Language "categories" (was: undergraduate >Honors in Russian)

[Karla Huebner]

How related is "related"? Obviously both English and Russian are
Indo-European languages, although not in the same subgroup. How does German
end up in category 2 when it's more closely related to English than Spanish
(category 1)? (I grant that everyone seems to think Spanish is easier, but
why?)

Karla Huebner

At 02:20 PM 3/1/2005, you wrote:
>The classification system I described in my previous posting was
>developed by the United States government. It is based on language
>distance from English and categorizes languages by difficulty for
>learners who are native speakers of English with no knowledge of a
>related language. Thus, Russian is category 3 (in terms of hours
>required to attain various levels of proficiency) for Americans who are
>not fluent speakers of Ukrainian.
>
>More information about this system is in an article I have written
>about to be published in the next issue of the Modern Language Journal
>(to be published this month I believe):  A Ceiling Effect in
>Traditional Classroom Foreign Language Instruction:  Data from Russian.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Ben Rifkin

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