Classifying
all the second languages into easy and difficult ones is almost the same as,
for example, classifying all the books according to the degree how interesting
they are. Everybody will classify them in his/her own way but such a kind of classification can never be objective.
Everything
depends upon the four main factors:
1.
Learner’s mother tongue: The more a second language differs from the native
one, the more difficult it is for this learner.
2. Learner’s
qualification: a philologist, a linguist may master any second language much
more easily than an amateur person without any philological education and linguistic skills.
3. The
presence of the linguistic environment: if a person communicates in this or
that second language with its native speakers every day it will be much easier
for him/her to master this language (no matter how difficult it is) than in the
linguistic isolation (when nobody around speaks this language).
4. The
presence of motivation: If a learner knows very clearly, why s/he needs this
language (E.g., for business, immigration or travelling), it will be much
easier for him/her to master this language than in case when the purpose is
quite obscure.
For English-speakers,
the easiest languages are those ones, which have the highest degrees of cognition:
Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, and other Germanic languages (except Icelandic
— because of the rather complicated archaic grammar and a very small number of
international words). Almost the same degree of easiness is present in learning
some Romance languages, such as Spanish or Italian.
The second
group according to the degree of easiness consists of European languages, which
belong to the Indo-European language family: Romance (French, Portuguese, Romanian
etc.), Celtic (Irish, Gaelic, Welsh), Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish,
Czech, Bulgarian etc.), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian) as well as Greek, Albanian
and Icelandic (although it is Germanic, however a very complicated archaic
grammar as well as almost complete absence of loan words of the Greek and Latin
origin make it more difficult than all the other languages cognate to it).
The third
group consists of European languages, which are not Indo-European: Hungarian,
Finnish, Estonian (they are Finno-Ugric); Maltese (it is Semitic), Basque and
Georgian (both of them are genealogically isolated). Some Indo-European
languages beyond the European cultural area belong to the same group: Armenian,
Ossetian, Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Hindustani (Hindu and Urdu), Bengali, Sinhalese
and some others.
The fourth
group consists of the languages, which are neither European nor Indo-European: Turkish,
Uzbek, Azeri (they are Turkic); Arabic, Hebrew (they are Semitic); Tamil,
Telugu, Kannada (they are Dravidian) as well as Mongolian, Korean and Japanese.
However, these languages are still cognate to the Indo-European family (they
all belong to the so-called Nostratic macrofamily) although the degree of this cognition is very low.
The most
difficult languages for all the Europeans are those, which do not belong to the
Nostratic macrofamily, especially if they were originally spoken beyond the
European cultural area: Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and other languages of
South-East Asia; languages of “Black Africa” (Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Zulu
etc.), Native American languages (Cherokee, Navajo, Nahuatl, Mixteco, Quechua
etc.) as well as languages of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Oceania
(Maori, Hawaiian etc.).
However, there
are no languages, which would be absolutely difficult or absolutely easy in all
the aspects. Of course, in all the natural (non-constructed) languages, there
are various objective difficulties (numerous exceptions from the rules,
complicated systems of declination or conjugation, absence of logic in some
grammar categories (such as the gender in the German nouns), but these
difficulties are balanced in all the languages. If there is something very
difficult in this particular language, something should be very easy. For
example, the English spelling is very complicated and with numerous exceptions;
however, the English grammar is very simple. In German, vice versa, everything
is exactly the opposite: very simple spelling rules but very difficult and illogical
grammar. In Hungarian, there is a very complicated system of verb conjugation
but the declination is much easier: in spite of the great number of cases (28),
all the endings are alike and depend only upon the root vowel. Moreover,
Hungarian adjectives are never changed like in English and with all the
numerals, nouns always stand in their singular form.
More
information about language difficulties:
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