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Akagiyama t1_j203mu5 wrote

Does a language have an "easiest and hardest to learn" counterpart? For example, if someone only speaks and understands English, Japanese or Ethiopian, is there a language considered the easiest and hardest to learn from that starting point?

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KWillets t1_j2163iy wrote

Yes, second language learning difficulty is measured relative to the first language.

The US DLI and state department difficulty rankings are based on the number of hours for an English speaker to learn the target language; it's different for speakers of other languages. For instance Korean speakers have little trouble with Japanese, despite these being category IV (hardest) on the DLI scale.

Factors that make languages easy or hard are vocabulary, grammar, reading and writing system, and cultural cues (and a few others that I can't recall at the moment). Category IV languages have differences from English in all of these categories.

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robot_tron t1_j20al5q wrote

English and German share a significant percentage of cognates, and going back and forth between those is generally much easier than pairing English with other languages. Same situation between the romance languages.

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FabulouslyFrantic t1_j21lyjx wrote

Interestingly, these pairs do not always reciprocate understanding.

Italians have some trouble learning Romanians, however Romanians find it much easier to learn Italian.

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shadowplumber t1_j22sf1a wrote

I did some research a while ago with translation out of English into three different languages: Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. We had groups of translators translate the same six texts into their languages, and then we also translated the six texts with groups of machine translation systems for each language pair. We found that the groups of translators tended to translate something into their language from English in increasingly diverse ways the more “distant” a language got from English (Spanish being closest, then Arabic, and then Japanese being the most “distant”), meaning, for example, let’s say 6 out of 20 Spanish translators translated a word differently into Spanish, but then 10 out of 20 Arabic translators translated the same word differently, and maybe 14 out of 20 Japanese translators translated the same word differently (things were obviously more messy than this but there were clear statistical patterns).

The crazy thing is that the groups of machine translation systems followed the same pattern. Those machine translation systems (neural networks) were trained on tons of existing translations and show evidence of a pattern in translator behavior on a very large scale. It was hard to compare our results with existing research (linguistic “distance” is a slippery concept that I really only saw addressed in one large-scale study; I’ll try to find this study later tomorrow to put on here), but I feel like our work was an empirical estimate or indication of the relative distance of several languages from one language (not from each other but just from that one other language, in this case English).

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