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Time to think about moving?

Above I noted several problems with this article. Now I'm going to try to start thinking about some solutions. I don't think there's any point in doing any rewriting yet until we have agreed on what the article should actually be about. I propose that "Hardest language" is not really the best title or topic; the very concept of a single "hardest language" is not taken seriously or investigated anymore in second language acquisition, it's only discussed on random people's blogs; it's not an academically valid topic, as any linguist can tell you there are many ways to measure a language's difficulty. Searching Google for "hardest language", the first two pages come up with numerous blogs, which claim Icelandic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Sanskrit, Russian, and a variety of other languages as the "hardest". This illustrates two things: 1) there are many more languages that claim the title of "hardest" than the nationalist editors here want you to think; and 2) the people discussing this problem are, for the most part, not linguists and have no idea what they're talking about (see some of the laughable claims here and here). If you search Google Scholar for the same term, it becomes clear that "hardest language" is a concept in computational linguistics and is wholly unrelated to the topic being discussed in this article; and it's not a concept in SLA at all.

So the article, most likely, should be about language learning difficulty in general, not about some hopeless quest to find the single 'hardest' language. Unfortunately, a good title for this is hard to find. Google Scholar reveals that "language difficulty" (which is currently a redirect to this page), is actually used synonymously with language impairment in most of the literature (and a secondary use, but still with more hits than our topic, is for measuring the difficulty level of a passage, for example in a standardized test). "Language learning difficulty", likewise, is mostly about language impairment. Any other ideas? rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 16:10, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also, FWIW, this search turns up a few articles by EK Horwitz, which may be useful in developing this article (and certainly more useful than the misinterpreted studies added in by some of the editors above). rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 16:12, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with the title move if "many" reliable sources can back up for the suggested titles. Are you going to expand the article?--Caspian blue 16:30, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm hoping to expand it, but I need a clearer idea what it should be about. If it's just "hardest language" I wouldn't have much to say other than "the question of which language is 'hardest' is futile...". Something about what makes language easy or difficult to learn (based on both characteristics of the language and characteristics of the learner) would make more sense, and that is actually a topic that is taken seriously in the literature. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 16:33, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I started this article with the full awareness that it is going to report opnions on which languages are considered "hard" (or "hardest"), for whom.

The article has seen an extraordinary amount of trolling and confusion introduced by the well-meaning and clueless. If you do not know what the article is supposed to discuss, and if you do not have any references on the topic, how about just leaving it alone? This article will be based to 100% on quotable references. Our task is just to gather these referenes. If it is "anglocentric", too bad, that's because you didn't provide sufficient references from the Russian or German viewpoint.

Historically, what happened was that I happened to find a couple of references suggesting that Korean is the hardest-to-learn language. These references were suppressed by Kjoonlee (talk · contribs), apparently a Korean expat, for no reason other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT. After some time I became fed up and walked away. Since then, the confusion here on this talkpage has just become worse, with insightful comments such as Utopial's "Including some of these studies is also OR" (wtf?) who took it upon himself to call the artice "uneducated" and "a disgrace to the linguistics field" again for no coherent reason, although he did ramble about "a yahoo top contributor". What is going on here? Why does this topic attract comments of such abysmal qualtity? --dab (𒁳) 20:04, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure whether that's addressed to me or to everyone. I agree that many of the comments above are abysmal, and that is part of why I was trying to start a discussion about improving the article; if my comments are abysmal, too, though, I would appreciate hearing why you think so. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 20:47, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
As for "our task is just to gather those references"...well, as for me, I tend to believe that Wikipedia articles should be more than just collecting/listing/quoting references. There's a lot to be said for exercising judgment and using knowledge of the field (which, based on your well-informed comments, I assume you have) to decide what information is worthy of inclusion and to mold it into a coherent article. If we were just doing nothing but gathering and spitting back references, there would be no way to stop people from filling up this article with whatever garbage they find floating around (and, as you have noticed, the internet is already full of unreliable garbage on this topic). And if the only goal of this article is to report unreliable opinions of bloggers (since that is what almost all the discussion online is--as I explained above, I don't see this topic get serious attention from academics), then how would it be encyclopedic? There are tons of little topics that bloggers spout opinions about, we don't necessarily have articles on all of them. The article ought to be about a topic that actually exists and is taken seriously. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 20:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Dab wrote: Historically, what happened was that I happened to find a couple of references suggesting that Korean is the hardest-to-learn language. These references were suppressed by Kjoonlee (talk · contribs), apparently a Korean expat, for no reason other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT.
dab, I think you should explain to people here exactly how the Wexler study that you found shows that Korean is the hardest language for toddlers to learn. And then when they understand it, you could put it back in. Laws dr (talk) 20:06, 14 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Wexler study does not show that at all; you are twisting its meaning around, as I explained above. Either you're a POV-pusher or you simply don't understand basic linguistics; either way, you should not re-add the irrelevant study. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 20:19, 14 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One of the couple of references that Dab said he found was the Wexler study. As you can see from the above quote he still holds that the Wexler study 'does' show that Korean is the hardest for toddlers to learn. Now what beats me is why he doesn't explain in detail how the study shows this. He's a linguist too. Laws dr (talk) 05:14, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it doesn't show that. It shows that one feature of Korean is acquired later than that feature is in the other languages that Wexler happened to test; that doesn't prove anything about all languages in the world and it doesn't prove anything about Korean as a whole since it is only considering one feature. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 05:39, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
dab, you're not helping at all. And I'm no expat. I still think you're not being very logical here. --Kjoonlee 04:16, 2 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Korean was long ranked the most difficult language for English speakers by the FSI, though it looks as though that place is now taken by Japanese. (Though if you ignore orthography, I can think of several languages more difficult than either.) kwami (talk) 01:21, 3 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Could you give the source for "Korean was long ranked the most difficult language for English speakers by the FSI"?Laws dr (talk) 16:34, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also what are the several languages that you can think of that are more difficult than either? Laws dr (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Why does that matter? No one cares what random Wikipedia editors think about which languages are hard. We're here to discuss improving the article, not to share our opinions. If you want to share your opinions about Korean, I suggest you find another place to do so. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 18:40, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Awkward carveout of topic for an article

I feel this article treats an artificially constricted topic. Replacing it with a new article on a slightly more general topic e.g. Comparative difficulty of acquisition of various languages (human) (I'm not really suggesting that as a title) would allow a more relaxed discussion of the features of various languages that tend to make them more or less easy to learn, without the narrow focus on "more difficult." EEng (talk) 00:02, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See discussion above. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:15, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, I confess my eyes glazed over when scanning the Talk page here. Keep up the good work. EEng (talk) 03:13, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

the topic of this article was perfectly fine before people ruined it. It was the meme of "hardest language". So what if "hardest language" doesn't hold up as a scientific definition? Wikipedia has lots of articles on pop culture memes. --dab (𒁳) 10:41, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia has lots of similar articles" is not an argument for notability (see wp:OTHERSTUFF). For the topic to be restricted to the popular perception of the relative difficulty of various languages, there would need to be reliable sources discussing such popular perceptions. Are there? (And here, BTW, we run into a really, really serious parochialism issue: such perceptions without doubt vary widely depending on the mother tongue of the perceiver. How could an intelligible article comprehend all that -- or would it just be "...perceptions among speakers of English"?) EEng (talk) 15:01, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This topic deserves an article on Wikipedia for the simple reason that it is one of the most common questions that linguists get asked by students and laymen. It is one of the most popular questions on Yahoo! Answers. It is convenient to have this article on Wikipedia for the ease of organizing all the ramifications to the question in one place. I have actually referred questioners to this very article rather than spending too much time dealing with all the possibilities and issues involved. If an encyclopedia is a place to find answers to common questions, then this article is perfect since it deals with a very common question with all the details in a single place. It is a perfect article for an encyclopedia that is user friendly. --Taivo (talk) 15:44, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK now, um, what question is "one of the most popular questions"? Is it, Which language is hardest? (whatever that means)? Or is it, What are the popular perceptions regarding which languageis hardest? ? Anyway, Wikipedia can't have an article simply because it deals with an oft-posed question. If there are no reliable sources which can act as a basis for a presentation of actual answers to such a question (or, at least, of a framework by which the question might be usefully attacked), then it can't be the subject of a Wikipedia article. As it stands the article has few or no such sources. EEng (talk) 17:34, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The question is "What is the hardest language (to learn)?" Why shouldn't an encyclopedia answer common questions? It seems quite arrogant of encyclopedia makers to require users to dig for data rather than making it easy to find. Where else would a reader answer this question? In several different places in the encyclopedia otherwise. This article actually does offer a good framework from which the question can be attacked from several angles. Does that mean that the article as it now stands is perfect? No. But it means that there is a very useful framework to attack the question here--second language acquisition issues, availability of data issues, U.S. government measurements for how it measures "most difficult", etc. There is, of course, no concrete answer that fits all people, but this article approaches the question from a number of useful angles and will enlighten the casual reader who doesn't want to dig in twenty articles for the answer (assuming the reader even knows which of twenty articles will give pieces of the puzzle). And your contention that unless an article can be based on a single source then it shouldn't be here is rather unencyclopedic, actually. There are many articles that are based on multiple sources. If you require a single principal source for each article then you've simply built a collection of book reports rather than an encyclopedia. --Taivo (talk) 17:55, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I think that, once we do the research and put in the work, we can have the best of both worlds: an article that both answers a common question, and does so in an academic and accurate way. That would be something like what we have now, only cleaned up a lot: Hardest language should redirect to something like "what makes languages hard to learn" (not in that wording of course, but a title that expresses that), and the first section of the article should probably address the issue that there is no one "hardest" language (for all the reasons we have discussed before), which will answer the common question, and then the rest of the article would outline factors that contribute to what makes a particular language harder or easier (stuff like relatedness to known languages) and what general factors contribute to how well a person learns a language (stuff like motivation and aptitude). That way we can still answer the question that, admittedly, most uninformed people are coming here about, but without "pandering" to what we personally know is a silly caricature of language. The general structure of what the article should be, I think, is pretty clear; all that remains is to find sources and actually fill that in, something I have not yet sat down and tried to do.rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:04, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I completely agree. --Taivo (talk) 18:27, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't say an article should be based only on a single source. I also didn't say an article shouldn't try to answer questions people might have; I said that along with good intentions there must exist one or more reliable sources on which the article can be based. In particular, if such answers must be arrived at by synthesizing bits of 20 other articles, and there is no source (or to be clear, are no sources) which have done that work already, then Wikipedia can't present such answers. See wp:No_original_research#Synthesis_of_published_material_that_advances_a_position. Good luck to you all in refining the scope and building the article; I was just making a passing observation. EEng (talk) 19:45, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

British Foreign Office study

I keep reading about a study by the British Foreign Office that found the most difficult language to learn for British diplomats. (For example, on this article at usingenglish.com.) However, I haven't been able to locate the original source, and I can find no mention of it on the Foreign Office website. Is anyone aware of where it might be found? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 01:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have sent an email to the Foreign Office about this. I can imagine they are busy, so I don't know if they will be able to respond. I will give an update here if I hear anything from them. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 01:44, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I found a document on the Foreign Office Personnel Rules, which states that, among other things, the overseas allowance for diplomats is "also paid for language skills, varying according to the difficulty of the language". There may be more on this on their website - I shall have a look. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 13:23, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can't find anything on pay scales for Foreign Office staff, but it appears from this page that this information will be published eventually. No idea when, though. If it comes to it, it looks like we could request the information through a Freedom of Information Request - however I think that may be a little extreme! These quotes of Basque, Japanese and Hungarian being on the top of the Foreign Office's difficult language list must have come from somewhere though. We just need to find out where. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:32, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I got a nice reply from the man at the National Archives. From the search he did for me, it looks like this might be the document we are looking for: 'Hard' languages and their relative degree of difficulty. It looks like I will have to shell out some cash to get this document into digital form, so I'd like to make sure it's the one we're after before I get an estimate. It is quite old (1950), and it seems reasonable to assume that the Foreign Office may have changed the way they measure language difficulty since then. Does anyone have advice? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 15:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Further searching turns up three more documents, although the first still looks like the most likely.[1][2][3] — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 15:11, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Delisted - withdrawn by nominator.

{{Requested move/dated|Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers}}

Most difficult language to learn → Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers — The difficulty of a language depends highly on what languages you already speak. The present title, however, implies that there is a "most difficult language" in absolute terms, which is not the general view in linguistics as far as I can see. Restricting the article to the difficulty of languages for native English speakers would allow for a much clearer direction in writing the article, and would avoid much of the arguments about scope, adding new languages, etc. that can be seen on the talk page archives. I am also concerned that the concept of a "most difficult language" in absolute terms does not have any reliable sources that can prove its notability, whereas the concept of the most difficult language for native English speakers can be easily sourced. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page (here and here) and in the recent deletion discussion. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 03:54, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose. The proposed title is just far too long and detailed for a useful Wikipedia title. This article is about much more than just difficulty for English speakers. It is also about general issues of what makes language A hard (or easy) for speakers of language B to learn. Only a single paragraph is about English speakers. The title can be changed to something like language acquisition difficulty or some such other form, but this article is not just about English speakers, although 99% of the readers will be English speakers and the paragraph on English difficulty is appropriate. I agree that there is no absolute "hardest language" and the current title is probably not the best, but the proposed title is abominable and fails to entail the majority of the article's content, focusing on a single paragraph. --Taivo (talk) 07:06, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It is true that there is only a very small amount of material in the "For native English speakers" section at the moment. I was thinking that if we could find consensus for a page move, then we could expand it considerably. Alternatively I had thought of being bold and creating a page on Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers myself, then proposing a merge with this page, but that seemed a little disingenuous given the amount of discussion already generated.
Actually, your suggestion of language acquisition difficulty is a good idea, I think, and would also avoid the arguments about the scope of the article. I was put off going this route initially because of your rejection of my suggestion of language complexity in the deletion discussion, but maybe I was too hasty. If we are going to go this route, how about difficulty of learning languages instead? There usually isn't a distinction made between language learning and language acquisition in SLA research these days, and language learning is more familiar to the layman. I did think of language learning difficulty, but somehow it reminds me too much of language difficulty, which is used mostly for speech impairments in the academic literature. What do you think? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 07:58, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"Difficulty of Learning Languages" would be an acceptable title. --Taivo (talk) 16:38, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support in theory. The article should be renamed, but it should be simply named and not use some long drawn out psycho-babble to completly describe the topic. The most common name should be preferred in order to increase the possibility of the article showing up in internet searches. If I was searching for this topic on Google,I would most likely type in Most difficult language to learn for English speakers. A bit dumbed down from what has already been proposed, but its straight and to the point, and will increase the likelihood of the page showing up in a common English language search engine result.--Jojhutton (talk) 13:30, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If we're going with simple names, then why not go the whole hog and make the title Hardest language for native English speakers? (I would insist on the native, because otherwise it could include people speaking English as a second language, which would open a whole other can of worms.) I understand wanting to get the page high in search rankings, but the problem with titles like this is that they imply that there really is a "hardest language". There certainly seem to be "harder languages" for native speakers, but I don't think the sources support the idea of "one language to rule them all". If we imply the latter I think we might see lots of rehashing of the "my language is harder than your language" edit wars, and I'd like to avoid that if possible. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:27, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I just took the begining of what this article is already titled. Didn't think that was going to be controversial. I said my peace.--Jojhutton (talk) 14:39, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No need to apologise. I'd like the title to be simple, too. It's just a matter of finding the right balance between all the different factors. It would be great to have your input on the rest of the suggestions here, too. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You don't have to wait for the outcome of this discussion to do that. I think under any title that section is rather dubious. In any case, you should feel free to remove it, and if anyone objects to it, then they can discuss it somewhere else on the talk page. This discussion is purely about the page move. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No. I oppose the removal of the possibility of acquisition section. It is, of course, one of the factors involved. Your deletion of this section has been reverted, so you must get consensus for deleting it on this Talk page before removing it again. But that discussion is not relevant here in this move proposal. --Taivo (talk) 16:41, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Rather than changing the title to accommodate current limitations with the article (anglocentrism in particular), and in doing so solidify this limited perspective, why not just edit the article to address these issues so that the article is more deserving of a more general title? I have already pointed out ways the article can be improved (here and here), although the last time I tried to bring this up the discussion got mostly overwhelmed by a repetition of an ongoing nationalistic argument. Anyway, the point is, this article could be an article on factors that make a language difficult to learn and on which languages have a reputation for being difficult. rʨanaɢ (talk) 16:55, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I do share your concern - my idea for renaming the page wasn't simply to get rid of the more general perspective, it was to move it to another page such as Language transfer or language complexity, or however else we wanted to work out the details. However, it seems like most people here are happier with a more general title, so I think I'll change my !vote to speed things up. In any case, if a section on "difficulty for native English speakers" in a more general article became long enough, it would probably end up being split off into a stand-alone article anyway. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 02:43, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose "Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers"; Support "Difficulty of learning languages". What the article says may apply to spoken language, but a written language that requires learning thousands of characters, like Chinese or Japanese, is objectively more difficult to learn than one than one that uses an alphabetic script. Kauffner (talk) 10:29, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think "native English speakers" also implies native English readers and writers, so there would be no need to worry about leaving out literacy with a title of "Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers". In fact, I'm in favour of including reading and writing in the article, as I argued in the deletion discussion. It still looks like Difficulty of learning languages is the more popular choice, however. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 10:56, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Reading and writing should be no more than a single paragraph here, although an appropriate paragraph. The primary difficulties in learning language are the linguistic aspects of that language, not the orthographic aspects. One can learn Japanese and Chinese perfectly well without ever looking at a printed text, just as native speakers of any language can be perfectly fluent yet perfectly illiterate. So any discussion of reading/writing difficulty must be subordinated in this article and not emphasized. --Taivo (talk) 13:38, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Have you tried learning a foreign language? I think the method you are describing is a bit unusual. In general, students rely on textbooks and dictionaries, so real-world language learners almost always write better than they speak. Of course, other methods are possible. You can learn Chinese with the pinyin writing system and Japanese with the hiragana writing system. Computer-based learning allows a greater focus on the spoken language than tapes do. But the article should focus on how people really learn language. Kauffner (talk) 03:30, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I do see what you mean - both of you. However, this seems more like a general editing issue than a page-move issue. Let's save this space for discussion about the page move. (And, yes, I know that I'm as guilty of going off-topic as anyone.) — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 05:00, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Phonology section

A good seminal paper to cite there would be the following:

  • Flege, James Emil (1987). "The production of 'new' and 'similar' phones in a foreign language: evidence for the effect of equivalence classification" (PDF). Journal of Phonetics. 15.

rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:52, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Phonology edits

It is important to remember that this article must be written accurately. My edits to the phonology section were to remove the absolutes that implied "all speakers have trouble (or ease) doing X". Japanese speakers can HEAR the difference between [r] and [l], the problem they have is in producing the difference when they speech center is conditioned to vary them by environment. English speakers have the same problem with initial [ts] and [ŋ]--they can hear the sounds there, but they just have a very difficult time producing them there. --Taivo (talk) 17:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am all for making the article accurate. Surely the best thing to do in this case is improve the example, rather than taking it out altogether? It is a lot harder to understand the concept without it. And yes, Japanese speakers can hear the difference between /l/ and /r/, but they put them in the same mental category - the English words light and right do sound like the same word to a Japanese speaker. It's the mental category that I'm interested in here. Is there a wording for the example that you would be happy with? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 22:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, the example is "[l] and [r] are allophones in Japanese so a Japanese speaker may have difficulty acquiring them". That is perfectly clear and all that is necessary. If the reader doesn't understand what an allophone is, then that is why there is a wikilink. We cannot go through Wikipedia and explain in detail every technical term every time it is encountered. The whole issue of "mental category" is not an appropriate expansion for this. It's also not really relevant. Japanese speakers hear the difference between [r] and [l] just fine, but they have not been trained to produce them in the "wrong" place. It's not about mental categories, it's about learning how to produce them outside of their normal environment. English speakers can hear a word-initial [ts] perfectly well in [tsar] or [tsitsi], but since they've never learned how to produce the sound in this location, that's the problem--not some "mental category". Just as English speakers have never learned to produce pharyngeals, speakers must learn to produce [ts] in the "wrong place". --Taivo (talk) 23:19, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It may be "perfectly clear and all that is necessary" to someone who already has specialist knowledge, but I don't think this is the case for the lay reader. We should not assume that readers will know the difference between phones, allophones, and phonemes. I think we have two choices - we can either make lay readers hunt through the allophone article to find a clear example of what it is, just to make sense of the point we are trying to make; or, we can include a short example in the text of this article. I don't think expert readers would be put at a disadvantage if we included such an example. Is it really such a bad idea? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 00:05, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The example you previously included was simplistic and inaccurate. I find it hard to imagine an accurate example that doesn't take up more space than it really deserves. "right" and "light" do not sound alike to Japanese speakers. The question isn't whether or not Japanese speakers can hear the difference. The question is whether they have learned how to place one sound in the environment of the other or not. --Taivo (talk) 00:31, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
They may not sound alike, but they do sound like the same word. I have personally taught Japanese students of English many such /l/ and /r/ word pairs, and invariably the reaction I get is "They're the same!" This seems to be the exact question we are discussing to me. You seem to be very forthright over something that seems like common sense to me, so maybe I've missed something. Could you explain how the ability to hear the difference between the words is different from the ability to place one sound in the environment of the other? (Should this be "move one sound out of the environment of the other"?) — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 02:46, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Here is what goes on: 1) When a speaker learns their language, they learn to produce certain sounds in certain environments; 2) they can still hear the difference between the sounds, thus they can identify non-native speakers who may confuse the sounds; 3) when learning a language with those sounds in other environments, they have to learn how to produce those sounds in a new environment, something that may or may not be easy to do (for example, when learning Swahili, English speakers must learn to produce [ŋ] at the beginning of a word); 4) their level of success at learning to produce those sounds in new environments marks their language to a greater or lesser degree as being "foreign" to the speakers of the language they are learning. Trying to make it sound like Japanese speakers are normally incapable of hearing the difference between [l] and [r] seems rather chauvinistic. It's simply not true. --Taivo (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just me - there's a whole article on this subject: Japanese speakers learning r and l. Of course they can tell the difference between the allophones, and identify people using the wrong allophone as having a foreign accent. This does not mean that they consciously distinguish between English words using /l/ and words using /r/. The article I linked to points out that Japanese speakers can distinguish between [l] and [r] when they are not mentally processed as speech. I am not contesting this. I'm interested in the mental representation of the sounds when they are processed as speech. Actually, that sounds like a pretty good working definition of a phoneme to me. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 06:29, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There's a difference between Japanese speakers processing [l] and [r] in Japanese words and identifying and using them in English words. --Taivo (talk) 06:34, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking about it, I still object to the overt mention (besides the Wikilink I put in) of the right/light example. The reason is that linguists are very clear about what Japanese can and cannot do physically and linguistically. 1) Physically, they can hear the difference between [r] and [l]. 2) Linguistically, they don't notice the difference because of their linguistic conditioning. Given a sentence like, "Japanese speakers cannot hear the difference between [r] and [l]", an unsophisticated reader could easily infer that Japanese speakers are not physically capable of distinguishing the sounds rather than the very restricted linguistic sense of that statement. That's why I'm opposed to some simplistic statement and a longer statement that correctly captures the linguistic subtlety isn't really necessary in this context. --Taivo (talk) 14:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Allophone" is really not all that technically esoteric or abstruse of a term -- it's among the first things students learn in an introductory beginning Linguistics 101 class, and a number of people outside formal academic linguistics are familiar with it (including many foreign language teachers). If removing the term "allophone" would create difficulties for the article, I support keeping it... AnonMoos (talk) 15:39, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The term "allophone" is just fine and should stay. There was a further example that said, "Japanese speakers cannot hear the difference between right and light" (or pretty close to that wording). I removed it for the reasons cited above. --Taivo (talk) 16:37, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Diagram of basic procedure to determine whether two sounds are allophones
Anyway, I just now made a nifty little chart and added it to article Allophone, which I hope is helpful...AnonMoos (talk) 21:18, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This sentence is a bit of a mouthful: "These sounds do not always appear to pose significant problems for second language learners, unless they are radically different than sounds in the native language, such as pharyngeals or clicks to a speaker whose native language does not contain them." Is there a way of making this more readable? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 03:01, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The whole second half of the sentence (after "than sounds in the native language") can be easily deleted. --Taivo (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move to Difficulty of learning languages

Most difficult language to learn → Difficulty of learning languages — Relisted. --rgpk (comment) 20:46, 4 April 2011 (UTC) I think difficulty is more appropriate than most difficult because there doesn't seem to be agreement in the literature about which the best way to measure difficulty is, let alone which language is the most difficult. If we imply that there is a "most difficult" language in the title, we also invite the argument of who the language is most difficult for; difficulty of learning a second language depends heavily on what languages a person speaks, and we do not have space to follow this through for every language combination. Most difficult could also imply that there is a "most difficult" language in absolute terms, but as far as I can see the literature does not back this idea up. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page (here and here), in the recent deletion discussion, and in the recent requested move discussion that was delisted halfway through. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 02:44, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not quite sure I see your point. "Difficulty of learning languages" suggests additional languages to me. If it was singular "Difficulty of learning language" then I would think of first language learning, but with plural I think of second language learning. Also, if you wanted to distinguish between these two then the logical choice would be something like "Difficulty of learning second languages", would it not? Why "relative"? — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 11:15, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Because you're comparing one to another. It is difficult to learn any second language, but it is more difficult to learn some than others. That's the core point of the article. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 11:31, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, only some of the article will be about which languages are harder to learn, and people seem to be keen to restrict that to languages that are hard to learn for native English speakers. The beginning of the article will be about what makes a language hard to learn in general, with reference to individual features of language such as phonology, lexus, etc. Or at least that's the impression that I got from the talk page and the deletion discussion. In fact, I got shouted down when I tried to make the focus of this page more specifically on hard languages for native English speakers. So a large part of the article wouldn't be about comparing languages at all. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 12:19, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
adding relative would be ok by me. Johnbod (talk) 13:02, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It would make the title longer, which is not desirable according to the Wikipedia article title guidelines, and also I don't see anything about "difficulty of learning languages" which implies "not relative". Also this discussion is for the proposed title of difficulty of learning languages, not a different one. We would have to have a new discussion for "Relative difficulty of learning languages". (In fact, if you look at the previous requested move discussion, this is exactly what happened for "Difficulty of learning languages".) — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:11, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There's no need to get wound up in red tape. If consensus goes for a different title than the one in the nomination any closing admin with a brain will know what to do. As for the length, I assume that's a nod to the previous RM where the proposed title was quite excessively wordy. While article titles are supposed to be concise, they don't need to be as brief as absolutely possible. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 14:20, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's what I thought... The previous RM discussion seemed to be in favour of moving to "Difficulty of learning languages", but when I tried to move it myself after it was delisted, my move was reverted. That's why we're having a separate RM for this title. Curiously, none of the other people who posted in that discussion have done so here. I certainly can't blame them for running out of stamina though! — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:58, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar

I think Grammar is what could determine the difficulty of a language alot more, followed by the phonetics (such as pronunciation). Like an isolating language is easy, and an agglutinative language is intermediate but an inflecting language is hardcore. I can very much call Basque the hardest language ever, it takes like books and books to explain it's grammar. Those scientific racists are ignorant, they say Europeans have a sophisticated language. Just look at English, it's not that hard, I'm not even sure where English falls into.

Here's a following example of a made up extremely difficult language.

"I love rainbows

I/Me = Fulazmingaru love = Pustaskishamaruna Rainbows = Baluumoucharamu

" Balum Fulaz Garu muuchmaramiyat Taskishapustaruna minsijirats " — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.159.9.234 (talk • contribs) 06:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC) [reply]

I think you're right. The article is definitely in need of a section on grammar. I'm afraid that your example can't be included though, due to Wikipedia's policy of not including original research. Feel free to contribute material on this yourself - just make sure that you cite reliable sources for all your statements, and keep a neutral point of view. All the best. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 06:43, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What makes grammar difficult are inherent complexity and irregularity, as in Greek and many polysynthetic languages, as well as divergence from one's frame of reference. Basque isn't really all that difficult, it's just different from typical European languages. I'll give you an example of what makes English difficult: the word "the". That is very difficult to acquire for anyone who doesn't have articles in their language. More difficult than grammar, IMO, are the intricacies of the lexicon: when you use which word and how. A well-known example from English is "in the street" for something which is on the street, while "on the street" means something different entirely. That's far more daunting than grammar, because there is effectively no end to it. Mandarin is supposed to be grammatically simple, but the fact that you can't just string words together in their proper order and inflection due to lexical complications can make it more difficult to speak coherently than a language like Basque. — kwami (talk) 06:54, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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