Is there a comparable language difficulty-ranking for non-English speakers?

General discussion about learning languages
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devilyoudont
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Re: Is there a comparable language difficulty-ranking for non-English speakers?

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Sep 24, 2018 9:26 pm

Serpent wrote:I think the main reason such lists don't exist for non-English natives is that we're expected to learn English first. And we might need to use English-based resources too.


Other countries might not be running such a large foreign service that can have no expectation that new hires will speak any languages other than English. (This is what the foreign service institute is for--the government teaching monolingual Americans how to work in the diplomatic service, or other foreign service)
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Axon
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Re: Is there a comparable language difficulty-ranking for non-English speakers?

Postby Axon » Tue Sep 25, 2018 4:33 am

I can't find it at the moment, but I remember reading a list of critical languages published by the Chinese government. I think Arabic and Russian were the top spots, and Malay and Indonesian were up there too.

I looked around online and found a lot of "hardest language in the world" lists in Chinese, though none from any serious institution. The top spots often went to Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and Polish, which makes a lot of sense to me. I did find a few that ranked French, Norwegian, Danish, and German very high. The reasoning for Norwegian was that it was learned by very few foreigners and everybody speaks their own dialect so there's no actual standard.

I know in the prestigious language immersion middle and high schools in China, there are courses in Arabic, Russian, Spanish, German, and French alongside mandatory English. One school even had Czech and Polish!

From what I know about Asian languages and from having spoken to lots of Chinese people who were interested in languages, I'd say for a native Mandarin speaker the list is something like:

Cat 1: Other Chinese languages
Cat 2: Vietnamese, *Burmese, *Thai
Cat 3: Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, *English, *Scandinavian languages
Cat 4: German, Icelandic, Romance languages
Cat 5: Semitic languages, Slavic languages, Finno-Ugric languages
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Re: Is there a comparable language difficulty-ranking for non-English speakers?

Postby StringerBell » Tue Sep 25, 2018 7:28 pm

Thank you to everyone who has responded; I appreciate the time you took to respond and I enjoyed reading through all the responses.
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