Hard Languages and Easy Languages

Hello, everybody!

Sometimes, we hear people saying something like "Oh, my God! This language is too difficult to learn." or "Oh, come on, this is easy!" about a certain language.

Well, I will give you a concrete example. As you know, I have been living in Japan quite many years and I have taught languages in almost all levels of education: primary school, junior high school and high school. I have also taught adults in small groups and in private.

I had a Japanese student a few years ago. She told me she went to an English language course in the US. She attended group lessons. She was the only Japanese in the class and the other students were from Brazil and other countries in South America.

The teacher used the direct method, that is, he or she spoke only English, even for explanations, but, of course, using adequate material.. My student realized that she was the only one who could not understand the explanations during the lessons.

I told her that the teacher could communicate better with the South American students.

She was surprised.

I told her that the other students that were from South America were all Spanish or Portuguese speakers. Portuguese and Spanish are Romance languages or, if you prefer, Neolatin languages, that is, languages which originated from the ancient (and dead) Latin language.

English is full of words from Latin languages!

The teacher used some Latin-originated English worlds sometimes... So the students could grasp the meaning and then the teacher would afterwards use a "pure" and currently used English word.

So, my Japanese student got convinced that she didn't have the "Latin background" to quickly grasp the meaning of the conversation.

However ...

My Japanese student could learn Korean very easily. Japanese and Korean have very similar grammar and both languages have so many words originated from Chinese language. 

It would be easier for her to learn to speak Korean than for a Brazilian who was not exposed to Japanese...

So, the idea of "difficult languages" and "easy languages" is very relative. It depends on:

• the student who learns. Is the student motivated?
• the student's language background;
• the goals the student wants to achieve;
• the time the student will use for learning. Sometimes, time to be used for learning a language is connected with the motivation.

There is a very nice video of Richard Simcott where he talks about the topic. He analyzes the situation from the viewpoint of a native English speaker.

Click here to see Richard Simcott talking about the topic.

We could record the video again from the viewpoint of a Romance language native speaker.

So, before learning a language, think about the 4 topics I wrote above and also check what language family the language you want to learn belongs to.

Happy language learning!

Alex

Alexandre Scalzitti