Topics Language

Question Have there been any systematic attempts to determine what the most difficult language(s) to learn as a second-language may be? Is the difficulty of second-language acquisition necessarily tied to the second-language's similarity to one's first language, or otherwise dependent on some inherent or acquired capacity of one's brain to learn a given second-language? Or are there some languages which are more difficult to learn as a second-language across the board, so to speak? If so, what sort of formulae might be used to determine the difficulty of the acquisition of a given second-language?

Accepted:
October 1, 2006

Comments

Human beings and human languages are made for each other. So far aswe have reason to believe, any (normal) human being can learn any humanlanguage as his or her first language, and young children are capableof learning many languages, if they are exposed to them.It seems that, as one matures, the part of one's brain devoted tolanguage-learning more or less shuts off (much as, in many people, theenzymes devoted to digestion of milk cease to be produced). And so, atthat point, one's language-learning no longer proceeds in quite the way it would have when one was younger. So it's possible, to be sure, that some languages yield more easily to the methods of acquisition we are forced to employ as adults.

But it's hard to imagine there would be any absolute measure here. It is, famously, not particularly difficult for native speakers of Portuguese to learn Spanish, but I doubt Spanish would be terribly easy for a native speaker of Japanese or even of German. So it seems plausible that there is some meaure of "similarity" between languages that is at play here. But the respects in which languages are similar or different might prove to be quite surprising and not at all obvious to surface inspection. Vocabulary similarities are, I'd conjecture, probably less important than one would suppose. Learning to speak another language requires learning to hear that language, and so it could turn out that what most mattered were similarities and differences at the level not of meaning or even of grammar but of sound. Then again, it might not turn out that way.