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> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school.

The US State department has the Foreign Service Institute, which is its primary training centre. With-in there they have the School of Language Studies, which teaches more than seventy languages, and over the years/decades it has been found that different language take different amounts of time to become proficient in (on average).

* Danish, Dutch, French, Norwegian, etc, take 24 weeks for an English speaker to learn

* German takes 30 weeks

* Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili take 36w

* Albanian, Bengali, Bosnian, Polish, Urdu, etc, take 44w

* Arabic, Japanenese, Korean, Cant/Mand Chinese take 88w

See:

* https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Service_Institute

Different amounts of time for a native English speaker. For instance, languages like Dutch are going to be easier than Korean simply because English is a close cousin of Dutch.

Many of the lower ranked languages on this list are interrelated via proto-indoeuropean and many of the higher ranked languages are not.

I speak both Swahili and Somali. While the two languages are written in Latin alphabet, I find Somali harder than Swahili. Yet, Somali is supposed to be my mother tongue. Thus, this grouping in many ways reflects ny experience too.

> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them

Learning a language is definitely not easy and claiming that learning different languages is same level of effort is outright ridiculous.

It’s not to say that one language itself is harder or easier compared to another, it’s a matter of it being different from the one you speak already.

> Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf

I would totally blame Sapir-Worf for all the articles I consistently omit or mixup when writing in English. Something being definite or indefinite is just not a category that I use when thinking about things and it’s existence still makes almost zero sense after more than a decade of practicing languages that have it.

Which language are you coming from? Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling.

Edit: oh, Russian? Just wondering. Seen this come up a ton of times with Russian-speakers. For whatever reason it's an especially alien thing coming from that particular language.

Anyway, definite / indefinite is helpful for clarifying whether we're referring to a specific item or a generic item (i.e. any instance of that type of item, doesn't matter which one.)

Hmm, now that I think about it, it seems implicitly clear to me and that limits my ability to creatively explain its utility.

Maybe I should turn this around instead-- could you help me understand why that isn't a way of categorizing things that's employed by Russian-speakers? Why don't you need to make that distinction?

> Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling.

First, it must be understood that English really many nouns tagged with a determiner; which can be articles (the X, a/an X), possessive or demonstrative "pronouns" (his/her X, this/that X, etc.), or others. (The nouns English doesn't want tagged are proper nouns, or nouns that talk about a type of X rather than an instance of X).

The X means that the question "which X?" is possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer expects the listener/reader to know/care the answer to "which X?".

A/an X means that the question "which X?" is possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer does not expect the listener/reader to know/care about the answer to "which X?".

It's important to understand that whether to use the versus a/an is controlled completely by the point of view and understanding of the speaker/writer. If the speaker/writer is setting an expectation the listener/reader can't meet, that's a sign to ask questions, pretend you know, or remember and wait until later for clarification.

I know Russian doesn't have articles but I'm not sure why they're "needed" in English versus Russian.

> oh, Russian? Just wondering

Close enough — Ukrainian. In fact most languages on this planet don’t have articles.

> Why don't you need to make that distinction?

Because you just ydon’t, it’s perfectly clear from context most of time or even completely irrelevant. When you actually mean to make this distinction, you just add this/that/my/your or some/any/whatever, refer to specific object by name or any other way.

> … in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling

I mean I understand the thing, it encodes another redundant bit of information, which I just don’t have when I’m thinking about something.

It really depends. If you spend time in a country, only speaking in its language and reading newspapers in it, you could learn a language in like 3 months. This is especially true if you know another language and already have the mental model for learning them.

Believe me, native English speakers do not think about the definite-ness of a word. We just knows that "the" comes before some things and not others and it sounds odd when someone gets it wrong.

My argument is that these differences are cosmetic, not that they don't exist. Also, Sapir-Worf is not at all referring to minor grammatical issues of this kind.

I think saying all differences are "cosmetic" undersells them a bit.

Sure, having different words for numbers related to different objects doesn't fundamentally break the world, but to someone raised with a concept of a number being a number universally, it's a pretty big conceptual change.

>> Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae).

> Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding).

Usually the same word is used for wood and tree, but we do have the word "ved", which refers specifically to the woody part of a plant, not the entirety of it. So you would call it "kerneved" for heartwood and "splintved" for sapwood.

It's not really in common everyday use, but very commonly used in the forestry and woodworking trades.

> It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me.

That's not "the Chomskyan hypothesis", it's a statement that can't be proved or falsified, since what "fundamentally the same" and "cosmetic differences" mean is really anyone's guess. Viewed from far enough, of course languages are essentially all the same, same as all living beings are essentially the same.

Nevertheless, I think that looking at any textbook in linguistic typology or just browsing WALS gives you quite an impression of how diverse languages can be, much more than you'd assume if you only speak a number of European languages.

> Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf.

Maybe you should look at the data about colour perception or, even more strikingly, spatial reasoning, which uses actual experiments conducted on speakers of different languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Guugu Yimithirr). The results can be interpreted differently, but to say that this is just "baseless speculation" is fundamentally wrong and doesn't agree with empirical data. There's a very strong version of Sapir-Whorf ("language constrains how you think") that probably no linguist takes seriously anymore, but there's still substantial debate about the weak form ("language influences how you think").

> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them.

Look up Navajo Code Talkers. Navajo was picked because it is so difficult to learn. I believe, at the time, only two people ever had managed to speak it who were not raised speaking it, or so an old history teacher said.

...or maybe because zero people outside the US (and not too many inside the US) speak Navajo.

If you're thrown in with a bunch of people who only speak Navajo, you're going to figure it out.

I believe Navajo was picked because it was obscure and in particular US intelligence knew the whereabouts every academic who had studied or published it.

Other Native American languages which might have been studied by European professors and students of linguistics had to be rejected.

Sure there is a sense in which Navajo is really hard to learn, but that's the same sense in which it's very hard to learn Babylonian/Akkadian. It's hard because no one speaks it, there is no culture to immerse yourself in, no theater or movies you can watch, no music you can listen to, no novels you can read, no friends to speak with, etc etc...

The only way to learn Akkadian, or Navajo, is in a very artificial and academic manner, and learning things in that fashion tends to be very inefficient.

>All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them.

I'm pretty sure if you were to hold a gun against my head until I get fluent in french you'll leave me alone far earlier than if I had to learn an Asian language with Chinese characters.

Learning Chinese characters is just busywork, that's all there is to it. It might be easy but it will still take forever.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.

> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

I remember reading about experiment that proved the opposite in regards to blue color —- speakers of languages with two basic colors for blue were differentiating one from another measurably faster.

No link to it unfortunately.

My own pet hypothesis is that it is not just language but our entire culture that creates an O/S for our brain in our early years.

"Restraining world view" seems harsh IMHO. Sounds a little elitist to me. But affecting world-view is possibly correct.

I suspect the plasticity of the brain can overcome some of the things that the original O/S load affects but it seems to require either a big emotional event or real effort by people to undo the initial programming, like being dropped into a new country where you don't know the language but must learn it to survive. We figure it out.

It does beg the question however what are we missing, as a result of our initial programming, that we might want to download an update for. :)

> It does beg the question however what are we missing

Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.

Or ability to mention a French coworker in your speech without explicitly mentioning their gender and the whole singular the all together

Look at that tree over there.

I worked with a French person once. They were very good at their job.

> Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.

Non-native here. I don't quite follow. How about: "The object is far away from both of us.".

The concept is there, but maybe not as a single word. Sure, it might be convenient to be able to say "The object it broscht!", but it would just be syntactic sugar. Not a new concept.

Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.

"French person", "Frenchie", "Cheese eating surrender monkey"

Latter two might be SLIGHTLY inappropriate in a working environment.

> Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.

In English — yes. In Ukrainian or Russian I just can’t omit this information without descending into soul-crashing legalize of “french person“.

The point being —- yes, its possible to say exactly that, but it would either be in a wrong register or too much of words where you could have just one.

In parts of the USA you can say "yonder object" and be understood that it is far away from both of us. It is archaic to most native speakers now.

“Thither and yon” is probably still widely understood

If you say that languages are how people slice up the world, and this makes different languages harder or easier to learn, you're committing to some form of Sapir-Worf, however mild. "I have the English way of slicing up the world and it's hard to adjust to the Japanese way of slicing up the world".

An alternate explanation is, as I argued, that the differences between human languages are superficial and the underlying (and more interesting) concept of language is the same for everyone. If that's true, the differences between languages are minutia.

> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

The idea is that English speakers identify light and dark as a variation of the same thing.

Are red and pink the same colour or different colours? What if you call "pink" something like "light red" instead? Are they now classified in your brain as two different things or the same one.

Is dark blue and light blue two colours or one? Does "light blue" become a different colour in a person's brain if it's label as azure as in Italian (etc)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color)

In English too. Mesa in English is a plateau, while in Spanish it's just a table (furniture), while sierra is not just a mountain range, but a carpenter's saw too.

you can actually test in various ways if one language is harder to learn than another. For example you ask children to ask for a cheeseburger. If they say "I can has cheeseburger" they are not as far along as "May I have a cheeseburger".

you then sample lots of kids and you find that in some language kids speak the language in the "proper" way much soon than other languages.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish...

However, the things that make a language hard to learn for kids aren't necessarily the same that make it hard for adults.

The article you link is about acquisition of past tense formation in Danish, where some verbs have a past tense ending in -ede, like bade/badede (bathe/bathed) and some others end in -te, like kalde/kaldte (call/called) and yet others are completely different. Those verb endings are frequently reduced in speech, which makes them sound similar or identical. In the study, children who used more different reduced forms were more likely to use a -ede form for a verb that usually goes with -te.

An adult learning a language is more likely to learn the "proper" form in a controlled environment first and then learn to slur their verb endings later when they reach a level where they can have casual conversations with native speakers. Compare also English "would of" vs. "would've," which native speakers seem to confuse a lot, although they're obviously different to someone who first encountered those words in writing.

Aren't children supposed to be better at learning new languages than adults, though? There's supposed to be a critical period where language acquisition is much easier.

It’s not like they are better it’s just repeating everything a million times and talking the whole day without shame of making a mistake is more fun when you are 6.

The fact that vocabulary of a 6 year old child is much smaller and takes less time to remember of course helps

On the other hand, when you are adult , you can actually understand abstract concepts of grammar. It’s just too boring to repeat everything enough times to train your neural network to get it right without thinking.

What children are actually really good at are sounds of language.