Language

Can we make sense of claims to the effect that language X is "harder" than language Y?

Comments

Sure, but there are several different things we could mean by saying that one language is more difficult than other. One language could have more complex grammatical rules than another. Another language might have simpler grammatical rules, but have more irregularities that break those rules (I am told that English is notorious for having a large number of irregularities). One language might have more letters, words, or use more sounds than another.

We also might mean that one language is harder than another in the sense that learning it might be harder for me based on what I already know. For example, a native English speaker might find Latin relatively easy to learn due to the fact that it uses the same alphabet as English and because many English words have Latin roots and therefore many similar words have similar meanings in the two languages. In contrast, that same person might find Thai to be difficult to learn due to its foreign alphabet, unfamiliar pronunciations, and lack of similarities between the two languages.

We can at least make relative sense of a claim like this. For a native English speaker, Chinese is harder than Spanish. How so? Because English speakers can achieve a high level of mastery of Spanish much more quickly, on average, than they can with Chinese. Obviously other such comparisons among various languages are possible.

Could one language be "absolutely" more difficult than another? Though I'm not a linguist, I'd think the answer is yes. Since I can't cite a fully real case (simply because I don't know enough), a slightly idealized one will do. IGNORING PRONUNCIATION, compare German and Afrikaans. They are related languages and there is a good deal of similarity between them. Knowing one will give you a leg up on understanding the other. (I have an intermediate knowledge of German. That lets me make elementary sense of a certain amount of written Afrikaans.) But anyone who has some familiarity with both languages will see that the grammar of Afrikaans is much simpler. In particular, there are no genders and no cases in Afrikaans. If reading and writing knowledge were all that we were interested in, Afrikaans would certainly seem to be easier than German. I'd expect that a linguist could add lots of even better examples.

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