QaEZ5_hfEc4.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          So it turns out I have to take a language, credit and university, so I'm going to take the easiest language in the world.

Speaker 1:          00:16          Good day everyone. One of the most common questions about language learning is what is the easiest language to learn? Now there is no exact answer to that question that applies to everyone because it depends on a few different factors. So the factors, it depends on or your native language, any other languages you happened to have learned and also the complexity of the language in question. So if your native language is English than the easiest language for you is probably the one that's the most similar to English. Uh, and if it's not, then maybe you've learned another language. Like if you've learned French, then maybe the language that's easiest for you to learn as the one that's most similar to French because you've already learned a lot of the concepts of those that those languages have in common. So you've already done a lot of the work in the past already.

Speaker 1:          01:06          Okay? So it could be your native language, the one that's closest to your native language, closest to other languages you've learned, and it also another factor is the complexity of that language. So it could be a language that's similar to your own, but if that language happens to be quite complex, then maybe that's not the easiest one. So it's kind of a balance of those different factors. So it's. There's no precise formula, but we have an idea just from those factors now the American Foreign Service Institute that trains American diplomats to go overseas, what trains them in language skills before their placement overseas. They've done a lot of research into this topic as it relates to English speakers because they're training their American staff to go abroad. So they're English speakers, but they're learning other languages. So they have a lot of data about how many hours it takes, about how intensively they have to study these different groups of languages.

Speaker 1:          02:02          So they have it categorized into four different groups. Is Category One, which are the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers than they've got two, three, four, and then five is the. The group of most difficult languages to learn and those people studying those languages study for I believe, 88 weeks full time. So that's like 88 weeks I guess a year and a half, something like that. Um, people who study the category one languages I think are in there for 23 or 24 weeks full time. So it's almost times four if you learn a level five language. So which ones are in level one the easiest category? They are uh, the Germanic languages such as a Dutch Africans, the northern Germanic languages from Scandinavia, Sweden, a Swedish or Norwegian and Danish not finished. That's separate language group. And then you've got the romance languages like French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and I believe also Romanian is in there.

Speaker 1:          03:03          So those ones are the most closely related to English. You've got the dramatic ones like Dutch and Afrikaans and I think those are probably the most closely related to English and the easiest to learn. I haven't actually studied those personally, but a lot of people say that Dutch is the easiest for English speakers. I have studied French and French has been the easiest language that I have personally studied. I used to think it was Indonesia because Indonesia is really simple and really straightforward and I made really fast progress in it and I could communicate an Indonesian after studying for just a couple of months before a trip. Uh, but when I started to study French I realized how much of an advantage that shared vocabulary is because English vocabulary is something like 35 percent French. So when I would look at a French text I would recognize a lot of the keywords already and I can basically understand half of the text without ever having studied French.

Speaker 1:          03:59          So after a few weeks I could basically read and after a few months I could communicate and speak not fluently, but I could make myself understood and I could understand pretty much whatever was said to me face to face, at least not on the radio and not third person, but face to face I could understand. So French has been definitely the easiest one for me. Category too, by the way, consists of only German. German is a dramatic language. Just like that, sure. Afrikaans and it's closely related to English, but it's also quite complex grammatically. It's not that complicated from what I hear, but it does have some complications like a grammatical case endings that, uh, other Germanic languages don't have. And that's why it's not in category one. It's a little bit more complex than the category one languages that puts it in category two. And I believe it's the only language in category two, so it's kind of off on its own because it's related to English, but a little bit complicated.

Speaker 1:          04:58          The hardest has been Japanese by far. Um, and that's one of the category five languages according to the Foreign Service Institute. Now what makes Japanese so hard is first of all, the grammatic grammar is very different from English. It's about as different as you can get. And also the writing system is extremely complex and I think that the Fsi categorization of level five doesn't even take into account. The writing system is just the spoken language. It matches my experience with French versus Japanese. It's feel, it feels to me like it took about five times as long to get conversant in Japanese as it did with French, about five times as long. But then the writing system on top of that takes a lot longer than that, maybe 10 times or 20 times or 30 times, as long as, as it takes to learn to read French to read and write French because it, you're learning for different, uh, writing systems and combining them together.

Speaker 1:          05:56          You're idiographic pictures. Those are the Chinese characters. Congee, those are very complicated and there's 2000 of them that you need just to read a book comfortably. Uh, and they're read in different ways. There's different pronunciations for each one. So learning Japanese is a real longterm intensive thing. So it's been the hardest for me a second. So that will be Arabic because when you learn Arabic you're learning not only one language, you're learning the formal language, which is kind of outdated, archaic language. But then you have to learn a dialect at the same time. And then you have to learn how to communicate with speakers of other dialects. So with Arabic you're learning a whole language family, that's what makes it hard. Uh, but the easiest has definitely been French followed by Indonesian because of its simplicity. A Indonesian, by the way, is a category three language according to Fsi. Obviously it's one of the more simple languages, but it doesn't have that shared vocabulary that with English that French or Spanish or Italian or, or Dutch or Africans would have. That's why it's not in category one, even though it's very simple. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I hope that gave you an understanding and I hope you're not choosing the language to study just based on how easy it is. I hope you are just interested in getting that information. All right. Have a good night. See you later.