There’s no way Portuguese and Italian are easier for an English speaker than Spanish.
Portuguese easier than Spanish ?
Now I know whoever came up with this took all the information they needed from the depths of their ass
Shouldn’t Hungary and Finland be deep red?
And does Finland have another language at it’s costal regions?
And is German really that much harder then dutch? Or even all the latin languages, while German and English are Germanic ones?
I call bullshit
Portugese easier than Spanish? How? 😀
English is a Germanic language which primarily uses Germanic grammar rules (minus 36% which is French). So I would have guessed German would be easier than French.
Strange ranking.
Portuguese easier than Spanish?
Arabic is two times harder than Slavic even while having only three grammatical cases opposed to Slavic 6/7?
Brits are much better at learning Finnish near the sea than further inland?
How the hell Hungary and Finland aren’t black as black hole as these languages have dozens of grammatical cases ( I think 18 in Hungarian case)?
For a native ENGLISH speaker…
So portuguese is easier than german for a native english speaker? I’ve seen some terrible maps but this one….
Doubt US diplomats find Hungarian as difficult as the rest of the yellow zone.
Quim barreiros might have spoken Hungarian
As a Danish speaker my whole life, let me correct this. No one understands Danish, not even the Danish.
Dainish easier than german?!
so this is data from US diplomats learning languages. I wonder how the map would look from the PoV of native Italians, Poles, or Germans.
The fact that Turkish somehow ranked the same as Hungarian is a crime
Able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations in practical, social and professional topics. Nevertheless, the individual’s limitations generally restrict the professional contexts of language use to matters of shared knowledge and/or international convention. Discourse is cohesive. The individual uses the language acceptably, but with some noticeable imperfections; yet, errors virtually never interfere with understanding and rarely disturb the native speaker. The individual can effectively combine structure and vocabulary to convey his/her meaning accurately. The individual speaks readily and fills pauses suitably. In face-to-face conversation with natives speaking the standard dialect at a normal rate of speech, comprehension is quite complete.
Although cultural references, proverbs and the implications of nuances and idiom may not be fully understood, the individual can easily repair the conversation.
Pronunciation may be obviously foreign. Individual sounds are accurate: but stress, intonation and pitch control may be faulty
Yea, I’ve heard US diplomats to Romania speaking Romanian. Now I understand why they sounded so awful – they only spent 24 weeks on it.
Everyone is saying that this language should be red and another one easier. But most people complaining didn’t even read the legend that this map is based on 76 years of teaching US diplomats these languages thus making it subjective.
I assume it is correct but based on my experience it is still a bit strange (French native though, not English).
– First Danish: while the language is indeed easy to learn (knowing German and English was enough to understand a log of written Danish), understanding spoken Danish (and speaking it) is rather challenging, and I guess it would apply to an English speaker.
– Romanian: here too, a Latin language, not very hard but easier to learn than Spanish? I would have put it in the same group as French.
– German: I really think the difficulty is a bit overrated, maybe due to the case system? It has so many “easy” features: a very consistent spelling, no difficult sounds, vocabulary is hard at the very beginning and once you know a few hundred words very easy due to the word formation system.
– Slavic languages: I only know some Russian (around B2) and here I have to agree definitively harder than the other European languages I know.
– Italian easier than French, probably: a much more consistent spelling and unlike in French, you speak what you read, no silent letters but why is Spanish supposed to be harder?
Gaelige, Gaelic and Cymraeg unclassified?
Danish easier than French? Yeah ok…
Hungarian and Finnish should be red. They are not European languages. It has at least 18 cases, 44 letters.
Finnish should be categorised as “Unclassified” since its only sounds that native speakers can understand, and the sounds change in every sentence.
How can Portuguese be easier than Spanish when spoken Spanish sounds just like written Spanish and spoken Portuguese sounds often different from written Portuguese because of the different phonetics?
Also, AFAIK, Spanish has somewhat simpler grammar (no mesoclisis, fewer verb tenses, less grammatical exceptions)
A lot of expats I’ve met complain that learning Portuguese is like learning 2 languages at the same time.
Hungarian is 4th hardest to learn in the world after Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese, this map isn’t right.
Even Danes can’t speak or understand Danish… wtf
Is learning dutch really way easier than german for english natives?
Well, a post claiming Hungarian is not hard as hell to master is not something I see often.
Estonian and Finnish are harder than anything we see on this map
I’m sure this rank doesn’t take phonetics and verbal comprehension into account lol
In this comment section, you will find individual redditors thinking they know more about the learning and teaching of languages to english speakers than people who made a comprehensive study from 76 years of teaching diplomats.
Guys, they averaged the time it took for their students to learn the languages. When it comes to “languages difficulty ranking for an english speakers” it’s one of the most objective metrics you could take. Y’all are working on vibes.
US government: *spends 70+ years studying how diplomats pick up languages and using actual scientific methods to make this conclusion*
Redditors: I cAlL buLLsHit I’ve literally done xyz language for 2 weeks in Duolingo this map is wrong
Category I and Category IV colours are pretty much non-distinguishable to my eye.
There is absolutely no way that Portuguese is easier to learn than Spanish
Based on USA’s Foreign Service Institute.
You might get standard non-live communication out of that much, but unless you talk natively in the other language with others as well, you won’t be speaking the language that well.
Also, this is from the English perspective. For everyone else learning English, it may be “easy” now thanks to the Internet necessitating its use, but everything depends on how close the other languages are to English.
I speak Polish, although not C-level, but enough to get along daily when I am in Poland. What is difficult in Polish are the exceptions and I also find difficult to remember all the prefixes of one verb like “iść” (to go). Like they have ”wyjść”, “przejść”, “wejść”, “pójść”, “zejść”, “dojść” i tak dalej moi drodzy polacy!
However, constructing the times seems to be much easier in Polish as there are stable rules compared to Romania (which is called Category I) where there are no stable rules to construct the times. More exactly, you cannot apply the same rule to all the verbs.
In the same time, Polish is hard to pronounce for many people (not for me) compared to Romanian. Poles might detect I am not native, but I do not have an accent when pronouncing Polish words.
In the end, I find Polish the most beautiful Slavic language.
More objective by changing the title by adding “… from an American diplomat’s point of view”
There’s no fucking way you’d learn slavic language that fast, westerners!
Now say “Ř”
Native American English speaker here, who has studied at least one of the languages in all of the categories present (Danish, German, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, French, Spanish) and gained fluency in a few. French and Spanish were by far the easiest (especially if you already know English + one of them). Danish seems weird at first, but it’s basically drunken English with a splash of German. German took me much more intense study than any of the Cat I languages, and the wide range of dialects in such a small geographic region often made me feel like I was starting from scratch any time I travelled to a new Bundesland. The Cyrillic alphabet is not so hard to learn, but it definitely poses an extra barrier for Bulgarian and some other Slavic languages. The other issue with most Slavic languages is that pretty much the only place you can get immersion and resources is in the associated country. Bulgarian itself is one of the easier Slavic languages due to simple grammar, but coming from English, I have no natural sense of what most words mean, because they’re just too far from Romance and Germanic languages. As for Czech, the pronunciation is much harder– lots of challenging fricatives, the grammar is worse than German, and again, it’s almost impossible to guess what words mean with just a Romance/Germanic background. As for Arabic… fuck me, I took 7 semesters of that in college. By the end, I could sort of read the news, and couldn’t hold a conversation if my life depended on it. I can read it phonetically, and I remember a lot of the grammar rules (because they’re oddly beautiful), but whatever formal dialect I’ve retained is useless for daily life.
40 comments
There’s no way Portuguese and Italian are easier for an English speaker than Spanish.
Portuguese easier than Spanish ?
Now I know whoever came up with this took all the information they needed from the depths of their ass
Shouldn’t Hungary and Finland be deep red?
And does Finland have another language at it’s costal regions?
And is German really that much harder then dutch? Or even all the latin languages, while German and English are Germanic ones?
I call bullshit
Portugese easier than Spanish? How? 😀
English is a Germanic language which primarily uses Germanic grammar rules (minus 36% which is French). So I would have guessed German would be easier than French.
Strange ranking.
Portuguese easier than Spanish?
Arabic is two times harder than Slavic even while having only three grammatical cases opposed to Slavic 6/7?
Brits are much better at learning Finnish near the sea than further inland?
How the hell Hungary and Finland aren’t black as black hole as these languages have dozens of grammatical cases ( I think 18 in Hungarian case)?
For a native ENGLISH speaker…
So portuguese is easier than german for a native english speaker? I’ve seen some terrible maps but this one….
Doubt US diplomats find Hungarian as difficult as the rest of the yellow zone.
Quim barreiros might have spoken Hungarian
As a Danish speaker my whole life, let me correct this. No one understands Danish, not even the Danish.
Dainish easier than german?!
so this is data from US diplomats learning languages. I wonder how the map would look from the PoV of native Italians, Poles, or Germans.
The fact that Turkish somehow ranked the same as Hungarian is a crime
this is for [S-3 language level](https://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale2.htm) (C1 in Europe):
Able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations in practical, social and professional topics. Nevertheless, the individual’s limitations generally restrict the professional contexts of language use to matters of shared knowledge and/or international convention. Discourse is cohesive. The individual uses the language acceptably, but with some noticeable imperfections; yet, errors virtually never interfere with understanding and rarely disturb the native speaker. The individual can effectively combine structure and vocabulary to convey his/her meaning accurately. The individual speaks readily and fills pauses suitably. In face-to-face conversation with natives speaking the standard dialect at a normal rate of speech, comprehension is quite complete.
Although cultural references, proverbs and the implications of nuances and idiom may not be fully understood, the individual can easily repair the conversation.
Pronunciation may be obviously foreign. Individual sounds are accurate: but stress, intonation and pitch control may be faulty
Yea, I’ve heard US diplomats to Romania speaking Romanian. Now I understand why they sounded so awful – they only spent 24 weeks on it.
Everyone is saying that this language should be red and another one easier. But most people complaining didn’t even read the legend that this map is based on 76 years of teaching US diplomats these languages thus making it subjective.
I assume it is correct but based on my experience it is still a bit strange (French native though, not English).
– First Danish: while the language is indeed easy to learn (knowing German and English was enough to understand a log of written Danish), understanding spoken Danish (and speaking it) is rather challenging, and I guess it would apply to an English speaker.
– Romanian: here too, a Latin language, not very hard but easier to learn than Spanish? I would have put it in the same group as French.
– German: I really think the difficulty is a bit overrated, maybe due to the case system? It has so many “easy” features: a very consistent spelling, no difficult sounds, vocabulary is hard at the very beginning and once you know a few hundred words very easy due to the word formation system.
– Slavic languages: I only know some Russian (around B2) and here I have to agree definitively harder than the other European languages I know.
– Italian easier than French, probably: a much more consistent spelling and unlike in French, you speak what you read, no silent letters but why is Spanish supposed to be harder?
Gaelige, Gaelic and Cymraeg unclassified?
Danish easier than French? Yeah ok…
Hungarian and Finnish should be red. They are not European languages. It has at least 18 cases, 44 letters.
Finnish should be categorised as “Unclassified” since its only sounds that native speakers can understand, and the sounds change in every sentence.
How can Portuguese be easier than Spanish when spoken Spanish sounds just like written Spanish and spoken Portuguese sounds often different from written Portuguese because of the different phonetics?
Also, AFAIK, Spanish has somewhat simpler grammar (no mesoclisis, fewer verb tenses, less grammatical exceptions)
A lot of expats I’ve met complain that learning Portuguese is like learning 2 languages at the same time.
Hungarian is 4th hardest to learn in the world after Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese, this map isn’t right.
Even Danes can’t speak or understand Danish… wtf
Is learning dutch really way easier than german for english natives?
Well, a post claiming Hungarian is not hard as hell to master is not something I see often.
Estonian and Finnish are harder than anything we see on this map
I’m sure this rank doesn’t take phonetics and verbal comprehension into account lol
In this comment section, you will find individual redditors thinking they know more about the learning and teaching of languages to english speakers than people who made a comprehensive study from 76 years of teaching diplomats.
Guys, they averaged the time it took for their students to learn the languages. When it comes to “languages difficulty ranking for an english speakers” it’s one of the most objective metrics you could take. Y’all are working on vibes.
US government: *spends 70+ years studying how diplomats pick up languages and using actual scientific methods to make this conclusion*
Redditors: I cAlL buLLsHit I’ve literally done xyz language for 2 weeks in Duolingo this map is wrong
Category I and Category IV colours are pretty much non-distinguishable to my eye.
There is absolutely no way that Portuguese is easier to learn than Spanish
Based on USA’s Foreign Service Institute.
You might get standard non-live communication out of that much, but unless you talk natively in the other language with others as well, you won’t be speaking the language that well.
Also, this is from the English perspective. For everyone else learning English, it may be “easy” now thanks to the Internet necessitating its use, but everything depends on how close the other languages are to English.
I speak Polish, although not C-level, but enough to get along daily when I am in Poland. What is difficult in Polish are the exceptions and I also find difficult to remember all the prefixes of one verb like “iść” (to go). Like they have ”wyjść”, “przejść”, “wejść”, “pójść”, “zejść”, “dojść” i tak dalej moi drodzy polacy!
However, constructing the times seems to be much easier in Polish as there are stable rules compared to Romania (which is called Category I) where there are no stable rules to construct the times. More exactly, you cannot apply the same rule to all the verbs.
In the same time, Polish is hard to pronounce for many people (not for me) compared to Romanian. Poles might detect I am not native, but I do not have an accent when pronouncing Polish words.
In the end, I find Polish the most beautiful Slavic language.
More objective by changing the title by adding “… from an American diplomat’s point of view”
There’s no fucking way you’d learn slavic language that fast, westerners!
Now say “Ř”
Native American English speaker here, who has studied at least one of the languages in all of the categories present (Danish, German, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, French, Spanish) and gained fluency in a few. French and Spanish were by far the easiest (especially if you already know English + one of them). Danish seems weird at first, but it’s basically drunken English with a splash of German. German took me much more intense study than any of the Cat I languages, and the wide range of dialects in such a small geographic region often made me feel like I was starting from scratch any time I travelled to a new Bundesland. The Cyrillic alphabet is not so hard to learn, but it definitely poses an extra barrier for Bulgarian and some other Slavic languages. The other issue with most Slavic languages is that pretty much the only place you can get immersion and resources is in the associated country. Bulgarian itself is one of the easier Slavic languages due to simple grammar, but coming from English, I have no natural sense of what most words mean, because they’re just too far from Romance and Germanic languages. As for Czech, the pronunciation is much harder– lots of challenging fricatives, the grammar is worse than German, and again, it’s almost impossible to guess what words mean with just a Romance/Germanic background. As for Arabic… fuck me, I took 7 semesters of that in college. By the end, I could sort of read the news, and couldn’t hold a conversation if my life depended on it. I can read it phonetically, and I remember a lot of the grammar rules (because they’re oddly beautiful), but whatever formal dialect I’ve retained is useless for daily life.