Why Are Some Languages Harder to Learn Than Others?

Why are some languages more difficult than others?

It's a subject that comes up all the time.

I want to talk about that today, and then I'm going to introduce you to a

very interesting person, where we discuss the subject in greater detail.

I think there are six or seven major reasons why we find learning

languages difficult, and some more difficult than others.

The first reason, I think, and one of the biggest reasons, is that we

put too much pressure on ourselves.

It's difficult to learn a language.

In other words, it's more difficult than speaking your

own language.

When you speak your own language, there is no pressure, and even

there you have a much larger passive vocabulary than active vocabulary.

Point number two then is the more different the language

is from your own language, the more difficult it's going to be.

Obviously a different writing system or similar vocabulary, similar structure.

One example, which I'll show you, is when I go to do Dutch, it's

very easy for me because it's written in the Latin alphabet.

It has a lot of

common vocabulary with languages that I already speak. So it's a breeze.

Let's take the example of Dutch.

I decided to play around a bit with Dutch.

I hadn't been studying Dutch.

I went in there [in LingQ] and I did the first five lessons in Sentence View, and

I just breezed through it in no time, even though the Dutch shows

me that there are 79% new words.

In fact, the language is so similar to languages that I know

that I can go through it in

Sentence View, understand it, and pretty soon I'm getting a flavor of

Dutch and I feel I'm getting somewhere.

If I go now to Arabic, for the same percentage of unknown words, even

this, it says 12% unknown words, I know it's gonna be super difficult for me.

It's not just the new words, it's also how similar the language is to

a language that you already know.

The third reason is I think people take on too much at one time.

That's why we have Sentence Mode at LingQ.

You know, reduce the amount of strange new words that you are looking at.

Help yourself as much as possible.

Listen to it, make it less strange.

Take it in smaller bites.

A fourth reason is that certain languages have sort of quirks.

It might be the spelling system in English, or even

in French, or even in Greek.

Or it might be gender, or it might be the case system in German or Slavic languages.

So these particular quirks can make some languages more difficult than others.

The fifth reason is the availability of interesting content.

I think when we start, we have a high tolerance for kind of repetitive

and somewhat boring material, but we have to then get onto things of

interest and some languages just have more availability, like English, like

Spanish, like Russian, of that kind of interesting content at our level.

Another big factor is your inherent motivation.

So a language may be difficult.

Intrinsically, for all the reasons that I've pointed out, it's more different.

It has these quirks, call it. There's a lack of resources.

But if you're tremendously motivated, you can overcome those.

So let's make that just sort of a brief introduction to this subject.

And now I want you to meet Zoe of Zoe Languages.

And we discussed this in greater detail. So it's very

appropriate that you are from China.

So many people consider Chinese to be very difficult.

I was recently in Poland, the

Polls consider their language to be very difficult.

The Koreans say their language is the most difficult.

I'm having trouble with Arabic right now.

I know that you speak Persian and Arabic, and of course you're

a native speaker of Chinese.

From your perspective, what is the most difficult language to learn?

Okay.

Firstly, I want to thank you.

I want to say that I was inspired by you.

I've been watching a lot of your videos, and after learning Arabic, I've

decided to learn Turkish and Persian.

Because of you!

Because you have inspired me.

Wow.

I want to say thank you.

Yeah.

Do you know that FSI Ranking Foreign Service Institute?

Exactly.

This famous ranking is geared towards English

speakers.

Mm-hmm.

It varies depending on your mother tongue.

Some people will still insist there's no such thing as the most difficult language.

Right.

They argue it's Russian or it's is Greek.

I think you have more experience than me.

Also, some people even say English, as they have been learning it for so

long, but still can't speak it. And their points are not entirely off-base.

For example, I speak seven languages.

I can't count Mandarin because it's my native language.

I think the most difficult foreign language for me is

Arabic. It's my number one.

I've been

struggling.

Can you give us a list of the languages that you speak?

I'll give you the

list.

According to the difficulty. The first one, number one is Arabic.

My native language is Mandarin, right, and the most difficult

language I've ever learned is Arabic.

The second one is German.

The third one is Turkish.

The fourth one is French, and then the next is Persian.

The last one is English.

Okay.

But this list isn't objective at all.

It's completely relative, and based on my personal learning journey. When we

talk about difficulty, we can have difficulty in speaking correctly.

In other words, complicated grammar.

We can have difficulty in pronunciation. We can have difficulty

in comprehension so that the aspects of the language that are difficult

can vary from language to language.

Would you agree?

Totally agree.

But I prefer to say that it's easy to define the difficulty of learning

the basics of a language.

It's straightforward to identify how hard the pronunciation is, for example,

like the four tones in Mandarin, Chinese, and or the writing system

and how complex the grammar rules are.

Because, for example, Arabic, because of the gender, and a lot of other grammatical

rules like German. Chinese tones and writings are very, very difficult.

But these kind of things can be learned in practice.

But in my opinion, once we reach an upper-intermediate level, all

languages become equally challenging because the difficulty lies elsewhere.

It's in the immersion environment.

Your knowledge of the culture and society and so on.

Here, I would like to give an example.

In my opinion, Persian would be easier than Arabic.

In terms of the grammar in Arabic, there are complex gender,

plural, and conjugation rules.

However, when I travel to Iran and communicate with locals,

I find it easy to have a basic conversation, to express myself.

I learned very quickly at the beginner level until the intermediate level.

I already have a lot of vocabulary because I knew Arabic already

and the grammar is easier than Arabic. But while I was in Iran, sometimes I

can even discuss complex topics because we have the context.

Of the conversation we are interacting.

People are aware that I'm a foreigner, so they speak slower.

Use simple vocabulary and clear sentence structure

to help me understand better.

However, it is still extremely challenging for me to follow my Iranian friends'

conversations.

They speak quickly and use a lot of colloquial expressions.

So understanding them requires knowledge of culture and the social

context.

I certainly do agree with you that Persian is easier than Arabic.

I wouldn't have put German as such a difficult language,

but that's your experience.

Someone who's native language is English, maybe has an easier

time with German. I don't know.

But another aspect of difficulty is how easy it is to find good

learning content.

Interesting learning content.

Yeah, so, generally speaking, it's becoming easier to find good learning

content nowadays via the internet.

I was just, before our discussion, I went to MTV Lebanon and I got

an MP3 file from there, and I can import that into LingQ and

it automatically transcribes it.

And so I have a lesson that wouldn't have been possible

even a few years ago. [For] Persian, it's more difficult to find good

learning content. In some languages,

there's just an abundance of good audio and text learning content.

Yeah.

So that's another factor that affects difficulty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Agree.

That's why I think it's not really fair to put English at the end of my list.

We already learn English at school.

Mm-hmm.

And these days, we expose ourselves to English content.

As you said, it's easy to find immersion environments.

Which make our studies seem easier compared to languages that lack learning

resources such as Persian or Turkish.

So I personally don't find English difficult, not surprisingly, but

it also depends. You know, some people say, "Well, English is easy!"

It is easier because of the environment.

So many people speak English, whether they're native speakers

or not native speakers.

Yeah.

Now then the question is, how well do you want to speak this language?

There are people, for example, who say that French is hard to understand because

of the liaison, because it's hard to hear the clear sort of definition of where

one word ends and the next word begins.

Japanese is somehow difficult because of the way

the Japanese people communicate.

There's a lot of things that are not said that are kind of understood.

So I think every language comes with its difficulty.

To me, the biggest issue is motivation.

If you're very motivated, difficulties fade away.

Agree.

I have a question for you, actually.

Yeah.

You know 20

languages, right?

Not always up to the level I'd like, but experience learning 20 languages.

Yes.

I'm curious

about your ranking, the difficulty ranking of these languages.

Well,

right now I would put Arabic at the top.

If I say, okay, Chinese, the difficulty there is the characters.

There's... that's just a matter of time.

You have to put in so much time because, you know, the sooner you learn a

character than you forget it. And you gotta learn it again and again.

And so that takes a lot of time.

On the other hand, when I was learning Chinese, it was my full-time job, so

I was doing it six, seven hours a day.

So within a year I was reading books in Chinese.

The grammar in Chinese is extremely easy.

It's probably the easiest grammar of any language I've ever learned.

Nothing changes.

There's no gender, there's no conjugation.

There's some patterns of how the language works, and you get used

to those patterns and away you go.

So Arabic certainly is up there in difficulty.

I think the Slavic languages are difficult because of a very complicated

grammar, so many different changes to words, depending on their function

Mm-hmm.

in a sentence. I never consider pronunciation a big issue.

If I pronounce it well or less well, it's good enough.

You know, I don't worry about that.

But it's hard to speak the Slavic languages accurately,

in other words, correctly.

Mm-hmm.

In Chinese, it's hard to make a mistake, assuming you have the word.

And of course, another advantage in Chinese is if you get the

characters, you can easily build your vocabulary because so many of what we

would call words in English are in fact the combination of characters.

So the more characters you have, the more new words you can

learn or recognize or guess at.

No, I would say that the difficulty right now

is Arabic for sure. Agree.

And that's about it.

The easiest to learn is any extension of a language you

know; another romance language.

Another Slavic language. Korean I found difficult because of a lack

of interesting content with audio and text that I could study on LingQ.

See, I'm not so interested in series on Netflix.

K-Drama or K-Pop.

No, not that doesn't interest me.

But to those people who are interested in that, then there's a

wealth of material for learning Korean.

Yeah.

So.

It's very subjective, but I'm very impressed that you have reached

out to learn languages of different language groups, and I think it's

an exciting thing to do to explore different parts of the world.

Now you're exploring the Middle East, which I'm also trying to do.

I was inspired by you!

Let's hope that we inspire people who are watching this to not spend too much

time worrying about the difficulty, be motivated by their interests, whether it

be history and geography, as is our case.

Or anime for Japanese or K-pop for Korean or whatever it might

be for Chinese or other languages, and go out and explore the world.

It's a wonderful thing to do.

Yeah.

Well listen, thank you very much.

Thank you.

And you are @Zoe.Languages on YouTube and people can go there and watch you

explore these different languages.

I saw your videos when you were in Iran, conversing with the people there

in the shops or with your friends.

A wonderful example for us to follow.

Thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

Thank you, Steve.