Difficulty of learning languages

Many languages are claimed to be the hardest language to learn.

There are in fact two learning cases:

• infants to naturally acquire
• adults to learn as a second language

Natural acquisition

The question of the hardest language to acquire can be considered by determining when children are able to speak grammatically correctly, as judged by adult speakers.

According to Wexler, the constructions that take children the longest to master are long-distance dependencies. The long-distance dependency of the reflexive pronoun in Korean is not implemented correctly by Korean children until the age of five (Wexler 1990, p. 109), making Korean the most difficult language for toddlers to master, according to Wexler's study.

As a second language

Learning a language as an adult strongly depends on the learner's native language. In general, the closer the language is in relation to vocabulary and sentence structure (among other factors), the easier acquisition will be. 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).

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).

Diplomats and defense language training gives some interesting data:

• The British Foreign Office reviewed the languages that diplomats and other embassy staff have to learn and determined that Hungarian, followed by Japanese, were the most difficult languages for these diplomats to learn.

• In the Defense Language Institute of the US Department of Defense (DLI), Korean is seen as the hardest of the Category IV languages, which are Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. Korean is 75-week course, longer than the other Category IV languages, and they are even trying to make it a Category V course all by itself.

Missionaries and ethnologists often learn much more unusual languages, and it is likely that ǃXóõ or Navajo and many other may rate as harder than Korean.

See also

• Chomsky hierarchy
• Critical period hypothesis
• International auxiliary languages – some of them attempts to create the easiest language
• Language learning aptitude
• Motivation in second language learning
• Propaedeutic value of Esperanto – it may take less time to learn an easier language first, then a harder language, than to learn the harder language by itself

External links

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