I consider the 7 pillars of language learning to be listening, reading, conversing, writing, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Does reading and writing a difficult script make the other pillars more difficult? Absolutely. So if you eliminate reading and writing, or use the same script for all languages, would the overall difficulty (time to learn) rankings change? Sure.dml130 wrote:would the FSI difficulty rankings look different when considering languages only in their spoken forms?
But of course, that's never going to happen. So what we have is another "Who has the hardest grammar?" thread. It's funny, because grammar is not the hardest pillar to acquire. Listening and vocabulary take much longer.