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

[StringerBell]

I'm wondering if there are any comparable lists ranking the difficulty of various language families for speakers who are not native English speakers. I've tried searching for this information online, but all I find are sites discussing the FSI Cat1-5 languages for English speakers.

So if you are a native Russian, French, or Chinese speaker, how do you quantify the difficulty level of a language/language family based on your native language since the FSI categories don't apply?

[shandra]

For me FSI's categories are still valuable for Romance languages speakers.

I think so because in cat.1 we have Romance and Scandinavian languages. I guess that an English speaker could find relatively easy a Scandinavian language, and in the same way an Italian speaker could find Spanish.

So it is possible that English and Romance speakers could share a common point of view, concerning FSI Cat.

(Sorry for explaining my point of view at Cefr A0 tonight)

[aaleks]

For English learners there's Common European Framework Guided Learning Hours

CEFR Cambridge English Exam Number of Hours (approximate)
C2 Cambridge English: Proficiency (CPE) 1,000—1,200
C1 Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE) 700—800
B2 Cambridge English: First (FCE) 500—600
B1 Cambridge English: Preliminary (PET) 350—400
A2 Cambridge English: Key (KET) 180—200

From here https://support.cambridgeenglish.org/hc ... ning-hours

I think for a native Russian English would be in the Cat 3 or 4.

[Iversen]

I'm slightly puzzled by the order of German and the Romance languages in the list for Slavic speakers. It is true that the upper classes in Russia communicated a lot in French before the revolution, but I suppose that this habit was stamped out rather brutally within the first few years after 1918. On the other hand there is a fairly large number of German loanwords in the Russian language from the time of Peter the Great, and German only has half as many noun cases as Russian.

As for the Baltic languages the Russian speaking populations in the respective countries may be acquainted with them, but hardly anybody else, and there can't be as many textbooks etc. as there are for the 'big' Western European languages. I know that the Slavic and the Baltic languages have a common origin, but that's really far back and probably not of much value for language learners now ... or what? What do the Slavic language learners say?

[Kraut]

https://www.businessinsider.de/welche-s ... ind-2018-2
Grafik zeigt, welche Fremdsprachen Deutsche am schwersten erlernen

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https://coursefinders.com/de/blog/5044/ ... r-deutsche
Wonach suchst du eine Sprache aus?

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https://www.sprachenlernen24.de/blog/Sp ... zu-lernen/

Welche Sprachen sind für Deutsche leicht zu lernen?

[vonPeterhof]

I'm slightly puzzled by the order of German and the Romance languages in the list for Slavic speakers. It is true that the upper classes in Russia communicated a lot in French before the revolution, but I suppose that this habit was stamped out rather brutally out within the first few years after 1918. On the other hand there are a fairly large number of German loanwords in the Russian language from the time of Peter the Great, and German only has half as many noun cases as Russian.

I've never seen exact statistics, but I suspect that the percentage of Germanic morphemes in Russian is smaller than that of Romance/Latin ones (including Latinate morphemes borrowed through Germanic languages), plus the latter seem to be used more productively in Russian morphology.

As for the Baltic languages the Russian speaking populations in the respective countries may be acquainted with them, but hardly anybody else, and there can't be as many textbooks etc. as there are for the 'big' Western European languages. I know that the Slavic and the Baltic languages have a common origin, but that's really far back and probably not of much value for language learners now ... or what? What do the Slavic language learners say?

Granted, I never got very far in learning Lithuanian, but yeah, I never really felt much of a boost from the Balto-Slavic relationship. Yeah, the conjugations and declensions do sort of feel a bit more familiar than, say, those in Latin, Sanskrit or, for that matter, German, but not to the point where you can just intuitively figure them out, and the cognate bonus is fairly small unless you're very good at solving sound shift puzzles in your head (and even then it's a hit-and-miss due to more than a millennium's worth of semantic drift).

[Kraut]

Today's Lithuanian has been purged of Slavic borrowings.

Example weekdays in the 19th century:

panedelis (Montag, vgl. weißrussisch panyadzelak, poln. poniedziałek, tschech. pondělí), utarninkas (vgl. weißrussisch aŭtorak, poln. wtorek, tschech. úterý), sereda (vgl. weißrussisch Sierada, poln. środa, tschech. středa), ketwergas, petnyczia, subata, nedelia (nach Kurschat, 1870).

today they look like this:

pirmadienis (Montag – wörtlich „Ersttag“), antradienis (Dienstag – wörtlich „Zweittag“), treciadienis, ketvirtadienis, penktadienis, sestadienis, sekmadienis.
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Aleksander Brückner: Die slavischen Fremdwörter im Litauischen. Weimar 1877.
https://archive.org/stream/dieslavische ... 1/mode/2up

[tiia]

https://coursefinders.com/de/blog/5044/schwere-und-leichte-sprachen-zum-lernen-fur-deutsche
Wonach suchst du eine Sprache aus?

I had found the same list, but then decided not to post it here, because:
1. The list towards the end of the article (the 10 hardest languages) is said to be generally valid and not only from the view of German natives.
2. There are too few information, why these languages, why in that order. What languages were considered for that list?
3. They don't give any reference!

I just think often there might have never been the need to create such an official ranking of difficulty as the FSI categories. Of course for German natives there are the general tendencies like Dutch is usually the easiest, followed by English and Scandinavian languages. Romance languages are considered easier than Slavic ones and anything outside the Indoeuropean language family is usually harder.

[Jaleel10]

You could play around with this http://www.elinguistics.net/Compare_Languages.aspx that is available on http://www.elinguistics.net/

This comparative linguistics approach takes you to a short digital trip in the history of languages... You will see how 18 words (when carefully chosen) can deliver values which are enough to calculate a distance between two and more languages and represent it on a tree. The distances are expressed as values between 0 (the nearest distance - so the same language) to 100 (biggest possible distance). Play with these values in the calculator! You will recognize proximities you can feel by yourself if you know some of the languages used in this study

Between 1 and 30: Highly related languages. Protolanguage (common “ancestor”) between several centuries and approx. 2000 years.
Between 30 and 50: Related languages. Protolanguage approx. between 2000 and 4000 years.
Between 50 and 70: Remotely related languages. Protolanguage approx. between 4000 and 6000 years.
Between 70 and 78: Very remotely related languages. Protolanguage approx. older than 6000 years - but high potential of interference with chance ressemblance.
Between 78 and 100: No recognizable relationship: the few ressemlances measured are more likely to be due to chance than to common origin!

I can not vouch for it's reliability because I know nothing about linguistics but this is a Spreadsheet I made to showcase how close Afrikaans is to other Germanic languages:



Just for fun I did one for all the languages I'd like to learn (from a Spanish base):

[Serpent]

For a Russian speaker, FIGS and English are easier to master in practise because there are so many resources. To learn a Slavic language to a high level you need either to take a serious university-level class, or to be ready to jump in and use native materials early on.

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.