German is a crazy language. The spoon and fork have one gender. The verb is sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end of a sentence. And the word "she" can mean a woman, but just as well 100 men. "Certainly there is no other language that is so sloppy and unsystematic," scolded the US writer Mark Twain in 1880 in an essay on the German language. Especially the declination drove him to despair. "It's as bad as in Latin," he wrote. "I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say that he would rather turn down two drinks than decline a German adjective.«
Apparently the writer had not yet acquainted with Finnish and his 15 cases. Compared to this, German for Twain and its compatriots is easy to learn - although more difficult than other Germanic languages, as the experiences of the foreign service in the USA show. Its training center, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), prepares around 100,000 employees of government agencies for their foreign missions every year and offers lessons in more than 70 languages.
For the trainees, attending the language school located near the Pentagon is a full-time job: they are taught 25 hours a week, plus three hours of self-study every day. With this workload, you will reach your goal, level 3, in some languages after just under half a year: you can read fluently, speak at normal speed and take part in most conversations. In the most difficult languages, they take three to four times as long to do this.
German and French are more difficult than expected
Based on these experiences, the Foreign Service Institute has classified the languages according to their difficulty. German and French were originally scheduled for 24 weeks, as for the other Germanic and Romance languages. But that was not enough: far more than half of the trainees failed to achieve their learning goals. The duration was initially extended to 30 weeks for both, and finally to 36 weeks for German. Now it is on a par with Swahili and Indonesian.
Most spoke, for example Greek, Russian and Turkish, are among the next higher middle category. Among them there is a couple for whom it usually takes a little more time, such as Finnish, Hungarian and Vietnamese. However, the greatest challenge is Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese and Korean: 88 weeks are estimated, almost four times as much as for Spanish or Swedish. According to the FSI, around 60 percent of trainees reach Level 3 in the intended time, and around 90 percent of the destination is delayed.
But it also goes faster. The US opera singer Gabriel Wyner reports that he learned German fluently in three to four months, French in five months, Russian in ten months. Today he teaches others how to learn languages. He says: "There are no difficult languages. However, there are languages that are more difficult for you to learn because they do not belong to the family of language(s) that you already know." English and Japanese, for example, would have little vocabulary and grammar in common. English and French are different: both, like German, belong to the Indo-European language family.
The Indo -European language family
In the 18th century, the English scholar Sir William Jones discovered similarities to the ancient Indian Sanskrit with the Latin, the Greek, the Germanic and Celtic languages and concluded on a common origin. Today, almost 450 Indo -European languages are known, including as different as Icelandic, French, Russian and Persian. With 3.3 billion speakers, they form the largest of the approximately 20 language families. Only a few languages do not belong to any family, such as Japanese and Basque.
However, the degree of kinship is not the only decisive factor. For example, German has less in common with his West Germanic brother English than with his North Germanic cousins. "In terms of vocabulary, German is incomparably closer to today's Danish and Swedish than to English," says the Fischer Lexicon "Languages" from 1987. Phonetically, that is, in pronunciation, the Germanic languages have sometimes even developed so much apart "that only a few bridges lead from one language to another". For example, Germans could imitate Turkish and Indonesian phonetically more easily than Danish.
In addition to a close relationship, there are other characteristics that basically make learning easier. Indonesian grammar, for example, is very regular - an advantage, as an experiment in the Netherlands showed in 2021. A group led by psychologist Antje Meyer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, let the test subjects learn constructed fantasy languages. This was easier for highly systematic languages. However, a only partially systematic structure helped little. The researchers explain that they can only generalize with high regularity and few exceptions.
How do languages differ
Are there any more characteristics that basically make it easier or make foreign language learning easier? Nobody knows how to compare languages better than Martin Haspelmath, professor of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and editor of the "World Atlas of Language Structures" (Wals). In this work, linguistic features of languages were systematically recorded and mapped for the first time. More than 2600 languages are represented in it, a good third of the more than 7,000 acquaintances, with all geographical regions and language families in the world. For example, the way sentences are built and how words are formed. "Learning a foreign language is easier if it is like the mother tongue in it," says Haspelmath.
The sounds and their distribution are also documented in the language structure atlas. Accordingly, the vowels "ö" and "ü" are extremely rare. They exist in German, French, Finnish, Turkish, and occasionally also in Asia – that is, in different language families that have developed thousands of kilometers apart from each other. "Such similarities, which cannot be explained well by borrowing, are a big mystery," reports Haspelmath.
Even if the similarities with the mother tongue make up a lot: some characteristics make learning difficult for everyone. For example, several consonants in a row, as in the German word "autumn" or in the Russian "Borschtsch", explains the linguist. Open syllables such as the Japanese word "Ko" are usually easier to pronounce as closed syllables like "child", the German translation. The waiver of grammatical sexes is also an advantage, says Haspelmath. »We distinguish three forms in German: male, female, like. Nevertheless, we also learn a language that only knows a genus like English. «
What also complicates German grammar is the leaking verb. It is in second place in the main clause, at the end of the sentence at the end, in question rates, and even more confusing it becomes when it consists of two parts or an auxiliary verb. "There is nowhere else in the form," reports the language atlas author. People with English or Dutch as a mother tongue at least know similar constructions, they have it easier to learn German.
The League of Idiots
Linguists from the United States have created a ranking of the strangest languages based on such strangeness. They initially determined 21 linguistic features that are independent of each other, such as the position of the verbs and the number of vowels. All 21 characteristics were documented for 239 languages. The language with the most rare properties was therefore "Chalcatongo Mixtec", a Mexican dialect. One of his special features: statements begin with the predicate, i.e. a verb, instead of the subject, the subject of the sentence, to which the predicate refers. In addition, a yes-no question cannot be distinguished from a statement-the emphasis is also the same.
The peculiarity of putting the verb at JA-no questions ("Are you coming?") Is only in 1.4 percent of languages, including German. It ended up in 10th place and was the most strange Indo -European language. In general, the Germanic languages proved to be quite strange; For example, they use pronouns such as "I" and "you", which most languages do without. The English (33th place) is characterized above all by an unpredictable pronunciation.
Michael Cysouw, professor of language typology at the University of Marburg, has also calculated a rarity index. He immediately drew on 142 features from the language atlas and found rarities, especially among the languages in northwestern Europe: English, German, Dutch, Frisian, French. However, he points out that the available data were mainly collected from people with an Indo-European language background. A different perspective could change the results.
Cysouw also combined the linguistic features from the whale with the statistics of the Foreign Service Institute in the USA. He confirms: "Learning a foreign language is more difficult the more it differs from the mother tongue." In the English mother tongue, the Indo -European languages with Latin script and similar grammatical structures are the easiest, above all the Germanic siblings of Norwegian and Swedish. Japanese and Korean formed the final lights, still behind Chinese and Arabic.
"The mother tongue sets limits," the Dutchman Job Schepens from TU Dortmund University has also observed on this side of the Atlantic. The linguist and his team analyzed data from 50,000 migrants who had undergone a language exam for a work permit in the Netherlands. The mother tongue explained one to two thirds of the differences in their exam results, regardless of other factors such as gender, age and education. Above all, the similarity in vocabulary was decisive. No wonder that many Germans manage to pass the Dutch state examination after just a few weeks of lessons, as Schepens reports: almost half of the words resembled each other.
So does the common vocabulary depend the most? "I would expect that for relatives such as German, English or French," says Schepens. But not if a language has fewer relatives, such as the Greek or the Korean, because then there are not so many related words. "In this case, the common vocabulary is probably less important for the question of how easily you can learn a language."
Relatives are still significant in other respects: when it comes to the question of whether age makes learning difficult. "When Germans learn Dutch, age hardly plays a role," Schepens found out. If the foreign language is not or little related to the mother tongue, it looks a little different. The differences are a greater obstacle for older people than for younger people.
Previous knowledge of other foreign languages would bring many advantages, especially if they are more similar to the target language than the mother tongue, says the linguist. For example, when an American has already learned German: Then Dutch is lighter than his compatriots without knowledge of German. He was unable to determine a general exercise effect in language learning. So Latin probably only helps with learning Romanesque languages like French, but hardly to learn to Japanese, Schepens suspects.
Theme week "Learning foreign languages"
Am I too old as an adult to learn a new language? Are there any light and heavy languages? Is a foreign accent a problem? And how do adults learn best? This theme week answers questions about one of the most beautiful things in the world: foreign languages.
Can the findings from the Netherlands and the USA be transferred to Germany? There is no data treasure like that of the Foreign Service Institute in this country. "We do not conduct empirical surveys for the purposes of science and research," the Federal Language Office informs on request. Its approximately 1,000 employees teach more than 15,000 members of the German Armed Forces and employees from federal and state departments in foreign languages from Amharic to Vietnamese every year. If you are also taking final tests, there should be extensive data available. Like the FSI, the Office would only need to compare the duration of lessons and exam results in the different languages in order to determine their difficulty for German speakers.
Which foreign languages are most similar to German
The first indications are provided by the works of Ingo Isphording at the Research Institute for the Future of Work in Bonn and his colleague Sebastian Otten, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The two economists have determined lexical differences between German and other languages by comparing everyday words such as "I" and "you", "man" and "dog", "drinking" and "dying". As expected, Germanic languages were the most similar to German, especially Luxembourgish, Swiss German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
From 1997 to 2003, they also concluded from data from the German Socio-Economic Panel: If someone immigrates to Germany at most eleven years, the mother tongue does not matter how well he learns German. In adults, on the other hand, language skills mainly depend on how much the mother tongue resembles German in vocabulary and pronunciation. That means: Sweden are much easier to learn German than Iraqis or Chinese, for example.
Conversely, it is no different for people from the Germanic language family, as a study in Israel makes clear. It is there that the English-speaking immigrants have the hardest time with Hebrew. Those with a native Arabic language learn Hebrew best – both are Semitic languages.
If German foreign -language books want to read in the original, should you choose the Swedish "Pippi Longstocking" better than Chinese folk tales? "The harder languages take more time," says polyglotte Gabriel Wyner. "But there is no reason not to be able to learn them." He recommends: "Choose a language you like."
