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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

On one of these I like the comment "You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. "

well yeah of course english is easier, else there wouldn't be these kind of tables : https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lan...

There's no equality amongst languages. Japanese students have to get up and do one hour of kanji learning every year from 8 years old to 18 years old in addition to normal language classes for instance - there's nothing comparable in english.

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That table is ranking languages by how easy they are for an English speaker to learn -- that is, how much commonality they have with English. It doesn't make any claim about English having some fundamental property that makes it easier to learn.

From the first paragraph:

"The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker."

That table is expressly from the point of view of an English speaker; I'm sure it would look very different if written for Arabic speakers. Since it's largely a function of similarity to your native tongue, how would we even measure if a language is easy or hard to learn?

And what counts as "normal language classes"? Until at least high school in the US, every class other than math focuses on reading and writing.

Adults don’t have to go that route though. I learned all the kanji from daily use through college level (some 3,500 or so) in a few months of study. You might as well point to the massive number of root vocabulary English has and make the same argument that English would be crazy difficult to learn (and you’d be equally right).

Dutch and German are classified differently (cat 1 vs 2). But it is a well-known language gimmick of these 2 specific languages that when a native speaker of one of these languages speaks slow enough, a native speaker of the other one can understand him reasonably well. So where do these 6 weeks of extra work come from?

That has nothing to do with learning English.

It’s based on the premise ‘as an English speaker’ these languages are easy to learn. But, if your native language where say Dutch you get a different list than if your native language is Japanese.

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