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Among the most difficult, it takes 44 weeks to learn the Albanian language

Politiko 2023-09-20 10:05:16

Among the most difficult, it takes 44 weeks to learn the Albanian language

Languages ​​are complex in many ways, and the main reason a language is difficult to learn is that it is different from the language a person speaks from birth.

"The Economist" in a recent article has divided languages ​​according to the level of difficulty that an English speaker faces in learning them. The US State Department puts the languages ​​it teaches diplomats into four categories with estimates of how long it takes them to learn from 24 to 88 weeks.

In the article it is said that the Albanian language can be learned by English speakers for 44 weeks, which is the third category of difficulty, out of 4 categories.

 While the easiest languages ​​to learn are French, Italian, Spanish, etc., while the most difficult languages, which can take up to 88 weeks to learn, are Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin.

Among the most difficult, it takes 44 weeks to learn the Albanian language

What underlies the difficulty of such languages ​​for an English speaker?

The first thing many students will think of is the writing system. Indeed, none of the State Department's most difficult languages ​​are written in the Latin alphabet used by most European languages. A second way that languages ​​can be difficult is with sounds and distinctions that do not exist in the learner's language. For an English speaker, novelties include the clicks of many African languages ​​and the exhalative sounds (produced by a sudden release of pressure in the mouth) in some Caucasian languages. Vocabulary obviously matters too. Most European languages ​​have an ancestor (called Proto-Indo-European) and so their words, too, often come in related pairs. If you know that water in Spanish is agua, it is easy to understand the Italian acqua and the English water. Finally, there is grammar.

The overall difficulty of a language can be seen as the sum of the difficulty of its writing system, sounds, words and grammar. These come in varying sizes: one Chinese professor has called it the hardest language he's learned to write and the easiest he's learned to speak.

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