>>11773496Yes, it's way harder for them.
>>11773805I see this retarded argument all the fucking time and I'm sick of it, so in the hopes that arrogant Europeans will finally shut the fuck up:
You're an absolute moron if you think going from a something like Spanish to Italian, a Romance language to English, or from one Germanic language to another is anywhere near as difficult as going from Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Arabic etc to English. In fact, the Foreign Service Institute, a part of the US government that deals with foreign trade/education, ranks languages by difficulty for government employees working oversees. They've been teaching foreign language to diplomats and contractors for over 70 years and their consensus is Japanese is by far the most difficult major language for a native English speaker to learn and the opposite is probably also true. And before you say that's stupid because Chinese uses the same symbols, Japanese usually has multiple readings for each kanji and that alone makes it 10 times more difficult. This is the chart from their website detailing how long it takes their professional instructors to teach a foreign language to just above competent.
https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/The following language learning timelines reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages to U.S. diplomats, and illustrate the time usually required for a student to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in the language, or a score of “Speaking-3/Reading-3” on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. These timelines are based on what FSI has observed as the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency, though the actual time can vary based on a number of factors, including the language learner’s natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.
Category I Languages: 24-30 weeks (600-750 class hours)
Languages more similar to English.
Danish (24 weeks) Dutch (24 weeks) French (30 weeks)
Italian (24 weeks) Norwegian (24 weeks) Portuguese (24 weeks)
Romanian (24 weeks) Spanish (24 weeks) Swedish (24 weeks)
Category II Languages: Approximately 36 weeks (900 class hours)
German Haitian Creole Indonesian
Malay Swahili
Category III Languages: Approximately 44 weeks (1100 class hours)
“Hard languages” – Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English. This list is not exhaustive.
Albanian Amharic Armenian
Azerbaijani Bengali Bulgarian
Burmese Czech Dari
Estonian Farsi Finnish
Georgian Greek Hebrew
Hindi Hungarian Icelandic
Kazakh Khmer 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
Category IV Languages: 88 weeks (2200 class hours)
“Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
Arabic Chinese – Cantonese Chinese – Mandarin
Japanese Korean
Notice how the major European languages are not even close to the more difficult ones? I'm sure you feel accomplished, having learned English as a second language, and you should be - learning a second language is difficult. But you're still a fucking idiot if you think you didn't have a gigantic head start just by speaking a native language that's already linguistically close to English.
