Difficulty of learning languages

The question which is the most difficult natural language can be considered in two ways:

• (L1) the hardest language to acquire by infants
• (L2) the hardest language for adults to be learned as a foreign language

The question (L1) can be considered in terms of the average of children who are judged by adult speakers to speak grammatically correctly. It turns out that the constructions that take children longest to master are long-distance dependencies. Thus the long-distance dependency of the reflexive pronoun in Korean isn't implemented correctly by Korean children until the age of five years (Wexler 1990, p. 109).

The question (L2) will strongly depend on which is the learner's native language: the more closely related the second language, the easier its acquisition will be (all other things, such as teaching method, motivation, and availability of learning materials being equal). This "proximity" of the target language is not necessarily a function of genetic relationship but may also be polyphyletic, such as a chance similarity of phonology. Differences in phonology are often insurmountable for the learner, and will be apparent in an accent in non-native speakers even after many years of proficient use of the learned language. Acquisition of native phonology is also complete very early in children's language acquisition, before the age of one year: that is, what is the "easiest" part of language acquisition for infants (completed first) is the "hardest" part for adult learners (completed last, if ever).

Studying the language chosen by immigrants in a multi-lingual destination, Chiswick and Miller (1994) find that "immigrants tend to gravitate to the official language that is closer to their mother tongue", making allowance for considerations of their region of residence and the labor market.

The question which of two given languages A and B is more difficult to learn may be considered by comparing the performance of native speakers of A learning B with that of native speakers of B learning A. For example, a study on speech comprehension by German immigrants to the USA and American immigrants to Germany found that native English speakers learning German as adults had a disadvantage on certain grammatical tasks, while they had an advantage in lexical tasks compared to their native German-speaking counterparts learning English (Scherag et al. 2004).

There may also be a genetic disposition determining which aspects of language a learner will find most difficult. Ross and Bever (2004) propose that right-handed individuals with left-handed family members (left-handed familials, LHFs) and right-handed individuals with only right-handed family members (right-handed familials, RHFs) showed differences in language learning strategy, with RHFs focusing on grammatical relations and LHFs on lexical knowledge.

According to a survey by the British Foreign Office among its diplomatic staff, the most difficult language to learn for adult English speakers is Hungarian, followed by Japanese.[1] This survey naturally included only languages that are used in diplomatic relations and does not rule out the possibility of other languages that are even more difficult to learn.

"The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages"[2]. Of the 70 languages analyzed, the 5 most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks, are: "Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean", with Japanese being the most difficult.

Navajo has a reputation as a difficult language because the US Army "code talkers" used it during WWII. However, the "Navajo" used for this purpose was a cipher and was incomprehensible to native Navajo speakers who were not part of the group that developed it.

See also

• Critical Period Hypothesis
• Language learning aptitude
• Motivation in second language learning
• Chomsky hierarchy
• the simplest languages to learn are certain planned languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, and the even simpler Toki Pona
• Propaedeutic value of Esperanto -- it may take less time to learn a simple language first, then a harder language, than to learn the harder language by itself

References

• Danielle S. Ross, Thomas G. Bever, , The time course for language acquisition in biologically distinct populations: Evidence from deaf individuals, Brain and Language, vol. 89, issue 1, April 2004, 115-121.[3]
• Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H.J., Röder, B., The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition 93 (2004),B97-B108.
• Barry R. Chiswick and Paul W. Miller, Language choice among immigrants in a multi-lingual destination, Journal of Population Economics 7, nr. 2 (June, 1994), 119-131.
• K. Wexler, 'On Unparsable Input in Language Acquisition', in: Lyn Frazier, Jill G. De Villiers (eds.), Language Processing and Language Acquisition (1990), ISBN 0792306600.

External links

• What is the most difficult language to learn?, John Hopkins Magazine (1999)
• Which is the hardest language?
• the hardest language on earth