Many easier languages or a couple difficult ones

[Iversen]

In my opinion it is meaningless to give absolute durations for learning any language in isolation, be it measured in hours or in months/years. If you look at languages in isolation it may however be meaningful to give relative assessments, such as Mandarin being more time consuming for an Anglophone monoglot than for instance Dutch or Danish, but even there you have to take the circumstances in consideration - like for instance where you live (and with whom!). For people who already know several languages these will influence the expected study time for the next one. The problem with English is that it is a fluid thing with lots of more or less unwritten conventions about what can be combined at what not, but not much morphology, and therefore the amount of morphology seems to be a major determinant for the FSI assessments. In other words: iIf you happen to have learned German or Icelandic already you're better equipped to a Slavic language where there are lots of complicated inflections than you would be with Bahasa Indonesia or Afrikaans as your second language. And if you have learned one Slavic or one Romance language already then you will also get a lots of vocabulary and some grammar with the next one for free as a bonus - not so if you know French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish but against all odds choose Polish or Hungarian as your next project. Or Navaho...

So all in all it may be possible for Anglophones to use those FSI levels as a rough RELATIVE guide to study time required, but not as an absolute guide. And you can't just add durations for 'easy' languages in isolation to match the expected duration for one 'hard' one.

That being said: my own study plan has mostly been based on European Indoeuropean languages and learning them to a decent level (whoch isn't necessarily nativelike proficiency), and that is of course based on the assumption that I can cover that field in less time than it would take me to learn just three or four totally unrelated and 'hard' languages to the same level.

So I have chosen the many-languages choice above.

[księżycowy]

In my opinion it is meaningless to give absolute durations for learning any language in isolation, be it measured in hours or in months/years. If you look at languages in isolation it may however be meaningful to give relative assessments, such as Mandarin being more time consuming for an Anglophone monoglot than for instance Dutch or Danish, but even there you have to take the circumstances in consideration

I forgot to mention before that with Chinese (depending on simplified or traditional) you get a bit of a break with Japanese thanks to the great similarities between hanzi and kanji. A few people have told me at least anecdotally that going from Chinese to Japanese in their learning path has helped them massively in tackling the beast that is the Japanese written language. So, this would surely reduce the numbers of proposed hours significantly again (like French and Creole).

[dml130]

Which do you think would be the more challenging endeavor for a native English speaker: attaining and maintaining many "easier" languages to an intermediate level, or doing the same for a couple of the most difficult ones

Imo many "easier" languages, because while total hours to get each group to B2 may be about the same, hours to maintain are more or less equal per language ime. So 4 languages will take more or less twice as many hours per month to maintain as 2 languages, regardless of which languages they are.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Once a person has attained a level of proficiency in a language, it seems it would be more about maintenance, which as you said should be roughly similar for each language no matter how difficult it was to learn.

[iguanamon]

The premise of this topic is something I don't use in chosing languages to learn. I wanted to learn Spanish, not because "it's easy" but because I live in the Americas. I've always been attracted to the culture, the music and Latin America and Spain in general as travel destinations.

Living in the Americas and speaking both English and Spanish is quite useful, but I decided I wanted to learn the other major languages here, so I next chose to learn Portuguese because of Brazil. Some people will say I got Portuguese for free, but having Spanish at a high level actually slowed my learning. It wasn't until I began to treat Portuguese as a language in its own right that I began to learn it.

Of course knowledge of Spanish is very useful in learning Portuguese, or really any romance language. In similar languages there are enough differences to master that makes the other language a language in the first place.

I'll let others (such as Iguanamon) answer that question. I'm hardly knowledgable in French or Haitian Creole.

I wanted to learn Haitian Creole and Lesser Antilles Creole French because I live in the Caribbean. While French is an official language of Haiti, all Haitians speak Creole. While St Lucia and Dominica are officially English-speaking islands, their own French Creole is a very common language... as it is in Martinique and Guadeloupe. I can certainly visit Martinique and use Creole everywhere.

I did not learn French (and still haven't) so I cannot speak to whether French is easier to learn. Though HC is 90% "French lexified" vocabulary, the grammar is West African. One constructs a sentence quite differently in HC than in French. There are many different features in HC, such as how plurals are formed; no gender; no verb conjugations (particles are used instead); reduplication for emphasis; the way indefinite articles are used; etc. These differences to me make it a language that's more "foreign" to an English-speaker than French. The vocabulary is largely indo-european derived and somewhat familiar. It's the grammar that is quite different.

This may be the reason why FSI considers it harder to learn for native English-speakers. Having had my experience with learning Portuguese after Spanish, I knew that "the devil is in the details". I also knew that I had to accept the language as it is and that the hard parts had to be learned and not skipped over.

I am not a linguist. I am not equipped to argue linguistics. I'm just a guy who learned some languages. I chose to learn the languages around me not based on ease of learning, but on interest. If I lived in Hawaii, I'd want to know Hawaiian, Samoan, Japanese, Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. If I lived in England, I'd want to know Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Norwegian, Hindi/Urdu, Italian, Romanian, Polish, etc. To me, usefulness and geographic proximity- which languages am I most likely to encounter, are what I base my language desires upon. Difficulty or ease never enter my mind as criteria for learning.

My advice on which languages to learn is: learn the languages that interest you and you will want to use most, whether they be hard to learn or easy to learn.

[dml130]

Difficulty or ease never enter my mind as criteria for learning.
My advice on which languages to learn is: learn the languages that interest you and you will want to use most, whether they be hard to learn or easy to learn.

I wholeheartedly agree with the above. However, just to be clear, this thread was started for discussion purposes only, not as a personal consultation for which languages to learn. Of course, good advice is always welcome either way.

[Granrey]

the question is complex because the question seems to have a hidden meaning of learning a language just for the sake of learning a language like look at me I am a polyglot.

learning a language is a very complex endeavour, having the right enviroment, tools and motivation are very key to learn. If while living in Alaska, you are trying to learn hatian, using Duolingo and couple books with low motivation. Youmight spend a lifetime and never learn it.


For the same reason, the estimated hours to learn a language assume that a bunch of factors are in place to make the estimate happen.

[leosmith]

the question is complex because the question seems to have a hidden meaning of learning a language just for the sake of learning a language like look at me I am a polyglot.

Why the judgement though? This is a language learning forum, after all. There's nothing wrong with learning a language for any reason (well, short of criminal activity maybe ).

[Le Baron]

the question is complex because the question seems to have a hidden meaning of learning a language just for the sake of learning a language like look at me I am a polyglot.

Why the judgement though? This is a language learning forum, after all. There's nothing wrong with learning a language for any reason (well, short of criminal activity maybe ).

True, but there is something dilettantish about just piling up a lot of languages. Not that it's easy to do or anything, but I think people generally have a hard time fathoming why anyone does it. We tend to see pursuing endeavours as being to some useful end, which is probably misguided. When I've mentioned I fiddle about with languages some people have asked 'are you a professional translator?' And when I say no, they have looked perplexed.
It's a fair bit of work keeping languages in a state of utility. I've often asked myself why I've pursued a language, which on the whole I don't really need. Sometimes dropping it, because life is too short to be maintaining things like that. I know you have a lot of languages at a decent level, but do you use them all and all the time? If I was dealing with that many it would start to feel like this:

[Granrey]

the question is complex because the question seems to have a hidden meaning of learning a language just for the sake of learning a language like look at me I am a polyglot.

Why the judgement though? This is a language learning forum, after all. There's nothing wrong with learning a language for any reason (well, short of criminal activity maybe ).

ha ha ha, not meant to sound that way but take my post from a guy that is almost 50 years old.

At some point in your life you will regret the things that you did and what you should had done instead

For instance when I was a teenager I spent several years going every Saturday for learning typing, filing, freehand writing, bookeeping/accounting, etc kind of to get me ready to work in a office environment. That was on top of going to a regular school from Monday to Friday. From that time, the only thing that age well were typing and bookkeeping and regret not learning french during that time.

couple years later while in high school I studied English and while at university I learned computers.

What I'm trying to say is this. Life is short and you don't know how much time you have. If you want to learn something make sure is something that you are likely to use at some point and be handy.

Learning a language is way way difficult and it takes years, no need to say several languages. It would be a shame wasting so much of your time for something you will likely never use and if you do, you will be horrible about it.

Most so called poliglots are fake, even the legit ones would have a hard time getting a regular job at a foreing country. Yes, they sound like those immigrants who can't speak english well.


*the only reason why I regret not learning french is because I ended up immigrating to Canada and French is useful in occasional work situations. However, at the same time, if I had learned French then, my life could have taken a different path in which I might had not needed it lol.

In summary, life is short. Enjoy it and learn something useful.

[Dragon27]

There's no point in learning things that you don't enjoy and are not likely to use (unless it's some kind of safety thing, I don't know), but hitting at least one of the two requirements is a good enough reason for me. Or you might say, that if it's not "useful" (for "practical" purposes), but you enjoy it, then it is useful for your enjoyment. After all, you will eventually die and lose the ability to use all of those skills anyway, so why not enjoy them while you still can enjoy things?