(It's a question that I see asked a lot in language learning communities online, so I thought I'd give answering it a go. Ditto the number of languages I "know".)
If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)
If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)
My degree is, specifically, in French and Russian, but
one of my hobbies is gaining acquaintance with new languages. A few years ago I
made a list of all the languages that I'd like to be familiar with; it comes to
around thirty. Thirty languages? I hear you exclaim, How the hell are
you supposed to learn thirty languages? All things considered, I don't
think it's such an unreasonable goal. Here's why.
Languages don't exist in isolation. Well duh, I
imagine you'd say (looks like you're in for a lot of ventriloquising - sorry
about that). But what I mean is, languages exist in clumps (or rather clades) -
a language that exists on its lonesome from its particular line is quite a rare
occurrence. Let's take English: English is a Germanic language that has been
radically reshaped by its long contact first with the native Welsh-related
Brythonic (back when it was Anglo-Saxon, leaving us with such relatively
unusual features such as the continuous/progressive aspect, i.e. I am saying vs I say)
and then with French and Latin, resulting amongst other things in our
staggeringly varied vocabulary (once your language gets a taste for filching
other people's words it will usually go out of its way to do so, resulting in
today's English speakers using loans from Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian together
without a second thought: The admiral's on the bamboo veranda. A few too
many glasses of punch, I reckon. He's asking for ketchup? I'll make some
coffee...).
As a Germanic language, English is clearly related to
German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (don’t forget Scots!) etc, as you can tell
from the fact that knowing English you can probably grok Hast du meinen
Vater gesehen? Wir waren neben dem Marktplatz even if you haven't studied
German. Similarly, Germanic is just one branch of the Indo-European, the
language family that most of the languages of India and Europe are descended
from (duhoy). If you take a list of the core vocabulary of a language (kinship
terms, body parts, pronouns and irregular verbs, common plants and animals and
so on) you get a Swadesh list (named for their originator, American linguist
and McCarthy victim Morris Swadesh) - if you compare them across the IE
languages the common base is clear. Take the number "one". One
reconstruction of the original Proto-Indo-European language root is *óynos: this gives
rise to the Latin ūnus and derived Romance languages like French un,
Italian/Spanish uno (Italic), German eins, Old English ān
(Germanic), Lithuanian víenas, Russian odín, Polish jeden
(Balto-Slavic), Persian yak, Sanskrit éka, and derived languages
like Hindi ek, Punjabi ika (Indo-Iranian).
I don't mean to hit you over the head with sudden tidings
of Indo-European reconstruction (even though it's seriously cool, being what
the linguistic community was mostly up to in the 19th century, including famous
names like The Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure) - my point is that
languages are a lot more interconnected than you might expect. Just knowing
English gives you a head-start on cognates (shared roots) in German and Romance
languages, not to mention that a lot of loan words these days are flooding in
from English, despite what self-appointed regulatory bodies like the Académie
française have to say about it.
My language list is organised around this idea: for each
language branch, I (somewhat arbitrarily) picked two modern languages and one
ancient. So for Italic, I had Latin, French and Italian, and for Balto-Slavic
Russian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent of Latin). I
also inserted Lithuanian into the group there, partly because the Lithuanians
of my acquaintance usually take a pretty dim view of being grouped with the
Slavs (they're Balts), and partly because Lithuanians (and neighbouring
Latvians) are the IE version of the coelacanth. Language change just doesn't
seem to have appealed to them from roughly the same era as Sanskrit onwards,
making them lots of fun for the philologically-inclined. But I digress (more
than usual).
The thing is, adding the other two corners to the each
language group is nowhere near as much work as the first one was. You find that
instead of starting from scratch with each new language, you can flick switches
on what you already know and slot it into the new one. Learning the grammar of
Italian, for instance, if you've got French, is largely working out how to turn
your French into Italian forms. So avoir (have) goes j'ai, tu as, il
a in French, and in Italian avere goes io ho, tu hai, lui ha.
(Actually, you don't need the personal pronouns in Italian - this linguistic
switch is called being pro-drop). I also get the feeling that the fact that English has branched so far away from the other Germanic languages makes us overestimate the distance between members of the same branch in general. (Might also explain our reticence to class Scots as a separate language, if we're going on English vs German as our benchmark!)
Another thing that I think puts people off is their
memories of enforced languages at school. I've already pontificated on the
difference between child- and adult-level learning, but in case you missed it
or don't have the strength to look at it again, my idea is that learning stuff
voluntarily as an adult is in a different league to learning as a child. Your
increased attention span, enthusiasm and access to materials (if you grew up
before the Internet was properly a thing, which I'm hoping for the sake of my
self-image is the case) mean your bored, school-age self being force-fed verb
tables doesn't stand a chance.
Do you have an interest? Look at your language's Wikipedia pages on the subject. Browse news articles and blogs. Hook up with
some native speakers, online or in person via stuff like Couchsurfing or
Facebook. Do language exchanges - if you have native or near native-level English
(which I imagine you must do to persevere through this lot), you're made for
life as far as languages to teach people go. Everyone wants to improve their
English: talk in English for an hour, and in return talk in your native's
language for an hour afterwards. That way, you're both getting roughly the same
out of the experience. Also, having an agreed-upon time when you do your
Talking In Each Other's Native Languages means that you won't need to bug each
other with language questions at other times - which, should you have any kind
of interaction with your exchange partner at all outside of your sessions,
should be a weight off the nerves of everyone involved.
Depending on how niche your language is, you can probably
find a fair amount of free stuff online just devoted to teaching people your
language. Why? People love sharing. A thing my mum told me as an awkward
preteen about making conversation was this: People love talking about
themselves. Sharing the intricacies of your own language and culture to a wider
audience is wonderful - I love telling people about the North and my relation
to it, just as Harmut clearly loves telling people about German and Germany on
his ace language pages. (This and others are on my list of useful
online language resources, by the way, so if you know any
good ones please let me know - I plan to write some introductory stuff myself.)
I'm sure you’re happy that speaking a particular language
is a perfectible skill. You can get better at it. But you know what? So is
learning a new language, full stop. As I've gone through the motions of
acquainting myself with each new language, I've noticed that the same steps
keep appearing:
- Work out what sounds are present in the language, and how they interact.
- Work out how the sounds are written down.
- Become familiar with the most common forms - greetings, a general idea of how words are used, common irregular words, common vocabulary (the last two overlap).
- Gradually widen the core to include more vocabulary and more nuance, the more specific nuts and bolts of grammar and usage.
(Compare it to learning new instruments - there's only so
many chords and scales that people use, you just need to learn how to produce
them. And if it's an instrument in the same family as one you already know,
it's all the easier. Not instantaneous mastery, but a good leg up.)
The concept that Chomsky and co. put forward is that
people are fundamentally all saying the same sorts of things - they just express
them differently. We are united by our humanity - like many great theoretical
conclusions, you could have asked anyone in the street and they'd probably have
told you exactly the same thing. People on the opposite side of the world from
you are interested in having enough to eat and a place to sleep, in looking
after their families and making something of their lives. They have the same
size and shape brain, a similar pair of eyes and lungs and kidneys. Their
larynges contract and vibrate columns of air just like yours, and their ears
receive airborne packets of information as yours do. Their voices and brains
and minds make different use of the same raw materials, but it would be a
poorer world if we required everyone to talk, think and dream in exactly the
same way as we do. And with modern technology, they are no longer even a single
world away from you. We live in exciting times - here's hoping we don't screw
it up.
Let's take English and Mandarin as examples of languages
that are traditionally thought to be distant and difficult to learn for each
other's native speakers. Like most Chinese languages and others nearby,
Mandarin has lexical tone - this means that when you learn a word, you have to
learn which of four tones it has (five if you include the unmarked neutral
tone). English speakers also make use of tone, but to express intonation.
The intonation on the word Well in each of
the following phrases (in my UK English, at least) roughly approximates each of
the four tones:
| 1. | Weeeeell, I dunno, it's a fairly big favour... | ("high level" mā) |
| 2. | Well? What did she say? | ("rising" má) |
| 3. | Well?! Are you going to open it, then? | ("dipping" mǎ) |
| 4. | Well! If that's how it is, then I quit! | ("high-falling" mà) |
(Also like music, tone contours are mapped out on a
five-point scale - this coincides with the musical idea that the pentatonic scale is the natural range of the human voice, used as it is in most folk songs
and guitar solos.)
Mandarin and the other Chinese languages are also united
in their use of Han characters. I grant you, they are tough. You apparently
need between 3, and 4,000 characters to be able to get by; but this is ignoring
the fact that most characters are made up of a combination of other, simpler characters.
There are 214 basic radicals, and a character is usually made up of a radical and
a suffix that indicates how it was pronounced in Middle Chinese (unfortunately
rarely any indication of how it's pronounced now). So the simplified character 妈
(pinyin mā) means "mother" - it uses the woman radical
(on the left) 女 (nǚ) and used to rhyme with 马 (mǎ,
horse). In this case we're lucky and the rhyme still works - though the
tone is different. You can see how the woman radical is a simplified drawing of
a woman - on Memrise they use animations and mnemonics ("The Chinese
mother is expected to work like a horse for her family") along with
spaced repetition to great success.
But wait a second - isn't English spelling largely based
on conventions from Middle English? Doesn't the root in reading and they had read a book come out, even though it doesn't sound the same? I think
it's a fair comparison. Basically, when you learn a Mandarin word, just as when
you were first learning to write English words, you have to learn the spelling
and pronunciation separately. There's also the matter that where Mandarin has
lexical tone, English has lexical stress: They import an import has a
rare English stress-based minimal pair (pair of items that differ only in one
feature, showing that there is a conscious contrast based on the feature) - the
Mandarin examples I cited give a tone-based one (mā vs mǎ),
which are as about as common as voicing-based minimal pairs in English (like bet
vs pet). If you don't know a word's tone in Mandarin, you don't know the
word. As English speakers we have to get used to paying attention to diacritics
in words (which English seems to be allergic to), but once we know the rules of
the game in that regard we're golden. (Mandarin nouns also have associated
measure words - a bit like knowing that it's a parliament of rooks, but
used all the time, and with a limited number of about 150. A bit like learning
a word's gender in other IE languages, but with logic still attached!) There's also the bonus that Mandarin's grammar almost entirely analytic - no learning of irregular verbs required, for instance. It's almost like only having so much room for grammar in their heads people in this case can't be bothered!
That's basically it, really: learning languages is a lot
easier if you force yourself to be flexible and open. There will be sounds that
you don't normally make (so I recommend getting to grips with IPA shenanigans
so you don't get stuck with pasty approximations), and some that you do make,
but are said slightly further in or out of your mouth, or with stronger or
weaker aspiration, or with a different emphasis style. You need to make
yourself listen, and listen carefully. If you've got a tame native speaker to
really work over your pronunciation it'll do you no end of good. You have, too,
to be humble enough to let yourself be corrected if you make mistakes, which
you will do, because that's how you learn a second language. For my money, starting
your acquaintance with a new language is like meeting someone new: you should
be doing at least as much listening as talking, if not more.
Christ, I hate that question. When I was living in France
and going to a lot of Couchsurfing meet-ups, I found the best answer was, Not enough. I quite like the analogy of languages as people: what
would you say if someone said, So how many people do you know? (I
warned you you'd be being ventriloquised some more, reader, I'm sorry about
that. It's dreadfully rude of me.) I imagine you'd probably ask what kind of
"knowing" the person asking you meant. Know enough to have a
conversation with? Know enough that you would acknowledge each other in the
street? Know enough that you could turn up on their doorstep in the middle of
the night utterly distraught, and they would let you in, make you a cup of tea
and not ask more questions than you wanted to answer? Know enough to sleep
with? Know enough to share your body with? Know enough to fall out and argue with
because you both know the other could be better than you're being? Know enough
that their heartbeat answers yours, that your lives are intertwined? Know
enough that your children will know them as they know you? Know enough that you will be remembered together with them and could wish for nothing more?
I have a casual acquaintance with around fifteen or
sixteen languages. I have native English and fluent French and Russian,
although not at anything like the level I really should have by this point. About two thirds of the
rest I can read more or less with a dictionary and have stilted conversations
in; I've found that fluency (in the sense of not needing to translate your
thoughts into the language consciously) is a transferable skill - I've had
conversations in Ancient Greek, though my reconstructed pitch accent is often
met with slight bewilderment.
I've found another useful image is that of planting
trees. When you're still getting to grips with the first three steps outlined
above, you're digging; when you're onto the fourth step, it's planted, and
you're watering; when you achieve fluency (which is nothing like an end point,
just as getting to know someone well isn't) your tree is in bloom. If you
neglect it, it can wilt, but with more watering and care it should come back
into flower. I don't think that you can aim to get to a native or near-native
level in much more than one language beyond your own: I find that each new
language that I meet makes me appreciate the beauty of my own all the more, the
rich soil that I've spent my life with and know as I know myself.
In Summary...
Sorry, did you still want to know which language is
objectively the hardest to learn in the world? It's your second language, the
one that you slave over in school for hours and hours to what feels like no
progress. After that it's more or less plain sailing - so long as you've got
the spare afternoons and know how to pitch your mast. Individual languages are
only subjectively hard if you’re coming at them from far away and don’t know
the ropes.
(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)
(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)
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