Language difficulty categories

[Loren A. Billings]

On 2003/07/04 05:42, "Leslie Farmer" <Zemedelec at AOL.COM> wrote:

> Try the Monterey Foreign Language Institute in north California--they publish
> such a list.   I saw it once, and the three most difficult languages for
> native English speakers were listed--in order of difficulty--as Chinese,
> Arabic and Czech!

I wonder if Leslie means the Monterey Institute of International Studies or
the Defense Language Institute (several steep blocks from each other in
Monterey, California). These are both accomplished institutions but they
differ in their overall purpose. Others on this list (e.g., Jack Franke)
know more about these places than I do.

I might add that a specific school might rank a particular language based on
the peculiarities of the people that teach that language at that
institution. If the examiners (especially in oral-proficiency tests) come,
for the most part, from the same faculty of teachers, then the biases of the
pool can undermine an institution's ability to assess how well prepared a
student is for a particular function in the target language.

Moreover, it is almost pointless to compare how difficult it is for the same
average American student to reach a comparable proficiency in two other
languages that are sufficiently dissimilar to each other: say, Mandarin
Chinese and Czech. There are so many differences between these two languages
that I find it hard to see how a yardstick would have much meaning. What an
Anglophone needs to function in these two example languages is so different.
Just in the sound system, Chinese uses differences in pitch to indicate
changes in lexical meaning while Czech keeps stress fixed but changes the
length of a vowel. These are both alien to the average American student. We
could go on with writing systems, for example, and show that Chinese is
clearly more difficult to master than Czech; it matters, therefore, whether
the student needs to read and write. In another realm, Czech may be more
difficult to master. Czech is notorious for having two quite divergent codes
for (simplifying somewhat) the written and spoken registers. These three
examples--phonology, writing systems, and diglossia--are just a part of the
things that need to be considered in coming up with such an index. I haven't
even begun to talk about cultural issues, which may well matter even more.

I do theoretical formal linguistics and therefore others know better than I
do what such an index would entail. What I do know, however, from some brief
stints in the language-learning realm, is that learning a second or foreign
language has so many variables that it is hard to make quantifiable claims
of any sort. Comparing the success of any two (albeit average) experiences
in learning non-English language just makes it so much more difficult for
the numbers to mean anything.


--
Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
Associate professor of linguistics
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Chi Nan University
Puli, Nantou, Taiwan 545 Republic of China

E-mail: billings at ncnu.edu.tw

Telephone: +886-49-291-0960
     NCNU extensions:
     2541 Department staff
     2789 My office
Fax: +886-49-291-4440

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