Language-learning has a bit of a mystique about it. It is one of many people’s regrets never to have done. Some people conclude that they simply don’t have the brain for it, like chess or jazz improvisation.
There are various elements of language-learning. Are some brains just too old to master another language? What technological tools are the most helpful? Why does it seem so hard to acquire another accent? Does linguistic talent overlap with the musical kind?
And, most recently, what’s the hardest language to learn? This depends on what language you already speak. America’s State Department ranks languages by how many weeks of full-time learning English-speakers take to reach a professional level. So European languages like Spanish and Swedish are among the easiest for Anglophones. Korean, Cantonese, and Arabic are among the hardest. In a nutshell: other languages force you to think about things that your language does not, such as a different alphabet, grammatical distinctions and sounds.
Whether you think you have the brain for it or not, everyone can learn some of a foreign language—and even a bit of pleasantry can coax a smile from others. Mastery may be hard, but you never get all the way there anyway. Nonetheless, every step opens up new worlds.
Which languages take the longest to learn?
The difficulty in learning a foreign language lies not only in its inherent complexity. Languages are complex in different ways (though all are learnable by infants). The main reason a language is hard is that it is different from your own.
America’s State Department places the languages it teaches diplomats into four categories (see chart), with estimates of how long they take to learn them ranging from 24 to 88 weeks. What underlies the difficulty of such languages for an English-speaker?
Average time for an English speaker in full-time learning to reach “General Professional Proficiency”*
24 -30 weeks: Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish.
36 weeks: German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili
44 weeks: Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Czech, Dari, Estonian, Farsi, Finish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kymer, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese.
88 weeks: Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese,
The first thing many learners will think of is the writing system. Indeed none of the State Department’s hardest languages is written with the Latin alphabet used by most European languages. Chinese stands out for its difficulty. It is commonly said that a learner must memorise around 2,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper. But even this estimate is criticised; someone with 2,000 characters will still have to look up unfamiliar ones in every few lines of text. Japanese is (mostly) written with a subset of the Chinese characters, but most characters can be given either a Japanese or Chinese pronunciation, making the task mind-tangling in that language too.
But foreign writing systems need not be difficult. The other writing systems in the “hard” category are all quite learnable. Arabic is alphabetic, with just a couple of dozen letters. Its two complications are that letters change shape depending on where they appear in a word (beginning, middle, end or alone) and that short vowels are not written. And Korean’s hangul system is technically a syllabary, in that every character stands for a syllable, not a single sound. But hangul is widely admired for being simple and logical.
A second way languages can be hard is with sounds and distinctions that do not exist in the learner’s language. To an English-speaker, the novelties include the clicks of many African languages and the ejective sounds (made by a sudden release of pressure in the mouth) in some Caucasian ones. But just as hard is the problem of languages that make distinctions your language does not. In Hindi, the t- and d-sounds can be “retroflex” (with the tongue curled back) or not, making two different letters that can distinguish two different words (moti with a retroflex t means “fat, thick” and with a non-retroflex t means “pearl”). Mandarin and Cantonese have tones, meaning ma with an even pitch and ma with a falling one are different words. (Mandarin has four tones; Cantonese has more, though the number is disputed.)
The lexicon obviously matters too. Most European languages share an ancestor (called proto-Indo-European) and so their words, too, often come in related pairs. If you know water in Spanish is agua it is easy to figure out Italian acqua and English aquatic. But the European languages share vocabulary for another reason: they have freely borrowed from one another over the centuries. Languages unrelated to the European ones (Arabic from the Semitic family, or Chinese from the Sino-Tibetan one) will not only lack the “genetic” overlap in vocabulary. They are culturally distant, and so have far less borrowed European vocabulary too.
The overall hardness of a language can be seen as the sum of the difficulty of its writing system, sounds, words, and grammar. These come in different proportions: one professor of Chinese has called it the most difficult language he has ever learned to write and the easiest he has learned to speak.
If you want to learn a language just for fun, start with Swedish. If you want to rack up an impressive number, stay in Europe. But if you really want to impress, bulking up your brain to master Cantonese or Korean is the sign of the true linguistic Ironman.
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To master a language, start learning it early
New evidence suggests a drop-off in results after the age of 17
THOSE who want to learn a foreign language, or want their children to, often feel they are racing against the clock. People seem to get worse at languages as they age. Children often learn their first without any instruction, and can easily become multilingual with the right exposure. But the older people get, the harder it seems to be. Witness the rough edges on the grammar of many immigrants even after many years in their new countries.
Scientists mostly agree that children are better language learners, but do not know why. Some posit biological factors. Is it because young brains have an extreme kind of plasticity? Or, as Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, argues, an instinct for language-learning specifically, which fades as the brain ages and (in evolutionary terms) is no longer needed? Others think children have special environments and incentives, not more conducive brains. They have a strong motivation to communicate with caregivers and imitate peers, and are not afraid of making mistakes in the way adults are.
Some believe any “critical period” may only apply to the sounds of a foreign tongue. Adults struggle with accents: eight decades after immigrating to America and four after serving as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger still sounds fresh off the boat from Fürth—in what is nevertheless elaborately accurate English. (An alternative explanation, runs a joke about Mr Kissinger, is that he never listens.)
But grammar is different, and some researchers have reckoned that adults, with their greater reasoning powers, are not really at a disadvantage relative to children. One study found that when adults and children are exposed to the same teaching materials for a new language for several months, the adults actually do better. Most such research has had to rely on small numbers of subjects, given the difficulty of recruiting them; it is hard to know how meaningful the results are.
Now a large new study led by Joshua Hartshorne of Boston College (with Mr Pinker and Joshua Tenenbaum as co-authors) has buttressed the critical-period hypothesis. The study ingeniously recruited 670,000 online test-takers by framing the exercise as a quiz that would guess the participants’ native language or dialect. This made it a viral hit. The real point was to test English-learners’ knowledge of tricky bits of grammar and to see how this correlates with the age at which their studies began.
Do younger beginners do better because their earlier start gave them more learning time, or because they learned faster in early years? It can be hard to tease apart these two questions. But testing a huge amount of data against a number of possible learning curves allowed Mr Hartshorne to do precisely that. Many previous researchers had posited a drop-off at around puberty. The new study found it to be rather later, just after 17.
Despite that later cut-off, learners must begin at around ten if they are to get to near-native fluency. If they start at, say, 14, they cannot accumulate enough expertise in the critical period. Unfortunately, 14 or so is precisely when many students, especially in America, are first introduced to a new language. (Even worse, this is an age when children are acutely sensitive to embarrassment in front of peers.)
Children who start at five don’t do noticeably better than those who start at ten over their lifetimes. But there is still reason to begin in the first years of school, as in Denmark and Sweden. Because mastery takes a long time—perhaps 30 years until improvement ceases—those who begin at five and are obliged to read and write English at university will by then have made much more progress than those who took the plunge at ten, even if their level is roughly the same by 40.
The existence of the critical period is not a reason for anyone 11 or older to give up. Some people remain excellent language students into adulthood. And Mr Hartshorne tested some truly subtle features of grammar that take years to master. A language learned even to a lower level can still be extraordinarily useful at work or enjoyable while traveling.
But for policymakers, the implication is clear. Earlier is better. Students outside the English-speaking world will eventually face English in the classroom or at work: they’ll have a better shot if they start younger. As for the Anglophone countries, getting foreign languages into the tender years is a hard sell. Many bureaucrats can hardly see past reading and maths. That is a mistake for many reasons. This study demonstrates one of them.
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Why you have an accent in a foreign language
It is because pronunciation, stress and rhythm are rarely taught well
Open a textbook for a foreign language, and one of the first things you see is an alphabet, enumerating the letters used in the writing system and the sounds they represent. This is obviously crucial for unfamiliar systems, say those of Greek or Russian. But even for languages that rely on the Latin alphabet, the guide will explain how diacritics such as accent marks change a letter’s pronunciation, and quirks such as the -ch- in German or -gl- in Italian. (The first often sounds like the ch in Scottish loch, the second like the -ll- in million.)
And with that, it’s off to master greetings, vocabulary and so on, with little further thought for pronunciation. This is a shame. There is much more to learning a foreign accent than the sounds that the letters on the page represent. To begin with, the rough equivalents given in English are often quite rough indeed. In French, the p in Paris sounds rather different from the p in English, a contrast often neglected in textbooks: the French version lacks the strong puff of air of the English one. (Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say “Paris” in English. Then try making the p without the puff, and you’ll get the French kind.)
Even when textbooks or instructors mention this sort of nuance, the next step is often missing. As with chemistry, the important thing is not just how the elements behave in isolation, but how they come together. Each language has rules for these combinations, which native speakers (and many teachers) generally grasp but don’t or can’t explain.
Consider an easy example. All French words are stressed on the final syllable, a rule typically explained in textbooks. But the importance of the rule is often underplayed. It applies not only to French words but to any foreign name: French-speakers are acquainted with a Texan city called yoos-TON, not the English HYOO-ston. The final stress is quite emphatic, usually involving a higher pitch and greater volume. Meanwhile, English words often have a secondary as well as a primary stress: in “civilisation” the primary stress is on the fourth syllable and the secondary stress is on the first. In French, the final-syllable stress is so strong as to leave little room for any other.
Next, languages differ in what linguists call phonotactics—in effect, what is a permissible syllable and what isn’t. The p in psychology and pterodactyl is silent because English phonotactic rules do not allow native words to begin with pt- or ps- sounds. English does let these consonants join in the middle of words, like uptown and upside, so English-speakers can certainly pronounce them. But the rule about beginnings means that even if you encourage them to pronounce the p in psychotic, they tend to insert an extra vowel to make it fit the template, and say puh-sychotic. Anglophone commentators discussing Kylian Mbappé, a French footballer, find themselves compelled to add a third syllable, calling him Em-bap-ay.
A similar befuddlement affects many foreigners learning English, perhaps even more so. The reason a Spaniard might say he is from Espain when speaking English is that sp-, st- and other consonant combinations are forbidden at the beginning of Spanish words, which is why the capital of Sweden is Estocolmo. That is just one example. English is unusually rich in consonant clusters that are, in practice, not allowed in other languages. Google a video of foreigners trying to say squirrel for another case study. The word combines an unusual skw- at the beginning, an odd vowel sound in the middle that most languages lack, and the tricky -rl at the end.
Another reason people are betrayed by their accents in other tongues, even if they are otherwise proficient, is that a language’s rhythm can be hard to pin down. They differ in how they space the syllables in a sentence. Cantonese and Italian, for instance, are “syllable-timed”: every syllable has roughly similar duration. Read this sentence aloud and try to pronounce every syllable this way, and you may find yourself halfway to mimicking an Italian. English is “stress-timed” (though less strictly), meaning that stressed syllables occur at roughly regular intervals, the remainder tending to be less distinctly pronounced. This is how you could distinguish Italian from English being spoken through a wall, even without being able to make out any individual sounds or words.
English-speaking tourists sometimes find themselves speaking English with a weird hybrid accent when they go abroad. Linguistic rhythm is infectious. But as with drumming or dancing, a little explicit teaching never hurts.
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Why English-speakers should not give up on foreign languages
Governments that cut funding for language study will come to regret it
Ashton University in Birmingham is closing the department that teaches languages and translation. The University of Sheffield stands accused of sending its language students on dumbed-down courses to save money. Fewer pupils at British schools are taking foreign-language exams (a drop in French, the most popular choice, accounts for most of the decline). A hasty analysis might see this trend as a nationalist, populist, post-Brexit mindset at work. But it has been gathering for a long time, not just in Britain but in America, and not just in the Brexit and Trump eras, but well before them.
The tragic attack on America of September 11th 2001 had one positive consequence. Many Americans realised how entangled their lives were with those of people around the world, and saw that they often did not understand their counterparts’ hopes and fears. Some patriotically applied to join the diplomatic and intelligence services; a few swotty types resolved to learn foreign languages. The number of students studying Arabic at university soared (albeit from a very low base). But the country’s attention has since wandered. The most recent research in America by the Modern Language Association found a drop of 9.2% in enrolment in university-level foreign-languages courses between 2013 and 2016.
Much more than tub-thumping politics, the likely culprit for all this is the global rise of English. Converse with Europeans of different ages and a three-generation pattern emerges. If they speak English at all, the oldest do so with heavy accents and grammatical mistakes. Middle-aged folk, especially in places like Scandinavia or the Netherlands, have light accents and merely mangle the odd idiom. The youngsters often put their elders to shame. They speak with American accents that could have been plucked from “Friends”—except that they did not pick them up from anything so primitive as an old-fashioned television. Endless time on YouTube, or gaming live with others while trash-talking in English, has made that seem less a foreign language than one of their own.
All this might understandably make youngsters in Anglophone countries wonder why they should bother learning French or Spanish at school. Why endure the arduous middle phase of learning a language—when you have some knowledge but no experience—if the awkward jumble that comes out of your mouth is liable to be met with a reply in flawless English? True fluency is valuable, as anyone who has sweated to achieve it will proudly attest. But that half-knowledge, the typical outcome of many courses, increasingly looks redundant.
Yet there are several good reasons to persist with language-learning in schools and universities. First, anyone who plans to move to another country, or interacts with one regularly for work or otherwise, still benefits hugely from almost any familiarity with its language. There is no way to genuinely get to know a place without being able to chit-chat or watch a bit of its television. (Anglophones who doubt this should imagine understanding their country with zero knowledge of English.) Second, even if your contact with the culture in question is only occasional, your efforts to use its language will be much appreciated—at least by older residents, who might otherwise scowl at you for assuming everyone is happy to speak English.
Foreign languages also have an intellectual value all their own—even if you never set foot in the relevant country. Latin and Greek were for centuries considered training for the mind; the same is true of immersion in any alien tongue. This is how many people acquire what formal knowledge of grammar they have. And the effort involved in talking in a foreign language makes you slow down and reflect on what you are saying and why. Researchers have even found that people make more rational decisions when speaking another language.
Beyond the individual benefits, 21st-century economies still need people who can function fluently abroad. Just as universal maths education creates a big pool of potential engineers, widespread language teaching does the same for business executives, diplomats, soldiers and spies. Speaking another language is not just a courtesy to others. Much of the benefit still accrues to those who put in the work—and the societies that support them. Even as English continues to rise, Anglophone countries that slash budgets for foreign languages may find themselves lost for words.