How To Not Learn a Language
As is usually the case, instead of doing something useful with my life, I have found myself on a bit of a wiki-dive. Except it wasn’t on Wikipedia.
I found myself watching videos explaining the basics of reading the Chinese script (Hanzi) and how this script relates to the Chinese characters used in written Japanese (Kanji).
Now to preface, while I am a bit of a nerd, I have absolutely no interest in learning Chinese in the short or medium term. Knowing some of it would be cool, but it’s not something I would actively work toward for the time being. Where it comes to Japanese, I understand the basic grammatical structure of the language, but do not speak a word of it, and cannot read a word of it.
I know I don’t need to say this, but I will. This is pure speculation, I definitely have no idea what I’m talking about.
And with that in mind…
Both Chinese and Japanese share a good amount of written “vocabulary” in the form of the aforementioned Chinese script. A native Chinese speaker or somebody with sufficient fluency reading Chinese characters will be able, with some guesswork, to read Japanese. The more formal the text the easier it will be to read due to Japanese formal text using more Kanji than Hiragana or Katakana (the two other Japanese scripts which are not related to Chinese). It is also my understanding that Cantonese speakers (Cantonese being the Chinese language spoken in Hong Kong) would have an easier time with such an exercise given that, like Japan, they still use traditional Chinese characters, as opposed to the simplified characters used by Mandarin (The most widely spoken of the Chinese languages) speakers. It is also important to note that while the Chinese speaker is able to understand the written Japanese, they won’t be able to “read” it out loud. It’s still a different language!
This exercise, while very interesting, is probably impossible to replicate with any of the world’s larger languages. Hanzi characters are logographs, which means that each character carries a specific meaning. All of the rest of the world’s larger languages use alphabets or abjads.
Case in point: I am an Arabic speaker. Arabic is a language that is ranked Category 4 on the American Foreign Service Institute’s (which trains US foreign affairs professionals) ranking for difficulty, making it one of the hardest languages in the world (from a native English speaker’s point of view). Arabic is written using an Abjad called the Arabic script (duh) which it shares with a surprising amount of other languages. Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Kurdish are some examples of such languages, and even if I try I will not be able to read any of them, because the letters of the script themselves carry no meaning. So while I will be able to “read” out loud (as opposed to our friend the Chinese speaker), I will not be able to understand a damn thing.
Who said linguistics isn’t interesting!
Yeah, you all did, weirdos.
In other news, just because I like mentioning it whenever I can, the Category 4 of the FSI language difficulty scale contains 5 languages:
Japanese: While the grammar is pretty straightforward, the vocabulary used can change based on the level of formality needed, there are Three different writing scripts to learn, one of which (Kanji) requires a minimum of 2000 characters to be learned for relative reading fluency.
Cantonese and Mandarin: Both are Chinese languages, so the script is obviously a nightmare to learn. Also, being tonal languages means that even speaking correctly is a serious challenge.
Arabic: Grammar is absurd, Americans can’t handle cursive scripts, and there’s about 25 dialects to learn none of which sound like the standard language (which isn’t even spoken outside of official or religious settings) and most of which are not even mutually intelligible.
Korean: Frankly, I don’t know why it’s there, and I’m not willing to find out.
Now, while colonization is an overall terrible ordeal that causes unimaginable pain and suffering, if you squint very hard and ignore all the exploitation and all the murdering and inhumanity, you might be able to see one small benefit: multilingualism.
Having been born in an ancient French colony, I grew up surrounded with a surprising degree of French that remained even though the French people have been supposedly gone 50 years by the time I was born. Also I was born to a father who was not a total idiot and taught me English from a young age. That means that I am trilingual, something normal and not necessarily that impressive where I’m from. Yet an absolute superpower to White Americans.
When you take another look to the FSI rankings you’ll notice that it separates languages into 4 categories:
Category 1: Easy languages for English speakers to learn (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.)
Category 2: Medium difficulty languages which require a bit more work than Category 1, but still manageable (German, Haitian, Indonesian, Malay and Swahili).
Category 4: Super hard languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Arabic and Korean).
I skipped Category 3, just because it contains literally everything else.
While a bit simplistic, I would tend to agree with the rankings where it comes to English speakers that do not speak any other languages. There would be some things that can be a bit more specific, I wholeheartedly believe that in category 1, Romance languages will be a bit more difficult than the Germanic ones, and Romanian would be the hardest of all. German, while a nightmare, might be the easiest in Category 2 due to being related to English, while the others aren’t.
My experience has been that, unsurprisingly, once you add one language to your belt, the rankings shakes up depending on that.
The fact that I speak Arabic, for example, turns languages like Hebrew or Aramaic (which are category 3 languages for the FSI) into category 1 languages even if learned them in English. That is because the grammatical knowledge and shared vocabulary I already have will be transferable.
Knowing any of the three Continental Northern Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish or Norwegian) makes the other two a literal walk in the park due to substantial mutual intelligibility.
German is a doorway to Dutch, Afrikaans and Luxemburgisch.
French might make Romanian easier, which would in turn be an access point to Slavic vocabulary due to geographical proximity.
And so on…
I do not claim to have language learning figured out, if I did I wouldn’t be stuck at B1 reading level in German for the past year, and I might have already progressed past reading children’s stories (with difficulty) in Norwegian and Spanish. But after learning about the absolute nightmare that is Chinese characters, I vow never to make fun of German again, no matter how much it hurts. No matter how much it makes me cry.
German is easy, man!
