Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

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Takra jenai
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Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby Takra jenai » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:25 pm

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.co ... difficulty
Language Difficulty Ranking
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker.
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annelions
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby annelions » Thu Aug 20, 2020 3:10 pm

Personally, I've never agreed with those rankings. I know that English has a lot of shared words with French but the pronunciation and grammar differences make it much more difficult than Spanish or even German, IMO. I dabbled in French for a while and never got very far at all.
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby jonm » Thu Aug 20, 2020 3:57 pm

There's a cool map of the difficulty rankings here.
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby caledi » Thu Aug 20, 2020 11:31 pm

annelions wrote:Personally, I've never agreed with those rankings. I know that English has a lot of shared words with French but the pronunciation and grammar differences make it much more difficult than Spanish or even German, IMO. I dabbled in French for a while and never got very far at all.


I think it's just so individual. I (as an English speaker) struggled a ton with German compared to French, but I have known a couple of English speakers who just couldn't wrap their heads around Spanish but picked up German pretty quickly. It's probably a combination of talents (for example, I'm better at pronunciation but worse at vocabulary), learning style, interests, motivation, and background. I do think that the rankings are probably close to correct on a very broad scale, though (like clearly Norwegian will be easier than Japanese for an English speaker).
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ASEAN
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby ASEAN » Tue Aug 25, 2020 7:12 am

annelions wrote:Personally, I've never agreed with those rankings. I know that English has a lot of shared words with French but the pronunciation and grammar differences make it much more difficult than Spanish or even German, IMO. I dabbled in French for a while and never got very far at all.


The original post was written in 2015 and there have been a few adjustments since. There are now just four categories. FSI's French course is now 30 weeks/750 hours compared to 24 weeks/600 hours for other Category I courses. German is Category II along with Haitian Creole, Swahili, Indonesian, and Malay (36 weeks/900 hours.)

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby SCMT » Tue Aug 25, 2020 5:04 pm

ASEAN wrote:
annelions wrote:Personally, I've never agreed with those rankings. I know that English has a lot of shared words with French but the pronunciation and grammar differences make it much more difficult than Spanish or even German, IMO. I dabbled in French for a while and never got very far at all.


The original post was written in 2015 and there have been a few adjustments since. There are now just four categories. FSI's French course is now 30 weeks/750 hours compared to 24 weeks/600 hours for other Category I courses. German is Category II along with Haitian Creole, Swahili, Indonesian, and Malay (36 weeks/900 hours.)

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/



Wait...so French got harder?
:D
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annelions
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby annelions » Tue Aug 25, 2020 10:08 pm

SCMT wrote:Wait...so French got harder?
:D

Good! French actually turned me off of language learning for a while. Everyone (at the time) was saying how easy French is because of things like shared vocabulary. I was bored with Spanish in school and wanted to learn something more interesting. French was not easy! I dabbled and continued to buy language books since then but French really put me off of any serious language studies. If I couldn't deal with an "easy" language like French, how was I supposed to learn a "difficult" one like German?
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Spanish
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: 2 / 16 Forge
: 0 / 100 Busuu
Croatian
: 0 / 18 Teach Yourself
: 1 / 38 Mondly
German
: 0 / 100 Assimil
: 1 / 64 Lingodeer

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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby Migla » Wed Aug 26, 2020 4:16 pm

This ranking is, obviously, most relevant for monolingual English speakers. The moment you come from a different language background or, god forbid, don't speak English at all and/or know a few other languages, it becomes a hit and miss. But nevertheless, I have always liked this ranking - I love quantifying things.

But I've always wondered - are those, say, 600 hours academic hours or not? Are they class hours only, or include homework and/or independent practice?
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby thevagrant88 » Wed Aug 26, 2020 4:44 pm

Despite some incongruous entries (Mongolian should easily be on the same level as Korean and Japanese, for example) it’s a solid guideline for native English speakers. I don’t really know how useful this is exactly but it’s still interesting. It could honestly pretty easily be further stratified, but still.
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Re: Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

Postby Gordafarin2 » Thu Aug 27, 2020 9:51 am

Migla wrote:But I've always wondered - are those, say, 600 hours academic hours or not? Are they class hours only, or include homework and/or independent practice?

That's a good question! I found a page mentioning "Their [FSI's] schedule calls for 25 hours of class per week with three or four hours per day of directed self-study." The hour-week equivalences account for the 25 class hours - so my interpretation is the 600 hours doesn't include extra homework/review time.
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