Job Discussion Forums

[vre]

Someone posted this on the Turkish forum. Quite interesting.

Taken from:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

'And here are some actual numbers...
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring students to a certain level of proficiency. Here are their figures (from 1973; I doubt if they have changed much ):

Languages included
(Languages regularly offered at the University of Michigan are in capital letters; this is NOT a complete list)
Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency
Speaking proficiency level expected of a student with superior language aptitude, after 720 hours of instruction

GROUP I Afrikaans, Danish, DUTCH, FRENCH, Haitian Creole, ITALIAN, Norwegian, PORTUGUESE, Romanian, SPANISH, Swahili, SWEDISH 480 3

GROUP II Bulgarian, Dari, FARSI (PERSIAN), GERMAN, (Modern) Greek, HINDI-URDU, INDONESIAN, Malay 720 2+ / 3

GROUP III Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, CZECH, Finnish, (MODERN) HEBREW, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, PILIPINO (TAGALOG), POLISH, RUSSIAN, SERBO-CROATIAN, Sinhala, THAI, TAMIL, TURKISH, VIETNAMESE 720 2 / 2+

GROUP IV ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN 1320 1+ '

[carnac]

Interesting when you compare the assessed diffficulty in learning the language with the cultural distance of each from English-speaking countries.
Do you know, has anyone done the reverse study? Diffficulty level for an Arabic or Japanese student leaning Serbo-Croatian or German?
Always interesting to turn studies around.
Where, I wonder, does Gailic fit in this scheme?
For an interesting (and funny) example of cultural differences, see
http://fieldworking.com/library/bohannan.html
Carnac

[thelmadatter]

Ah DLI... I remember the place fondly, even if I met my now ex-husband there Yup, I was a soldier once - even if it was only for a whole 1.5 years back in 1987. I was a Korean student there. It is true about the categorization. Add to that, that they gave you a language proficiency test with some verbal puzzles to figure out. Given that I just graduated with a degree in linguistics, I knew exactly what they were looking for on that test. I tested Level IV.

I cant speak for DLI now but back then it was touted as the best place to learn a language - complete immersion. Not true. Yeah, you were in class 8 hours a day doing nothing but studying the language but that was it. You were studying. It was just a good language school. After a year, I still wasnt even conversant in Korean although I aced all my tests.

[jesszilla]

Several of my teachers and fellow students in Arabic and Persian at the University of Arizona taught/studied at DLI - the general consensus from them was that the teaching methodology left much to be desired, and the materials needed badly to be revised. The profs all strongly recommended the summer immersion courses at Middlebury College instead, and I can attest to that - I took Arabic at Middlebury and went from knowing nothing to an Intermediate High on the ACTFL scale - that's roughly the equivalent of two years of college coursework - in only 9 weeks. It was INTENSE, but it was the best learning environment I've ever experienced. It's too bad they're so expensive, and they don't offer more languages.
I'm now studying Japanese, and I think the language categorization scheme fits for some people, but not for all. I personally had a lot of trouble with French, but I find Arabic and Japanese to be pretty easy - they're highly rule-governed, with few exceptions, and the sound systems are very consistent. It's really just a matter of internalizing all the rules. French and other Indo-European languages are very mongrelized, and there are many exceptions to the rules, which, for me at least, makes them more difficult to learn. Dunno - maybe I'm just weird
All I'm saying is, don't let stats like that psych you out - Arabic and Japanese are not as hard as people say they are. Now, tonal languages...that's intimidating.

[jesszilla]

PS The Middlebury summer program works out to be about 320 hours of class time. If you count the language pledge, and all of your out-of-class speech time, it might make it to 720 contact hours, but I doubt it.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

I wonder how German ended up being grouped in as more difficult to learn than Swahili or Swedish. The other languages in the same level as German require a unilingual English L1 speaker to learn a different writing system.

Maybe it might have to do with what consititutes a level two fluency. German people can be pretty critical about German L2 levels.

German and English are in the same linguistic branch (it goes English, Frissian, Dutch, German) and for a long time Dutch and German were actually considered the same language by English people. Internalizing vocabulary items in German isn't too hard because so many are so close to English words (or are compound words made up of words that sound close to English words where English has taken on a Latin derived word, often from French).

[J.]

of Japanese grammar are not that difficult and the pronunciation is rather regular. But literacy in the language is a whole other ballgame. If you study Japanese in romaji I can see how you might think it was easy, but the writing system is, to say the least, complicated. Languages that share a common alphabet, or a relatively easy alphabet, with English are therefore easier to manage, unless you have a photographic memory. :)

[Roger]

[Roger]

[Deconstructor]

The very idea that one language is more difficult than another is absurd. (I learned that word �absurd� from Roger in a different thread.) All languages are learned the same way as all children learn them very easily. Ultimately, when one becomes fluent in another language, it means that at some level s/he has learned it intuitively, that is, the way children do, and not in a language class with the help of �competent� teacher. We still don't understand this dynamic and I suspect never will.

[ls650]

[Deconstructor]

[Deconstructor]

[some waygug-in]

Hmm.

I guess I understand now. Korean is defenately harder for native English speakers to aquire than Spanish or French, but is relatively easy for Japanese or Chinese speakers, and vise versa. (or so I've been told)

So, how does this help me with learning Korean? uggg.

By the way Decon, I seem to recall you saying that you had studied Russian. Can you suggest a good way for me to learn cryllic script?

I've found a couple of on-line sites but they seem to confuse me more than help me.

Cheers

[Roger]