The Easiest Language

As you would expect I tend to read a lot of blogs which focus on learning languages. Although many people are interested in learning languages the people who write blogs on the topic or take up residence on various linguist or polyglot forums are often more enthusiastic than the average punter. Something which never ceases to surprise me is the fact that there are all kinds of arguments that come up because one person strongly believes in something that another aspiring polyglot vehemently denies.
Perhaps the best illustration of this type of argument is the one about what constitutes the ‘easiest’ language to learn. There is one school of thought which goes something like this. Babies are capable of picking up any human language thus there is no ‘difficult’ language. The only thing that counts is motivation and, if you have enough of it, you can master any language.
I shouldn’t get riled by such an unscientific way of looking at things but I do. This idea that motivation is the overriding factor in determining difficulty is clearly delusional. Nobody can deny that motivation helps but there are a host of other factors that are important.
The first one is clearly exposure. In this respect the ‘baby’ analogy does have some worth though clearly the prerogatives of an adult who already speaks one or more languages and a baby who is learning his first are quite different. If you are exposed to a language more you are obviously in a position to acquire it more readily.
That is not to say that exposure automatically results in acquisition. I know many people who hear Polish and Dutch every day who only have the most rudimentary understanding of the language. Adults, unlike babies seem to have the ability not to listen to a language being spoken around them.
Having said that, if you are open to the languages spoken around you and want to acquire them then you will automatically pick up the language to a degree without any additional effort. For me the clearest example of this is Polish because although I never really liked the sound of the language I did want to understand it because it was my girlfriend’s language. That meant that I did not switch off when Poles were speaking to each other and I tried to follow television shows. I have a good enough understanding of Polish and I can make myself understood but I make lots of mistakes. The reason is that Polish is a difficult language and being good at it takes more than exposure.
The second one is proximity. I read on one blog that Spanish can be just as difficult as Mandarin without that secret motivation ingredient. When I read something like that I want to cry. An English or French speaker with the same level of motivation will obviously acquire Spanish more quickly than Mandarin because it has such a large vocabulary overlap with their own language. You can understand a lot of Spanish without ever studying it; just pick up a copy of the Metro and count how many words you can recognize.
Moreover, languages written in your own script with almost the same sounds are obviously easier to read than languages written in an unfamiliar script. Cyrillic is hard enough to get used to but learning to recognize and sound the Chinese characters used in Japanese and Mandarin is something different again. Sure babies do not learn a language through reading but for adult second language learners having native level texts to read is an excellent input. With Spanish you get that from the start, with Japanese you might be studying for years before you can read a newspaper.
The third one is accent. People are always amazed that Scandinavians and Dutch people speak such good English, often without an accent. What most people don’t seem to notice is that English speakers who speak the languages of those countries often have very good accents too. That is simply because the sounds we produce in English are not so far away from those of Dutch or Danish. Equally languages like Japanese which are easy to hear and pronounce are easier to reproduce than more proximate languages like French. The more you need to alter your normal way of speaking to reproduce the sounds of the target language the harder it is. That’s why the English ‘th’ causes an issue.
For me French is a very difficult language on this point. To speak French properly you really need to be conscious of your pronunciation and ideally to keep practicing it over time. It is the same with listening to it. French is not a language that is easy to hear compared with say Japanese or standard German where an English speaker can normally hear the words without too much effort, understanding them is the challenge.
Finally a point that gets little attention is the complexity of the vocabulary. On this score agglutinating languages like Turkish are very hard to master until you can easily split up the word and languages with countless individual multisyllabic words, like Polish, present big challenges. If you compare English to Polish it is astounding just how many one or two syllable words it has where Polish has a four or five syllable tongue twister.
Of course enough motivation can make molehills out of these mountains. For love or money many people will do anything. They say that the best classroom is a pillow after all. However, that does not mean that all languages are equally easy. I have a good knowledge of ten languages and the easiest for me to make progress in were French and Dutch for a combination of reasons. My strongest motivation right now is for Japanese but I am still at a lower intermediate level whereas I read novels in German a language I have put little effort in to in the last ten years.
The easiest language varies from person to person because difficulty is a combination of factors depending on who you are and where you are in your life. If we think of individual as the sun all of the languages orbit around us in different trajectories. You cannot immediately say which language will be easier for another person but what you can certainly say is that some languages are more difficult than others.