The Relative Difficulty of Japanese.

[sechan19]

I was chatting with my mom, alateaqoe, this morning and the subject of language difficulty came up. She mentioned a statistic she'd heard about recently on the subject. To whit, to become proficient in...

...French. You need 575-600 hours of instruction.
...German. You need 750 hours of instruction.
...Hebrew. You need 1100 hours of instruction.
...Japanese. You need 2200 hours of instruction.

And those numbers don't even cover self-instruction times - they're just classroom hours.

I wondered where the numbers were coming from and did a little searching, finally identifying the probable source of this statistic as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) branch of the US Department of State. They've divided a large number of languages into three categories of difficulty (from the perspective of a native English speaker). The numbers above refer to the time it takes to reach level 3 proficiency: speaking with structural accuracy and employing a rich enough vocabulary to communicate on diverse topics. At that point, you're still not fluent.

You can check out a full breakdown here.

So Japanese is one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn. French and German (the language that my colleagues are always complaining about), by comparison, are a "cinch." Not that I want to disparage my colleagues at all. It's just that sometimes when I'm rewriting a kanji character forty-thousand times I start to feel a wee bit bitchy about it. But it was my choice to study Japanese, after all, so that's the way it goes.

My mom and I agreed that choosing one of the most difficult languages I possibly could to study was "so me." (It's kind of like how I always instinctively choose the most expensive item on the menu.) Oh, and when I'm done with Japanese I'll move on to Chinese - also on the list of category 3 languages.

There's something seriously wrong with me. Heh.

EDIT:
Check out the comments section for more discussion on language between myself and lordameth. He makes the very important point that language difficulty varies by person according to individual strength, and I agree. I'd like to further state that I should have noted more explicitly in the original post that all languages are difficult to learn - a point I tried to imply through the use of quotations around the word cinch. I hope my irony wasn't completely lost there, but if it was I apologize.

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

I think there's something seriously wrong with all of us.

But that's besides the point. Every language has its ups and downs, its easier points and its harder points. For example, I hate dealing with verb conjugations and especially irregular verbs, so Romance languages are quite frustrating for me.

I don't think it's fair to say that any language is wholly easier or harder than another, across all aspects. In fact, I imagine that if you cut out the hours needed to learn the letters, Hebrew should be just as easy if not easier than French.

[reteva.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I can completely agree with that. I've studied French and Spanish, and I think that "generally speaking" they are easier than Japanese by a long shot. I can't speak to the ease of learning Hebrew, of course.

What the table doesn't take into account, and which I think you make a very valid point about, is that language learning is highly personal. Different people excel at different types of things, and so the relative ease of language learning is going to vary by person, based on how a specific language plays (or doesn't play) to their individual strengths.

[foxxydancr.livejournal.com]

yes, i'd like to comment here that apparently, I SUCK at languages. boo. I've spent much too long trying to learn a language that's supposed to be "simple". grump. but at least I get to use the same alphabet and don't have to worry so much about intonation.

Like, this week, I learned that someone can be onbeschofd (impolite, rude) but can't be beschofd. It's like how you can be dissheveled, but you can't be sheveled. sigh. silly language.