1. Which foreign language should you learn?
2. Which foreign language is the hardest?
3. How do you master that listening?
4. Everyone else knows English.
5. The natives won't speak to me in their tongue.
6. Using a 2nd language to learn a 3rd.
8. Do children learn better than adults?
9. Subtitles and Dubbing movies
10. Using the Bible to learn a foreign language
11. Using your students' English book to learn his/her language
12. Having an Official Language
I say learn whichever foreign language interests you. But beware though that if making money or getting a pretty girlfriend is the only motivation, you'll probably be disappointed. Making a career out of your linguistic skills is more a matter of luck rather than hard work or intellegence. For example, if a person became fluent in German or Japanese before the beginning of WW2, that person could get a job in intelligence as opposed to working on the front lines. And if a person became bilingual in Russian and English at the beginning of the Cold War, that person could build an entire career out of knowing both of those languages. On the other hand, in today's globalized economy with the cheap labor and cut throat competition, there's a lot of people with degrees in English, Spanish, or Chinese, who are stuck doing low paid menial work, simply because there's only a limited number of jobs for translators. If you do need to learn job skills, go to trade school and learn Carpentry or Welding.
Instead of dancing around this subject, I'll simply say what I think it is. I think the hardest language is most likely Japanese with Korean, Mandarin, and Arabic not too far behind. Of course, other languages like Hungarian and Cantonese also have a reputation for being hard but since there's not too many people learning them as a second language, there's not enough reliable information to adequately judge those.
Most people who don't have any language learning experience will either say Chinese because of its characters, or English because of the difficulty that people have learning to write and speak it properly. But I don't think those are necessarily the hardest languages. Below is a list of very hard languages. I can assure you that these languages are hard no matter whether you're an American who only knows English or a person born in Central Asia who knows several languages.
Mandarin -- Everyone knows about the huge character set. The grammar and pronunciation are relatively simple. But many people who do learn the language make the mistake of assuming they can just learn the pinyin and learn the speaking part easily. The main difficulty with Chinese lies in the vocabulary, as its not a European language. A single root can have over 10 different meanings. Learning the 2000 most common characters will definitely help a person pick up Chinese words faster. If you do want to get good with your speaking on this language without learning the characters, go with a comprehensive course like FSI and stay away from the 10 minute a day books.
Korean --
This is currently the language I'm learning right now. If you read the profile for it at www.how-to-learn-any-language.com , you might think Korean is the hardest language. After all, according to the profile, Koreans speak English well and are eager to practice it, and the Korean grammar has 500 conjugations for the verbs, Hanjas(chinese characters), and a very different vocabulary.
I'll shed some light on this. First off, Koreans in general are at the same level with their English as the Chinese and Japanese. Which means that of all the Koreans living in Korea who try to speak English with the tourists and ESL teachers, only a few are really good at English. On the grammar, there are 7 speech levels and only 3 or 4 are used in every day life. Korean grammar overall is pretty consistent in the sense that verbs and adjectives don't conjugate on person like Spanish or Russian. Basically if you say "he studies", the conjugation will be the same whether you talk about a woman, man, a child, several people, or yourself. When you factor in the endings for past tense, present tense, future tense, hypothetical, cause and effect, emotion, indirect quotations, and polite form (usually an offer to do something), you can get around 50 or 60 possible endings.
If you learn 1 speech level, typically the "hamnida" form used between strangers, and apply similar rules for the verb endings to the 2 other speech levels used with friends and young children, you end up with between 200 and 300 endings. For example to conjugate study in the polite form between strangers, its "gongbuhamnida". For the friendly level, its "gongbuheyo". And for young children you just take off the "yo" and say "gongbuhe". All you're doing is changing the ending a very little changes and when you study the language, the rules become very clear. This is what Korean learners and speakers mean when they say that Korean is a very consistent language.
It does get a little tricky with the adjectives and adverbs. When connecting 2 phrases or modifying verbs and adjectives, you attach particles to the words in the middle of the sentence. Which particle to use depends on how you're going to use the word, for example, introducing conditionals, hypothetical statements, expressing agreement/disagreement, past/present/future tense, and whether the word to be modified is an action verb or descriptive verb. With these modifiers, there are several hundred particles that have to be learned.
The real difficulty, just like Chinese, is with the vocabulary. While Korean does have English loan words, the North Korean dialect uses far fewer loan words than the South. The majority of the words in Korean are derived from Chinese roots. But to say that a Chinese person will pick up Korean easily is like making a false comparison between English and Latin. There may be similar roots, but the words are quite different. On top of that, the pronunciation for the Chinese roots in Korean are different from their native pronunciation in Chinese. For example the word wine "podoju" in Korean is pronounced "putoujiu" in Chinese. But that's not all. Korean words often re-arrange the Chinese roots to make words that don't exist in Chinese. For example, "gam-sa-hamnida" which means thank you. Those are taken from the Chinese roots "gan" and "xie". But in Chinese 'thank you' is "xie xie". For the numbers, there are pure Korean and Sino Korean numbers and rules governing which ones are used for what. And there are many words for family members such as "obba"(the girl's older brother), and "hyeong"(the boy's older brother), that simply don't exist in English and many other languages.
A lot of people do assume that Korean is hard (or even easy), but for the wrong reasons. Some people make the mistake of assuming that the hangul script is what makes it difficult. Or once they do learn the script (which can be done in a few weeks), mistakenly think that Korean is easy. During my ESL teaching in Korea, I've seen too many ESL teachers give up after struggling with the pronunciation. Without question, Korean is a difficult language, and one that I think is more difficult than Mandarin Chinese.
Japanese --
This language has 2 writing scripts, Hiragana and Katakana, accompanied by a set of Chinese characters, known as Kanji in Japanese. While the set of kanji is standardized at 1945 characters, a person who speaks Japanese can probably be expected to learn something on the order of 2000 to 3000 characters. While the standardized set may only have 1945 characters, the each individual kanji can have many different pronunciations depending on its position within the sentence and the other kanjis that are in the word.
Pronunciation is relatively simple. There are no tones and each letter in the Hiragana and Katakana can be represented accurately by a corresponding English letter. The Hiragana is usually used to represent grammar particles and conjugate verbs while the Katakana is used to represent foreign loan words. On the foreign loan words however, Japanese does borrow from other languages besides English and the pronunciation is somewhat different from the original pronunciation.
Many people who learn Japanese say that Japanese grammar is a little bit easier than Korean grammar. For a couple months one time, I did study the Japanese Bible. What I found was that Japanese words and the conjugations for the verbs and adjectives did seem longer than corresponding sentences in Korean. On numbers, there are certain objects that have a different number for 1 or 2 whereas other objects simply use the regular numbers. Overall, the long words and multiple pronunciations for the different kanjis make Japanese a difficult language. And this is 1 language where learning the Chinese characters is necessary for fluency.
Arabic --
Right now, I can't say too much about the language since the only Arabic I've studied has been a few small suras at the back of the Quran. One thing about this language that sets it apart from the other 3 hard languages mentioned is that there's no standard dialect that will make you understood by any Arab. The Modern Standard Arabic is limited mostly to newspapers and TV and has a pretty complex grammar. There are over 10 spoken dialects, which have minor differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. Reportedly, the spoken dialects are easier than the MSA and the Classical Arabic used in the Quran. The only problem is that the Arabic textbooks on the market don't adequately cover the spoken dialects making it necessary for an Arabic learner to get a native Arabic teacher.
Arabic is written using a cursive script that goes from right to left. Since the original script doesn't have vowels, the vowels are marked using small lines and curves placed either above or below the consenents. The vocabulary is composed of 3 letter roots, where various words and verbs can be formed by adding vowels and even 1 or 2 other letters to the roots. The conjugation of the verbs is more complex than most other languages with the verb being conjugated on single subjects, duality(2 subjects), plurality(3 or more subjects), and gender of the subject. The good news is that Arabic has few irregular verbs and once a student learns all the different conjugations for a typical verb, the same rules will apply to all verbs. The rules for the numbers are reportedly difficult. And vocabulary can be quite complex if a person decides to study the classical Arabic, with some words having over 30 meanings. Like some other languages, Arabic does use English loan words but often changes the pronunciation of that word.
Other honorable mentions --
Other hard languages that people have suggested over time include Hebrew, Greek, Finnish, Russian, and various indigenous languages from both North and South America as well as Africa. Hopefully in the future after I'm become fluent in Korean, I hope to tackle another hard language.
I won't say too much here. I say start off getting a good textbook for your target language and make sure it comes with listening material. On a regular basis, you should divide your listening practice between the textbook tapes and watching TV shows in your target language so that you get exposed to different kinds of speech. Listening is usually the toughest part of learning a foreign language and getting it mastered usually requires a strong command of the grammar and vocabulary.
This is one of the most common excuses people use to not learn a foreign language when they travel abroad. After all, why bother learning the native language when every school kid seems to be learning English. First off, expatriates are not obligated to learn a foreign language when their co-workers know English but the assumption that English is this "International Business Language" or that all the young people can speak it is a crock.
My experience as an ESL teacher in Korea has taught me that compulsory foreign language education does not work on a mass scale. The problems that plague the ESL Industry ranging from terrible textbooks, inefficient teaching curriculums, ineffective teachers, playground classrooms and diploma mills, and un-motivated and tired students, make it certain that the majority of students who go through the ESL system don't come out anywhere close to being fluent in English. Needless to say, if you go to a country where English is a compulsory subject and you are motivated enough to study the native language of that country, you'll have a better shot at getting fluent in your target language than the students who are compelled to study English.
This is one of the most common complaints of people travelling to a foreign country for language studying. First off, before you shell out hard cash for a 2-3 week vacation abroad, make sure that you are above the phrasebook part of your studies and that you are fully comfortable reading restaurant menus, telling time, asking directions, getting the weather report, and doing the other functional tasks in your target language. Many people who make the complaint about not being able to practice their target language are not where they should be on it. And thus when someone refuses to speak in the target language, the native English speaker is too often not prepared to explain him/herself or walk away. You have to know enough so that you won't get pushed around if people mock your language learning efforts.
Here are some tips that help if you're going to be in the country for a while. First of all, get out to the countryside as there's fewer English speakers and don't center your social life around hanging out at expatriate bars. When you do go out and tour the country, tour alone if you can. Going along with a bilingual native friend can be a hindrance in learning the language. Finally, if you find a restaurant or taxi cab where the person speaks the native language with you, get the business card and be a regular customer if possible.
My advice is to avoid doing that. Sometimes it can be done if you're in a foreign country and you want to avoid shipping costs. For example, an American living in South America might want to learn German and could use a German book written for Spanish speakers. If on the other hand the 3rd language in question is a hard language like Chinese, it's best to use a Chinese book written for English speakers, even if you have to order the books online. I don't know exactly what advice to give to people who don't speak English fluently. When I was in Korea teaching ESL, I did stop at a few bookstores to see what materials the Koreans had access to as far as learning other foreign languages besides English is concerned. There were plenty of decent books that Koreans could use for learning Spanish and Russian. There were very few materials for learning Arabic or Mongolian that the Koreans could access. Hopefully the language book publishers will make all the world's languages accessible to everyone so that nobody feels compelled to learn English or Russian for the sake of learning a 3rd language.
Since I'm no expert on relationships, I'll only say that it depends. When I was attending university, I met a friend who spent 3 years in Mexico and he was quite fluent in Spanish. And his advice for me was to get a "sleeping dictionary" if I went to a foreign country. But on the other hand, when I took an airplane to Korea, I met a man who was married to a Korean woman for over 20 years and he could not even read the hangul script. While getting to talk to your spouse's family will provide extra motivation for learning a foreign language, merely being married to a foreign spouse won't automatically make you fluent, especially if your spouse is learning your language. It's time and hard work that makes the difference.
Notwithstanding the failures of the ESL industry in foreign countries, I would say that children who grow up in bilingual families for the most part end up becoming bilingual. But merely coming from a bilingual family or being born to immigrants will not necessarily guarantee that a child grows up to become bilingual. After some time, if the child grows up and does not maintain both languages, he/she is bound to lose one of those languages. Without reading practice in both languages, many immigrant children often times can talk with relatives in their ancestor's language but not be able to read a newspaper in that language. Or they switch languages in the middle of a conversation if they don't know the particular word. Thus, getting fluent in 2 languages is not a picnic for anybody and requires hard studying no matter what.
Watching a foreign language with subtitles in your native language can help you pick up words. But the translations are not 100% accurate and won't really match what you're expecting to hear. A better option is to have the subtitles in the language that the actors are speaking. On dubbing, I don't think movies or TV shows should be dubbed into another language unless the original language is available.
It's best to learn your foreign language to an advanced stage before tackling religious texts such as the Bible and the Quran. In addition to the difficult vocabulary, getting a full understanding of scripture requires a working knowledge of the original language. For the Bible, the original languages are Hebrew and Greek, and for the Quran, the original language is Arabic.
My advice is, only use it for very basic speech. One time in 2005, my Korean co-teacher invited me for a Korean lesson. The book she was using was an English grammar book geared towards Korean students. At the hagwon itself, there were some children English books with Korean translations in some of the pages.
In 2007, I toyed with the idea of learning Russian to talk to some of the Russians in Busan. One book I bought was a Korean 101 book written for Russians. Again, learning a language "backwards" in this manner is not a good idea. For starters, the English children book for Korean children does not explain the words and grammatical constructs that a Korean would use if talking to an adult. In the case of the Korean 101 book for Russians, such a book will have Russian translations for Korean phrases but not an explanation of the Russian case system or the various conjugations for the Russian verbs.
In general, the Government should not dictate any "official language" but should use the most commonly spoken languages in the region for administrative purposes. As far as teaching foreign languages in the public schools, the most commonly taught foreign languages taught in public schools around North America are French and Spanish since those are commonly spoken throughout the continent. Other foreign languages should be taught based on the populations of immigrants and native Americans. For example, Washington DC and LA have a large population of Asians making Chinese and Korean feasible foreign languages to teach in school, whereas across the Midwest in places like South Dakota and Oklahoma, Lakota and Cherokee would be good languages to teach because of the large numbers of native Americans in that region.
