Nov
8
The Language Difficulty Myth
People always think their native language is the hardest in the world.
It’s not true.
Well, obviously, it is true for some nation which truly has the most difficult language of the world. On the other hand, “difficulty” of a language is like “movement” of an object in Physics: it only makes sense relative to some frame of reference.
In any case, I’ve always heard it from people that their language is the most difficult. For example:
- Norwegians told me that Norwegian is extremely difficult and they knew some person who had lived in Norway for 18 or more years and still didn’t speak the language well. Well, Norwegian is easy.
- I’ve heard from Portuguese that Portuguese must be one of the most difficult languages in the world. I have met people who have learnt it to a point where they could work in Portuguese in very short time. I have learnt it up to a level where I can read books in 5 months myself.
- In Lithuania, people think that their language has been found by some scientific research to be the hardest in the world. Or, the second hardest after Chinese. Well, it’s not.
A point to be made, though: it is true that most of the languages are very hard to learn perfectly. But we’re not talking about learning things perfectly here… we prefer being able to communicate and leaving “being perfect” to those that wish to specialize in that language. But when people call their language “very difficult”, they don’t usually think of “learning it perfectly” but of “being able to utter basic things in it”.
The fact is, people always overrate their language in terms of how difficult it is to learn it. Do not get discouraged. In fact, it can even act in your favor: if you learn the language in the end, people think that you must be some kind of a genius to have been able to do that. Weird.
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There are 9 comments to this post.
lyzazel had this to say,
Nov 21, 2009 @ 5:03 am
Cool. Kaip sekasi su lietuvių kalba?
There are indeed people who consider their language easy but I think they are usually in the minority.
On an unrelated note, I will probably look into Turkish some day. Well, I don't plan to learn languages forever but I could surely take on some more. I saw an ad for Turkish classes but they were expensive and I don't believe in classes that much. Anyway. :>
Parrish777 had this to say,
Nov 22, 2009 @ 1:31 am
Parrish777 had this to say,
Nov 22, 2009 @ 1:33 am
Polish has long been considered a difficult language for English native speakers. However, the difficulty of any language really depends on the relationship between the learners native language and that the language they are attempting to learn.
Parrish777 had this to say,
Nov 23, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
The difficulty level of any language really has less to do with reality and more to do with perception. There are so many great methods for language learning and believe me when I say that there is no magic program for mastering a language in 30 days. Books claiming fluency in 15 minutes a day can give new learners false hope. The reality is that becoming proficient in any language requires a lot of time and work. It requires diligence. However, there are a lot of things that a person can do to help advance their learning and my blog is devoted to sharing those ideas.
joel had this to say,
Nov 25, 2009 @ 3:24 am
But I do think in the other way probably. I think my native language is the easiest one to learn because I use it every day and I am comfortable of it. I learnt English and French in my school days and so i was comfortable learning them too. I think the reason behind this is, the earlier we start to learn a language, the easier and faster we learn it.
Nice sharing and keep posting.
tomris had this to say,
Dec 4, 2009 @ 4:00 am
Açiu, gerai. Why don't you check Manisa Turkish on Google,and (other) section on that sıte includes some interesting links as well.
mithridates had this to say,
Dec 8, 2009 @ 3:56 am
Yes, I can guarantee that you'll like Turkish. The textbook I used was Teach Yourself Turkish, which was written in a style definitely similar to yours so that's the one you'll want to pick up to learn. I didn't buy the one with the CDs as well so I'm not sure how well the dialogues were recorded.
It's this one:
Jayden had this to say,
Jan 30, 2010 @ 8:09 am
I have to agree, although I tend to rate English (my native language) quite easy – minus the irregularities. Norwegian is indeed pathetically easy and I think those people who live in Norway for 18 years are either extremely thick, anti-social or just plain unopen to learning a new language. We had a girl in my school go to Norway for 10 months on an exchange. Now, she wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she came back speaking beautiful Norwegian, so I think those kind of excuses are exactly that, excuses.
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I just think the opposite. I am Turkish. I learnt English and French at school.When I started to learn Lithuanian at the age of 56 I decided that Turkish is the easiest to learn because it uses the latin alphabet,it is read as is written,it does not have grammatical gender,adjectives are not declined,etc.. So may be we can speak of some criteria which make learning easy depending on what languages you speak