Talk:Difficulty of learning languages

message: I feel this article treats an artificially constricted topic.  Replacing it with a new article on a slightly more general topic e.g. Comparative difficulty of acquisition of various languages (human) (I'm not really suggesting that as a title) would allow a more relaxed discussion of the features of various languages that tend to make them more or less easy to learn, without the narrow focus on "more difficult." EEng (talk) 00:02, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: See discussion above. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:15, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: the topic of this article was perfectly fine before people ruined it.  It was the meme of "hardest language". So what if "hardest language" doesn't hold up as a scientific definition? Wikipedia has lots of articles on pop culture memes. --dab (𒁳) 10:41, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This topic deserves an article on Wikipedia for the simple reason that it is one of the most common questions that linguists get asked by students and laymen.  It is one of the most popular questions on Yahoo! Answers.  It is convenient to have this article on Wikipedia for the ease of organizing all the ramifications to the question in one place.  I have actually referred questioners to this very article rather than spending too much time dealing with all the possibilities and issues involved.  If an encyclopedia is a place to find answers to common questions, then this article is perfect since it deals with a very common question with all the details in a single place.  It is a perfect article for an encyclopedia that is user friendly.  --Taivo (talk) 15:44, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

text: The question is "What is the hardest language (to learn)?"  Why shouldn't an encyclopedia answer common questions?  It seems quite arrogant of encyclopedia makers to require users to dig for data rather than making it easy to find.  Where else would a reader answer this question?  In several different places in the encyclopedia otherwise.  This article actually does offer a good framework from which the question can be attacked from several angles.  Does that mean that the article as it now stands is perfect?  No.  But it means that there is a very useful framework to attack the question here--second language acquisition issues, availability of data issues, U.S. government measurements for how it measures "most difficult", etc.  There is, of course, no concrete answer that fits all people, but this article approaches the question from a number of useful angles and will enlighten the casual reader who doesn't want to dig in twenty articles for the answer (assuming the reader even knows which of twenty articles will give pieces of the puzzle).  And your contention that unless an article can be based on a single source then it shouldn't be here is rather unencyclopedic, actually.  There are many articles that are based on multiple sources.  If you require a single principal source for each article then you've simply built a collection of book reports rather than an encyclopedia.  --Taivo (talk) 17:55, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

text: Personally I think that, once we do the research and put in the work, we can have the best of both worlds: an article that both answers a common question, and does so in an academic and accurate way. That would be something like what we have now, only cleaned up a lot: Hardest language should redirect to something like "what makes languages hard to learn" (not in that wording of course, but a title that expresses that), and the first section of the article should probably address the issue that there is no one "hardest" language (for all the reasons we have discussed before), which will answer the common question, and then the rest of the article would outline factors that contribute to what makes a particular language harder or easier (stuff like relatedness to known languages) and what general factors contribute to how well a person learns a language (stuff like motivation and aptitude). That way we can still answer the question that, admittedly, most uninformed people are coming here about, but without "pandering" to what we personally know is a silly caricature of language. The general structure of what the article should be, I think, is pretty clear; all that remains is to find sources and actually fill that in, something I have not yet sat down and tried to do.rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:04, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I completely agree.  --Taivo (talk) 18:27, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awkward carveout of topic for an article 

message: I keep reading about a study by the British Foreign Office that found the most difficult language to learn for British diplomats. (For example, on this article at usingenglish.com.) However, I haven't been able to locate the original source, and I can find no mention of it on the Foreign Office website. Is anyone aware of where it might be found?  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 01:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I have sent an email to the Foreign Office about this. I can imagine they are busy, so I don't know if they will be able to respond. I will give an update here if I hear anything from them.  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 01:44, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

text: I can't find anything on pay scales for Foreign Office staff, but it appears from this page that this information will be published eventually. No idea when, though. If it comes to it, it looks like we could request the information through a Freedom of Information Request - however I think that may be a little extreme! These quotes of Basque, Japanese and Hungarian being on the top of the Foreign Office's difficult language list must have come from somewhere though. We just need to find out where.  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 14:32, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

text: Further searching turns up three more documents, although the first still looks like the most likely.  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 15:11, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  British Foreign Office study 

message: A good seminal paper to cite there would be the following:
*
rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:52, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonology section 

message: It is important to remember that this article must be written accurately.  My edits to the phonology section were to remove the absolutes that implied "all speakers have trouble (or ease) doing X".  Japanese speakers can HEAR the difference between [r] and [l], the problem they have is in producing the difference when they speech center is conditioned to vary them by environment.  English speakers have the same problem with initial [ts] and [ŋ]--they can hear the sounds there, but they just have a very difficult time producing them there.  --Taivo (talk) 17:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I am all for making the article accurate. Surely the best thing to do in this case is improve the example, rather than taking it out altogether? It is a lot harder to understand the concept without it. And yes, Japanese speakers can hear the difference between /l/ and /r/, but they put them in the same mental category - the English words light and right do sound like the same word to a Japanese speaker. It's the mental category that I'm interested in here. Is there a wording for the example that you would be happy with?  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 22:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, the example is "[l] and [r] are allophones in Japanese so a Japanese speaker may have difficulty acquiring them".  That is perfectly clear and all that is necessary.  If the reader doesn't understand what an allophone is, then that is why there is a wikilink.  We cannot go through Wikipedia and explain in detail every technical term every time it is encountered.  The whole issue of "mental category" is not an appropriate expansion for this.  It's also not really relevant.  Japanese speakers hear the difference between [r] and [l] just fine, but they have not been trained to produce them in the "wrong" place.  It's not about mental categories, it's about learning how to produce them outside of their normal environment.  English speakers can hear a word-initial [ts] perfectly well in [tsar] or [tsitsi], but since they've never learned how to produce the sound in this location, that's the problem--not some "mental category".  Just as English speakers have never learned to produce pharyngeals, speakers must learn to produce [ts] in the "wrong place".  --Taivo (talk) 23:19, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It may be "perfectly clear and all that is necessary" to someone who already has specialist knowledge, but I don't think this is the case for the lay reader. We should not assume that readers will know the difference between phones, allophones, and phonemes. I think we have two choices - we can either make lay readers hunt through the allophone article to find a clear example of what it is, just to make sense of the point we are trying to make; or, we can include a short example in the text of this article. I don't think expert readers would be put at a disadvantage if we included such an example. Is it really such a bad idea?  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 00:05, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The example you previously included was simplistic and inaccurate.  I find it hard to imagine an accurate example that doesn't take up more space than it really deserves.  "right" and "light" do not sound alike to Japanese speakers.  The question isn't whether or not Japanese speakers can hear the difference.  The question is whether they have learned how to place one sound in the environment of the other or not.  --Taivo (talk) 00:31, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: They may not sound alike, but they do sound like the same word. I have personally taught Japanese students of English many such /l/ and /r/ word pairs, and invariably the reaction I get is "They're the same!" This seems to be the exact question we are discussing to me. You seem to be very forthright over something that seems like common sense to me, so maybe I've missed something. Could you explain how the ability to hear the difference between the words is different from the ability to place one sound in the environment of the other? (Should this be "move one sound out of the environment of the other"?)  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 02:46, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Here is what goes on:  1) When a speaker learns their language, they learn to produce certain sounds in certain environments; 2) they can still hear the difference between the sounds, thus they can identify non-native speakers who may confuse the sounds; 3) when learning a language with those sounds in other environments, they have to learn how to produce those sounds in a new environment, something that may or may not be easy to do (for example, when learning Swahili, English speakers must learn to produce [ŋ] at the beginning of a word); 4) their level of success at learning to produce those sounds in new environments marks their language to a greater or lesser degree as being "foreign" to the speakers of the language they are learning.  Trying to make it sound like Japanese speakers are normally incapable of hearing the difference between [l] and [r] seems rather chauvinistic.  It's simply not true.  --Taivo (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not just me - there's a whole article on this subject: Japanese speakers learning r and l. Of course they can tell the difference between the allophones, and identify people using the wrong allophone as having a foreign accent. This does not mean that they consciously distinguish between English words using /l/ and words using /r/. The article I linked to points out that Japanese speakers can distinguish between [l] and [r] when they are not mentally processed as speech. I am not contesting this. I'm interested in the mental representation of the sounds when they are processed as speech. Actually, that sounds like a pretty good working definition of a phoneme to me.  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 06:29, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a difference between Japanese speakers processing [l] and [r] in Japanese words and identifying and using them in English words.  --Taivo (talk) 06:34, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thinking about it, I still object to the overt mention (besides the Wikilink I put in) of the right/light example.  The reason is that linguists are very clear about what Japanese can and cannot do physically and linguistically.  1) Physically, they can hear the difference between [r] and [l].  2) Linguistically, they don't notice the difference because of their linguistic conditioning.  Given a sentence like, "Japanese speakers cannot hear the difference between [r] and [l]", an unsophisticated reader could easily infer that Japanese speakers are not physically capable of distinguishing the sounds rather than the very restricted linguistic sense of that statement.  That's why I'm opposed to some simplistic statement and a longer statement that correctly captures the linguistic subtlety isn't really necessary in this context.  --Taivo (talk) 14:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

text: The term "allophone" is just fine and should stay.  There was a further example that said, "Japanese speakers cannot hear the difference between right and light" (or pretty close to that wording).  I removed it for the reasons cited above.  --Taivo (talk) 16:37, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Anyway, I just now made a nifty little chart and added it to article Allophone, which I hope is helpful...AnonMoos (talk) 21:18, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

text: The whole second half of the sentence (after "than sounds in the native language") can be easily deleted.  --Taivo (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonology edits 

message: I think Grammar is what could determine the difficulty of a language alot more, followed by the phonetics (such as pronunciation). Like an isolating language is easy, and an agglutinative language is intermediate but an inflecting language is hardcore. I can very much call Basque the hardest language ever, it takes like books and books to explain it's grammar. Those scientific racists are ignorant, they say Europeans have a sophisticated language. Just look at English, it's not that hard, I'm not even sure where English falls into. 
Here's a following example of a made up extremely difficult language.
"I love rainbows
I/Me = Fulazmingaru
love = Pustaskishamaruna
Rainbows = Baluumoucharamu
" Balum Fulaz Garu muuchmaramiyat Taskishapustaruna minsijirats " — Preceding unsigned comment added by  75.159.9.234  (talk • contribs)  06:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're right. The article is definitely in need of a section on grammar. I'm afraid that your example can't be included though, due to Wikipedia's policy of not including original research. Feel free to contribute material on this yourself - just make sure that you cite reliable sources for all your statements, and keep a neutral point of view. All the best.  — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 06:43, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

text: What makes grammar difficult are inherent complexity and irregularity, as in Greek and many polysynthetic languages, as well as divergence from one's frame of reference. Basque isn't really all that difficult, it's just different from typical European languages. I'll give you an example of what makes English difficult: the word "the". That is very difficult to acquire for anyone who doesn't have articles in their language. More difficult than grammar, IMO, are the intricacies of the lexicon: when you use which word and how. A well-known example from English is "in the street" for something which is on the street, while "on the street" means something different entirely. That's far more daunting than grammar, because there is effectively no end to it. Mandarin is supposed to be grammatically simple, but the fact that you can't just string words together in their proper order and inflection due to lexical complications can make it more difficult to speak coherently than a language like Basque. — kwami (talk) 06:54, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar 

message: Well, at last, we have reached a point of closure with Vegaswikian moving the article to Difficulty of learning languages. But just as he said, we shouldn't let this stop the discussion about the possibility of merging this article with second language acquisition. Myself, I have begun to feel that the real issue in whether we should merge or not is that of space. It feels better to me to have this topic as a section inside another article, because it is not usually considered a valid topic in SLA, and giving it its own article seems to be giving the subject a credence that it doesn't deserve. But, as Taivo says, it is useful for readers, and while being useful is not a good reason to have an article on something, it is something that can be taken into consideration. 
To balance these two viewpoints, I propose a practical solution: we should merge if we can condense the article down enough, but if we can't, we should leave it as a standalone page. As the present main contributor to second language acquisition, I am perhaps in a special position to comment on this. I can confirm that the article is pressed for space - I have already split long sections out into sub-articles, and even so, it is still missing some essential sections such as sociolinguistic views on SLA. I am also concerned about undue weight - a large section on difficulty might erroneously cause readers to think it is as important a topic in SLA as say, interlanguage or sequences of acquisition. Is it possible to work difficulty into the article without causing an undue weight problem? I would like to hear your views.  — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 13:53, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  The case for merging 

message: About Rosenberg, A. (1979). Lingvisticæ Investigationes:III 3(2). 323-339 - this study was really not intended to be taken seriously. I've read it, and the author basically goes through all the major languages looking for the equivalent of English's "It's all Greek to me". For example, although English picks out Greek, the Greeks have a phrase that says "that sounds Chinese to me" (actually, I can't remember the actual phrase or language - this is just an example off the top of my head to demonstrate the method). He then goes through all similar phrases in all the languages, and works out who is at the top of the tree. It just happens to be Chinese. I notice the sentence in the article contains caveats about his claims, but I don't it belongs anywhere near a section that is trying to represent scientific consensus on the matter. We could maybe include it at the bottom of the article in a "myth of the hardest language" section or similar if we find enough pop science examples...  — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 09:54, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay. I did not understand the context of his statement. The context of his statement should be added and it should be re-labeled "myth of the hardest language" section.--Ephert (talk) 10:07, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rosenberg 1979 

message: *
Has a decent discussion of some of the issues mentioned at this article, as well as links to some other sources that might be more WP:RS (although less accurate--this source has some valuable caveats about those other sources and the woman who wrote it is more of an expert than the writers of the more "official" sources probably are, but unfortunately it's still just a blog post). rʨanaɢ (talk) 21:07, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference 

message: Greetings and salutations, all! I would like to thank this opportunity to inform you all that I have taken the liberty of merging all of the content of this article into the article w:Second-language acquisition per TEMPLATE:afd-mergeto (Date: January 2013). Thank you and happy wikiying! Illegitimate Barrister (talk) 06:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger completed