This question was posed in one the emails I received today. I managed to find some information about the relative difficulty of learning particular languages for English speakers, but not for speakers of other languages.

The difficulty of learning a particular language depends on which language(s) you already know. Each language presents you with a different set of challenges, including differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and writing system. Generally the more differences there are, the harder a language is to learn, though there isn’t necessarily a simple correlation between interlingual distance and the difficulty learning.

Most people seem to think that Japanese and Chinese (any variety) are very difficult languages to learn. Having studied both I can confirm this. When learning these languages, the biggest challenge you face is reading and writing them.

Chinese grammar is straightforward; the pronunciation is not too difficult, though the tones take a lot of getting used to. It takes quite a long time to build up enough vocabulary to be to have more than a basic conversation, but the more words you learn, the easier it gets to learn new ones. Most of the vocabulary is constructed from native roots and there are very few foreign loanwords.

Japanese grammar is more complex than Chinese, though a less complex than most European languages, apart from the intricate politeness registers. Japanese pronunciation causes few difficulties, though the irregular intonation is quite a challenge. Japanese vocabulary is a mixture of native words and words borrowed from other languages, particularly Chinese and English. The English loanwords are all changed to fit Japanese phonology, and are often abbreviated and combined with native and/or words from Chinese. As a result, they are difficult to recognise as words that were originally English.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies the languages they teach into four groups based on the number of hours of instruction (English-speaking) students need to attain a certain level of proficiency. In this scheme, the most difficult languages are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. For more details, see:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

e-books have been with us for quite a few years, but have yet to gain widespread popularity. Maybe this is due to the lack of suitable devices on which to read them. Reading text on a back-lit screen tends to strain the eyes more than reading text on paper.

Perhaps the new Sony Reader for e-books will change this. It uses e-ink technology for the display, which is supposed to look almost link real ink on paper and doesn’t need to be back-lit so can be read even in bright sunlight. It can also play mp3s. Sony have done deals with major publishers to ensure that there are plenty of e-books to read on their Reader.

When I read this news, I thought that this device could also be very useful for learning languages. If you had the text and audio of a language course in a suitable format, you could save them on your e-book reader and access both on the one device. It would be even better if you could add dictionaries, grammars and other reference books. Maybe you could also use it to listen to audio books and magazines in a language you’re learning while reading the text of those books and magazines.

The idea of a gadget on which you can store and read hundreds of books, and listen to music and other recorded material, really appeals to me. I read a lot and have so many books that there’s never enough shelf space. I often borrow books for my local library, but also like to buy books by my favourite authors. This device would also be handy when travelling as it would save you from having to lug around numerous real books.

The origins of the word Easter are a bit uncertain. According to The Venerable Bede (672-735 AD), a Christian scholar, Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre), who was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxons.

The Teutonic goddess of fertility was known by such names as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos, and her name came from an old word for spring: eastre.

An alternative theory is that Easter comes from the German word Ostern.

Many cultures celebrate the beginning of spring with various festivals. The Christian festival of Easter was probably grafted onto old pagan spring festivities, and things like Easter eggs and Easter bunnies are symbols of new life and fertility which perhaps date back to pagan times.

There’s more information about the origins of Easter at:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/easter.htm

Happy Easter to those you who celebrate it.

As I mentioned the other day, they count in twenties in Manx Gaelic. Today I discovered that this system can be used for counting up to 199. For example, 100 is quig feed (five twenties) or keead (hundred), 120 = shey feed (six twenties) or keead as feed (hundred and twenty), and 199 = nuy feed as nuy-jeig (nine twenties and nineteen) or keead as kiare feed as nuy-jeig (hundred and four twenties and ninety).

This system is known as the vigesimal or base-20 counting system. The word vigesimal comes from the Latin vīgēsimus, which is a variant of vīcēsimus (twentieth) and influenced by viginti (twenty). The vigesimal system is also used in the other Celtic languages and in a number of other languages, at least to some extent.

There are vigesimal and decimal systems in Scottish Gaelic, though the decimal system in not widely used. The vigesimal system is rarely used in Irish, with the except of daichead (forty), a version of dhá fhichid (two twenties).

In Welsh both vigesimal and decimal systems are used, though the vigesimal system is more popular in north Wales. The number from 16-19 in the Welsh vigesimal system are unusual: 16 = un ar bymtheg (one on fifteen), 17 = dau ar bymtheg (two on fifteen), 18 = deunaw (two nines), and 19 = pedwar ar bymtheg (four on fifteen).

The Celtic languages that were once spoken in many parts of Britain used the vigesimal system. The so-called sheep-scoring numbers are remnants of these languages. They were related to Welsh and the numbers from 15-19 have more or less the same structure as those in Welsh. There are many versions of these numbers – here’s one from Keswick in Cumbria: yan (1), tyan (2), tethera (3), pethera (4), pimp (5), sethera (6), lethera (7), hovera (8), dovera (9), dick (10), yanadick (11), tanadick (12), tetheradick (13), petheradick (14), bumfit (15), yanabumfit (16), tanabumfit (17), tetherabumfit (18), petherabumfit (19), jiggit (20).

For more details see my sheep-scoring numbers page on Omniglot.

Other languages that used the vigesimal system include Cornish, Breton, Basque, Albanian, Georgian, Ainu, Mayan, Nahuatl, and to a limited extent in Danish and French.

Phrases such as ‘three score years and ten’ and ‘four score and seven’ demonstrate that the vigesimal system was once used in English. The word score comes from the Old English word scora and is related to the Old Norse word skor, which means notch, tally or twenty.

For more information on the vigesimal system, see: Wikipedia.

Each of us constructs our own unique version of the world in our minds, but we don’t necessarily notice everything, at least consciously. The things we see, hear, touch, taste, or smell evoke memories, associations and various trains of thought.

When you learn a foreign language, you are effectively creating a new version of the world in your mind. Everything will have a different name, though it takes a long time to learn all those names and there are likely to be gaps in your vocabulary. One way to overcome this problem is to learn how to describe the things for which you don’t know the words. Another way is to focus on particular subjects and to learn as many of the relevant words as you can. To test your new vocabulary, you could try explaining the subject to someone else and/or writing about it.