Is there any ranking for the difficulty of world languages?

Question

Any article, table or website about the difficulty of world languages? how difficult is any language? which ones are easier to learn and which one more difficult? for instance for an English speaker is it easier to learn Turkish language or Arabic? and the reasons, please.

Answer 1

Its really how fast you learn.

Answer 2

No, because difficulty is a relative term. But with a little research you can find which languages are easier to learn for you.

There are language families and branches and theoretically languages within the same family share common characteristics. This fact lets an American/British learn Dutch easier than Turkish. Because Dutch and English are in the same family and their structure is close. For a Turk, Japanese or Korean is easy as it is easier for a Japanese or Korean learn Turkish.

And no offense to the others who suggested that learning a language with a different alphabet is more difficult. Actually, that is not correct. When you're learning a language you're learning the structure of it. Of course getting used to the new letters will take some time but the difficulty of a language depends on its structure, how close it is to your native language. Alphabet is something you will need just for writing and reading, and you'll learn it as you already learned your own language's alphabet. Pre-school children can speak their language before they go to school and at the school they learn how to write and read. It's similar with your second language.

Answer 3

I don't know of any table or ranking.

Any language that requires that you learn a new alphabet (like Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese, etc) is naturally harder. (This is assuming you are an English-speaker.)

English is considered very difficult to learn because, unlike the romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, and others derived from Latin), it doesn't follow strict rules in terms of conjugation or pronunciation. There are so many exceptions. This is because English is a mix of Latinate and Germanic words.

Some people have a natural "ear" for accents and/or an aptitude for languages. In general, it is easier to learn languages and accents when you are younger. As you get older, you may find it harder to do learn new sounds that are uncommon in English so it will be tougher to sound like a "native."

Answer 4

Turkish is easier to learn for Americans than Arabic because the Turkish alphabet is almost identical to the English alphabet with the exception of 4 or 5 letters.
However, I believe that Spanish is the easiest language to learn because the alphabet is the same. But I may be biased because I am from Texas where the Hispanic culture is more prevelant.

Answer 5

No. A language is not difficult for a native speaker although English must be near the top with the constantly expanding vocabulary and it's plethora of ancient words.

Answer 6

its a matter of how fast u learn and how close the language u know and the language u r trying 2 learn r. english is one of the harder ones because not that much of our language is too similar to other langauges and there are exceptions to pretty much all of our rules of language

Answer 7

Arabic is more difficult than Turkish because (1) while Turkish has a complex grammar, it is very regular. Arabic has a simpler grammar but it there are lots of exceptions and special cases to learn. (2) To learn Arabic, you need to learn Modern Standard Arabic to read and one or more spoken dialects to converse. The Koran and Hadith are written in Classical Arabic. So Arabic is really a collection of languages.

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

The two numbers following each group listed below are:
1. Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency
2. Speaking proficiency level expected of a student with superior language aptitude, after 720 hours of instruction

GROUP Iafrikaans, 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+

Answer 8

it is pretty much a matter of opinion. english is apparently a really hard second language, but i wouldnt know.