"And The Award For The Hardest Language To Learn Goes To..."

Anyone who has learnt a second language will tell you that it is not easy. There is new vocabulary, grammatical structures, those pesky exceptions to grammatical structures and, sometimes, new phonemes (or sounds) and alphabets. And to make matters worse the new language is supposed to slip off the tongue or be understood as it is spoken at a rate of knots by those to the manner born.

So nothing is easy - but are there some languages that are easier to learn than others? And where does English fall in the spectrum?

Early linguist's three tiers of languages

Early linguists confidently divided languages into three tiers - you could call this the Olympic approach with its gold, silver and bronze medals awarded across groups of languages. To do this they rather simplistically used as a yardstick a typological cline of morphological complexity, with isolating languages like Chinese seen as the simplest, agglutinating languages like Japanese or Turkish lying somewhere in the middle, and inflecting languages like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit awarded the dubious distinction of being the most complex and advanced. Needless to say things are not quite that clear cut.

Getting ghoti

English certainly benefits in terms of ease from its lack of gendered nouns. There is no "el" or "la" to contend with. And not a sniff of "der", "die" or "das". But consider this: if English is so easy what is a "ghoti"?

This question is beloved of TEFL teachers worldwide because the answer points to phonetic difficulties inherent in English. Like a surrealist joke the answer is a "fish". Get it? Let's get "ghoti" and unravel it a bit to explain.

• "GH" as in "tough" [F]
• "O" as in "women" [I]
• "TI" as in "station" [SH]

Phonetically speaking English is hardly the most transparent language in the world as Lord Cromer wrote in 1902 when he penned the following poem that opens "When the English tongue we speak/ Why is break not rhymed with freak?/ Will you tell me why it's true/ We say sew but likewise few?/ And the maker of the verse,/ Cannot rhyme his horse with worse? .../ To sum up all, it seems to me/ Sound and letters don't agree."

Relatively speaking

It may come as no surprise that in this postmodern world linguists are no longer quite so confident in their pronouncements on the simplicity of languages. It is nowadays fashionable to pooh-pooh the whole concept and simply state that the answer depends on who asks the question.

For example, an English speaker will learn Frisian (spoken in Holland) more easily than a Japanese speaker would. In general, the closer the second language is in relation to vocabulary, sounds, sentence structure and other factors to the native tongue, the easier the language will be to learn. This is not necessarily a function of whether the languages have a similar root or heritage but may be fortuitous, such as a chance similarity of phonology (or the sounds that are used). The lack of the "r" sound for asian speakers is a case in point, and tonal languages used in Asia cause similar problems for European speakers.

Can we have a decision please?

One thing is clear. Learning a language in a country where it is spoken is a much more effective way than learning it at a remove. For French language courses France is your best bet for the simple reason that learning French in France you will be surrounded by the language. But what is the hardest language to learn?

Taking into account the differences in alphabets, sounds, grammatical rules and the pragmatic issues of who is learning and where are they learning it...
...the jury is still out on what is the most difficult language to learn.

It should be noted that the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State has analysed the difficulty of attaining proficiency across 63 languages for English speakers and found that Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean proved the hardest.

It should also be noted that Sentinelese is an undocumented language and is only spoken by the isolated people of North Sentinel Island who have been known to kill the few brave fishermen who have washed upon their shores. This makes it an extremely hard language to presently learn!