Lingo Bingo

Native customs

The most influential factor on how you learn other languages is the language you were surrounded with as you grew up. Languages that share some of the qualities and characteristics of your native tongue will be easier to learn. Languages that have very little in common with your native tongue will be much harder. Most languages will fall somewhere in between.

This works both ways. Although it is quite a stretch to say that English is harder than Chinese, it is pretty safe to say that the native Chinese speaker probably has nearly as hard a time learning English as the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. If you are studying Chinese right now, that's probably of no consolation to you at all.

Intimate relations

Learning a language that is closely related to your native language is much easier than learning a totally alien one. The shared characteristics in related languages tend to make them easier to learn as there are fewer new concepts to deal with.

Since English is a Germanic language, Dutch, German and most of the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are all closely related to it and therefore easier to learn for an English speaker than an unrelated tongue. Other languages related in some way to English are Spanish, Italian and French, the more distant Irish and Welsh and even Russian, Greek, Urdu and Hindi.

English shares no ancestry with languages like Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, all languages considered darn difficult by English-speaking standards.

Grammar school

Grammar: one of those aforementioned shared characteristics. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully similar to English which makes learning it much easier – in theory - than German, which has a notoriously complex word order and verb conjugation.

The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.) are famous for sharing many characteristics. It is not surprising since they all evolved from Latin. It is very common for someone who learns one of these languages to go on and learn another. They are so similar at times that it seems that you can learn the others with little effort (which is, of course, not strictly true).

Confounded cognates and pilfered phraseology

The Romance languages all take the vast majority of their vocabulary from Latin. English has stolen much of its vocabulary directly from Latin and when it wasn’t satisfied with that, it just nicked the rest from French. There is a gargantuan amount of French vocabulary in English. This is another reason that Spanish, French and Italian are considered easier than other languages.

There is always a large amount of borrowing, swapping and stealing of vocabulary between languages, and not always between related languages. There is a surprising amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It's disguised by Japanese pronunciation, but it's there all the same.

Wired for sound

It won’t be a shock to learn that languages sound different. Although all human beings use and make roughly the same sounds, there always seems to be some sounds in other languages that we just don't have in our native language. Some are very difficult to articulate and some can be quite subtle. There are some vowel sounds in French, for example, that just don't exist in English. A Spanish 'o' is not quite the same as an English 'o.' While a French 'r' is very different from English, a Chinese 'r' is actually very similar.

Many learners don't put enough effort into this element of language-learning and this makes some languages seem harder to learn than they should be.

Tone deaf

Some ‘difficult’ languages use tones – using a rising or falling pitch when pronouncing a word. This is arguably the main reason Chinese is hard for native English speakers – it is an extremely difficult concept for someone who has never used tones before.

It is not just ‘exotic’ languages from faraway lands that use tones. Swedish uses tones, although they are not nearly as complex or difficult as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that can only really be learned by listening to native speakers.

While we’re on the subject, there are examples of tone use in English, but they are rare, and aren't part of the pronunciation of individual words. For example, in American English it's common to raise the tone of one’s voice at the end of a question. It's not exactly the same thing, but thinking about it that way might make learning a tone language a little less daunting.

Squiggly script scribblings

Some languages use a different script and this can obviously have a huge impact on whether a language is tricky to learn or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but include a few other symbols not in English to represent sounds specific to that language. Think of the 'n' with the little squiggly thing (actually called a tilde) above it in Spanish, for example.

However, some languages really confuse things by having a different alphabet altogether. Greek, Hebrew, Hindi and many Slavic languages of Eastern Europe all use a different script, thereby adding to the complexity when learning a language. Some languages, like Arabic, are also written from right to left, further bamboozling the eager English speaker.

Chinese is the language learner’s waking-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmare. Each word has a symbol representing it, meaning you literally have to know thousands of different symbols in order to read Chinese. On top of that, the symbols aren't phonetic, so there are no clues as to how they are pronounced. For example, even if you don't speak French, you could guess at the pronunciation of the word ‘coccinelle’ and most sympathetic French people would understand you. Take a Chinese word and you either know it or you don’t. If you don’t, you haven’t got a ladybird’s chance in an insecticide company of pronouncing it correctly. This is perhaps the biggest challenge in learning a language like Chinese.

Culture vultures

Although people often do not realise it, languages have aspects of the relevant culture built into the language. In English most people are capable of politely speaking to a stranger, but in many European languages for example, you will actually use a different word for 'you' and a different verb conjugation depending on who you are talking to, even though you might be saying exactly the same thing. And what you are saying might not actually be that interesting in the first place…

The Japanese language takes this to extremes. There are different words to say the same thing to different people, i.e. to your boss, your brother, a stranger or Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister. There is no doubt that this kind of subtlety adds to the difficulty level of a language.

Chance, yes, but a lot more…

So, is Italian an easy language to learn? Well, if your native language is English then, yes, it is relatively easy to learn compared to some other languages. You're using the same script, pronunciation is quite similar overall, the grammar is not too difficult and there is a lot of familiar vocabulary. If your native language is Spanish, Italian is even easier. If your native language is Chinese, then it's probably very difficult.

While the linguistic hand that you are dealt at birth by your Mum and Dad plays a massive part, your future progress in the world of languages is not all dependent on your native language. There are other important factors, like your memory, your general intelligence, your natural talent for languages and your listening ability. Many of these can be learned or improved with training. Individual limitations in these areas can be offset by learning how to learn languages. Mastering the unique skill set that language learning requires and anyone can improve his or her ability to learn languages.

Remember that although your language learning ability will always be influenced by your native language, it needn't be limited by it. If you learn and absorb as you did when you were a child, the concept of 'easy' or 'hard' languages becomes irrelevant.