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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Learning foreign languages from another language family
Question:
I am a teacher and have had basic classes in teaching ESL students. I took these classes a few years ago.

I recall from a lecture in class - or perhaps from a reading in a text or our required reading materials - that different language families can require varying amounts of time for learning. In other words, from a general and overall population standpoint, the time it for native English speakers to learn another northern European or Celtic language takes the least time for us (native English speakers); Romance languages the next level of time; the mid-eastern languages a third level of time; and the Asian languages the longest amount of time. And, then, it's the reverse for the Asians to learn mid-eastern; Romance; northern European inc. English, etc.

Is my memory of this theory close to reality or current research theory or have I recalled incorrectly?

I know that individual differences can also be very important in learning another language - and many exceptions to the general population time rule can apply and do everyday.

If you could also refer me to the archives for articles related to the time it takes to learn languages from different language families, please provide me with the proper search terminology. Thank you!

Reply:
Hi,
Perhaps you did read this kind of estimation as to the amount
of time required to learn a foreign language by speakers of a
given language (or language family) somewhere but
unfortunately this kind of statement is totally erroneous. ,
"Northern European" languages do not belong to a single
language family. For instance, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish,
Finnish, Norwegian, Estonian, Lithuanian, etc. are all
countries of Northern Europe and yet the main languages
spoken there belong to different language families (Slavic for
Russian, Polish and Ukrainian; Uralic - actually Finno-Ugric -
for Finnish and Estonian; Baltic for Lithuanian). True, the
Slavic, Baltic, Germanic and Celtic languages (as well as the
Romance languages) all belong to the same large Indo-
European language family. Same is true for "Mid-East"
countries. Arabic is a member of the Semitic sub-family, which
belongs to the larger Afroasiatic family whose language
members are spoken not only in the Middle East but in
Northern and Central Africa. If you consider Iran to be in the
Middle East, then its main language, Farsi, is actually part of
the Indo-Iranian sub-family which is itself part of the larger
Indo-European family. Indo-Iranian languages include
Kurdish, Pashto - the main Afghan language - Hindi-Urdu,
Marathi, Gujarati, etc. all spoken in India. As for "Asian
languages", Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian) belong to
the Austroasiatic family, while Thai belongs to the Ta-Kadai
family (as does Laotian, Shan, etc.) while Mandarin,
Cantonese and other languages of China belong to the Sino-
Tibetan family. Other languages spoken in Asia, such as
Javanese, Balinese, Samoan, Fijian, Tahitian, Maori,
Hawaiian etc. all belong to the Malayo-Polynesian language
family, but Japanese and Korean belong to a completely
different family. Therefore, any statement or estimation
grouping languages or even language families into classes
such as Northern Europe, the Middle-East or Asia is totally
inadequate on linguistic genetic grounds.
Secondly, this kind of estimation is based on the notion of
language distance...distance being equated with learning
difficulty, which itself is equated with time required to learn.
Problem is, language distance is difficult to measure as the
various aspects of a language (the sound system, the
morphological system, the syntactic system, the lexical
system) can be quite independent of each other. For
example, two languages belonging to two different language
families can have fairly distinct sound systems, or different
morpho-syntactic systems but, by reason of historical contact,
have highly similar lexicons. This is the case for English and
French. English and French have quite different grammars
and different sound systems but English shares 40% of its
vocabulary with French, because it has either borrowed large
numbers of French words or large amounts of Latinate words,
also shared by French and other Romance languages.
Therefore, learning French vocabulary by an English speaker
is probably "easier" (i.e. require less time) than learning
German vocabulary, even though there should be less
distance (i.e. require less time to learn) between English and
German since they belong to the same sub-language family,
Germanic.
Finally, language distance is a linguistic concept. 'Learning
difficulty' is a psychological concept. It is not at all evident to
me that linguistic concepts such as 'language distance' can
be used to explain psychological concepts such as 'difficulty'
or even less that of 'difficulty in learning'.

Reply From: Robert A Papen    click here to access email
Date: Oct-04-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family Nancy J. Frishberg    (Oct-04-2009)
  2. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family James L Fidelholtz    (Oct-04-2009)
  3. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family Anthea Fraser Gupta    (Oct-04-2009)
  4. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family Elizabeth J Pyatt    (Oct-04-2009)
  5. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family Joseph F Foster    (Oct-04-2009)
  6. Re: Learning foreign languages from another language family John M. Lawler    (Oct-05-2009)
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