The Road to Fluency

[Dan Parvaz]

Tacking on to Alysse's comments...

The Language category system developed by the US Department of Defense
plays into that idea of "language distance". The higher the category, the
more time is taken in initial instruction (the aim of the Defense Langauge
institute is to graduate students in basic courses with an FSI level 2 in
speaking, listening, and reading) As an example, using English as the L1:

Category 1 language... Afrikaans
Category 2 language... Spanish
Category 3 language... Farsi,German
Category 4 language... Mandarin Chinese, Arabic

Rhonda Jacobs did a paper back when she was in the W. Maryland TIP/TAP
program on the status of ASL as a "truly foreign language", meaning that
ASL is somewhere near the cat-4 level.  I'm not sure of Ms. Jacobs is
affiliated with an institution, but she can be reached via the RID.

Cheers,

Dan.