Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition
Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2017 11:25 am
Analysing the difficulty of languages always becomes an incredibly complicated task because there are too many factors to consider. The most obvious is of course the learner's background, i.e. which languages can the learner speak. But there are many others, like different learning curves (e.g. easy at the beginning, harder to perfect), different difficulties for different aspects of the language (speaking, reading, understanding speech...) or different criteria for what it means to know a language (for example, some people might say Tristano's Spanish is better than his Dutch because it's more fluent, but he considers his less broken Dutch better instead).
And all these factors are dependent with each other, creating so many combinations that it can be hard to find two learners with the same assessment of the difficulty of learning a language.
And let's not forget the factors that are extrinsic to the language itself, such as accessibility to resources, including people to talk to.
If you don't want to oversimplify it, you might need to write a 5000 word essay of the difficulty of learning a specific language, and still it would only apply to yourself.
But then comes the FSI and says "this one is Category I, this one is Category II...". Yes, ok, very useful!
And all these factors are dependent with each other, creating so many combinations that it can be hard to find two learners with the same assessment of the difficulty of learning a language.
And let's not forget the factors that are extrinsic to the language itself, such as accessibility to resources, including people to talk to.
If you don't want to oversimplify it, you might need to write a 5000 word essay of the difficulty of learning a specific language, and still it would only apply to yourself.
But then comes the FSI and says "this one is Category I, this one is Category II...". Yes, ok, very useful!