in school, and, frankly, the quality of the instruction wasn’t great. However, just given how many obvious cognates there are it actually didn’t take too much work to understand authentic content. Yet, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian are still put in the same group as French, Spanish, Italian in the Foreign Service Institute difficulty list of wide renown. Based on IKEA labels, this could be a surprising situation; however, the things I could easily understand in French were typically those with lots of “educated vocabulary”: the “démocraties”, “anticonstitutionnellements,” and “réformes économiques” of the world, while a lot of things where in English I’d use a phrasal verb I could probably understand if spoken to me, but I might sort of be guessing (if not wholly stymied; I often think of teaching someone how to tie a shoe using only words) about how to render them into French. Whereas I bet it’d be a bit more automatic word-for-word exchange into Germanic languages many times. But I happened to be more a fan of news-type programs than soap operas, so the terminology of day-to-day life would up somewhat overlooked.
Yeah, I think common everyday type words in English tend to come from Anglo Saxon, and thus often have German cognates. An English speaking beginner with level zero German would probably get something like “das ist ein Haus” or “ich habe ein Buch” - but one quickly enters far deeper waters. In Romance languages the opposite is perhaps true - i.e. the more advanced you go, the more Latin derived cognates you’ll encounter.
An interesting aside, German has a certain number of French or Latin derived words (so called Fremdwörter) which are mainly reserved for very elevated or academic discourse. When I lived in Germany I remember seeing somewhere the word “Nezessität”, and I was like: ‘oh, so now you tell me! After I busted my brain to learn the word “Notwendigkeit”’. But when I asked one of my teachers he explained that “Notwendigkeit” is used 99.999% of the time!
If Google NGrams is to be believed, as of the year 2000, the figure was about 99.987%. With that many decimals, I guess one can even give your prof the benefit of the doubt being off by a factor of ten
Yes, I mentioned it was a very general overview. I’m obviously only talking about major languages, or national languages that 1million+ speakers. I know there are sorts of crazy, indigenous languages that are probably way harder than even Japanese or Chinese… like navajo or some obscure languages in the Amazon or Papua NG or something.
but I agree with you about Russian being more similar to english than we realize. It’s hard to explain, but the overall way sentences and words are put together just “feels” much more familiar in my brain when I’m studying and listening in Russian compared to Korean in which I really, really, REALLY have to focus hard on listening and it just wears my brain out trying to put the sounds and the grammar together… and why I’ve listened to about 5 x the amount of Korean dialogue as Russian, but I still find Russian WAAAYY easier to study and comprehend.
But my point is, coming from english, once you get beyond the easy group of German/romance, there is a big jump in difficulty, as almost all other languages will have some type of major hurdle to get past.
And yea, youtube is my go to resource for when I have to learn a new alphabet or basic sentence structure.
I learned the chinese pinyin, the korean AND japanese alphabets for free over there, as well as the Russian alphabet before trying to study those languages here on Lingq.
I decided to make Spanish the first language I learn. There were two main reasons I chose it. One it’s spoken a lot in the United States. Second, I like the language.
“…He doesn’t speak French he speaks Québécois which is like some caveman version where people sound like they’ve got speech impediments. They say it’s French because it’s written the same…”
I’ve never been to French-speaking Canada (unfortunately) but I’d be very surprised if there is any more difference in pronunciation between Canadian French and Continental French than there is between US English and British English. I also suspect that there are (in each case) significant differences both between different regions and between speech in a formal context (school, university, law court, etc) and “street language”.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the way people speak down by the docks in Marseille isn’t markedly different from the diction of some metrosexual leftwing economist from the Sorbonne…
i choosed the languages i learn because of the places where they are spoken for some reason countries that speak french as a first or second language have impressed me more than spanish ones i can’t believe unesco has french as one of the top ten difficult languages
The key thing to understand about our verbal viagra popper is that he is a “troll” in the very pure sense of one who posts with the aim of trying to provoke some kind of emotional reaction.
When one has grasped this fact, such people even become interesting in a trivial kind of way - perhaps rather like watching a stray dog doing a pile of poop right on someone’s front doorstep…
In my experience this is completely true. I’ve studied Russian and Chinese and Russian feels much more familiar to me as a native English speaker. But they both take a long time to learn.
I’m Brett. I’m Vietnamese. I want to find friend to pracitce English the spare time. Besides I like to exchange culture another country. I can learn vietnamese. Myskype: thuymarketing09. Thanks
I recommend Finnish. It is one of the hardest languages to learn, it’s a small country thats not particularly exciting to visit (it’s one of the only countries where Syrian refuges ended up leaving because it was so depressing), and almost everyone living there is fluent in english.
But it’s also one of the wackiest languages, it sounds cool to me so it sounds like fun,
