Are some languages more difficult to learn than others
No spoken language is significantly more difficult to learn than any other in absolute terms. After all kids can learn their mother tongues, whatever they may be, without too much trouble. However adults already speak one or more languages and generally find it easier to learn a closely-related language than a distantly-related or unrelated one. For example, the least difficult languages for English speakers to learn are Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch and German, in more or less that order.
Written languages are a different matter - some, particularly Chinese and Japanese, are difficult to learn even if you're a native speaker.
Each language presents you with a different set of challenges in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and writing system. The closer these are to your native language, the less difficult a language is to learn.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring students (mainly native English speakers) to a certain level of proficiency. These are listed below: 1 = least difficult and 4 = most difficult.
- Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
- Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), German, (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian, Malay
- Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese
- Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
