What Makes a Language Hard to Learn Part 1: Pronunciation

I spent the last week marking students' essays, several of which made the claim that English is the "easiest language in the world to learn." My initial reaction when reading that is that what makes a language easy or hard is highly subjective and that an absolute statement like that could not possibly be made. Nevertheless, I'm still fine with outrageous claims so long as the student provides some evidence to back them up, but when the student demonstrates this by stating that English is easy because it only has 28 letters and other languages have more, I'm left feeling not entirely convinced by their argument. Their writing at the very least did get me thinking, in particular about what I would say makes a language easy, or more particularly difficult to learn. 

It's kind of a tricky question because first we need to all agree on what it means to learn a language. For instance, I consider myself to speak fluent English, but if I sat down and tried to read a jargon-filled engineering report, I'd honestly have a very hard time following it. Anyone who has studied vocabulary for the GRE has probably felt the same way. So just how much of a language do you have to know to be able to say that you've "learned" it? For my purposes here, I'm going to distinguish between learning a language for general purposes and specific purposes. By general purposes, I mean the sort of day to day communication the average person would need to get through a variety of situations, which is different then specific purposes (e.g. academic, business, scientific). I know that definition still isn't very specific, so another way to think of is simply the minimum someone would have to learn in order to say that they know that particular language.

As I started to write, I realized I had way more things to say on the matter of what makes a language hard to learn than could fit reasonably into one blog entry. So I'm going to break this up into pieces. Here's part 1, where I discuss pronunciation. 

Pronunciation

Before being able to learn a word and use it in a sentence I have to be able to pronounce it with some degree of confidence. This relates to the actual sounds of the language as well as the way those sounds are represented in writing. Now, many languages are full of unique sounds. Even ones that are very similar may not be exactly the same (e.g., the letter "t" in English is pronounced slightly differently than the letter "t" in Spanish). Normally, mispronouncing words like this will just make it sound like you have a foreign accent, but it becomes a problem when minimal pairs are involved.

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pairs are pairs of words that only differ in one sound, for instance the words "pay" and "bay." A native English speaker has no problem telling these words apart, but if you spoke a language like, say, Arabic which doesn't distinguish between [p] and [b] you can easily cause confusion by mispronouncing words (like the time I had a student saying she wanted to go downstairs to "bray." "Like a donkey?" I thought).

This is honestly one of the things that has held me back from seriously learning Arabic. Arabic has several minimal pairs involving letters called emphatic consonants, which are produced in the very back of the mouth (ق,ص,ض,ط, and ظ). They all also have their own non-emphatic counterparts, so mispronouncing these will cause a potential change of meaning in the word.

See if you can hear the difference

When I first heard these, I couldn't tell the difference between them and their non-emphatic counterparts. Though I can usually differentiate between them when I hear them spoken now, it still doesn't mean I can consistently find the spot in the back of my mouth where I'm supposed to make them.

Minimal Pairs and Aspiration

Another example of this that I've experienced comes from Hindi, which distinguishes between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants. For those who don't know, aspiration is a little puff of air that goes with a consonant. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say "ta, ta, ta." Now say "da, da, da." Hopefully, whenever you said "ta" you felt a puff of air on your hand which wasn't there when you said "da." Your tongue is otherwise in the exact same spot of your mouth. This is aspiration, and it usually indicated in phonetic transcription with a little letter "h" (like [tʰ]).

In English, aspirated and non-aspirated sounds really just appear in pairs like this: [tʰ]/[d], [pʰ]/[b], [kʰ]/[g], but in Hindi there would be four forms: [t], [tʰ], [d], and [dʰ]. Now, I've had a lot of practice making a non-aspirated [t] sound from learning other languages, so that isn't too difficult for me, but putting aspiration on a [d] is quite difficult to make my mouth do. It's also rather hard for me to hear the difference. An excellent site for learning Devangari (the script that Hindi uses) is right here. Click on the link, then go to the "Tests" tab. Assuming you don't know Devangari, here's a key for the first test:

क = [ka] / ख = [kʰa]
ग = [ga] / घ = [gʰa]

Try taking the test. It will play one of the sounds, then you choose the letter you think you heard. I guarantee that you will find it very difficult to hear the difference between the sounds. Since these sounds are minimal pairs, using them incorrectly can lead to completely changing the meaning of a word.

Spelling System

I do most of my language learning by reading, which is probably why pronunciation issues are so challenging for me when learning a language. I rarely have a native speaker or teacher there to let me know if I'm making sounds correctly. In addition to this, the way a language represents sounds in writing also influences how difficult it is I find that language to learn. For some languages, like Spanish or Hungarian, this is no problem since words are written more or less phonetically. That is, once you know the basic rules, you can look at a word you've never seen before and still know instantly how to pronounce it.

Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért

This intimidating looking Hungarian word could easily be learned with a little bit of practice, if for instance I told you that an "sz" is pronounced like [s] and an "s" by itself is like the "sh" in "shelf." An accent over a vowel makes it pronounced more or less longer and the stress of the word is also on the first syllable. There's a little bit more to it than that, but the point is that every time you see the combination "sz" it is always pronounced like [s]. (By the way, this word doesn't really mean anything. Hungarians just brag that it's the longest word in their language. If I had to try an translate it, it would go something like "You're a foreigner trying to learn my language, and I want to embarrass you.")

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Writing words phonetically is the same even in a different alphabet, like Russian or Greek. After spending a little bit of time learning their letters and a few simple rules, I could pronounce new words with great confidence simply from reading them.

The same cannot be said for Arabic or Hebrew. I know both languages' alphabets fine, but the problem is how they represent vowels in writing. Both languages have long and short vowels. In writing, the long vowels are represented by letters and the short vowels are left out.

   written ktab, but pronounced kitab = كِتاب

 

Well, strictly speaking the short vowels can be written using marks that appear either above or below the letter (like the one on the bottom right of the word above), but in practice they're rarely included in writing. If English were to do the same thing, it would look something like this:

I imagn tht ths sentnce wld b nxt t impossbl t dciphr if y dd nt lread knw Englsh (nd evn thn...)   

I imagine that this sentence would be next to impossible to decipher if you did not already know English (and even then...) Clearly, the Arabic alphabet is written assuming the reader already knows the word. That is, it is not written for language learners. Of course, even adding the vowels in the above English sentence doesn't make things too much easier if you don't know the language. In Arabic, each letter pretty much can only make one sound with a few exceptions. This is certainly not the case with English. Silent letters aside, just consider our vowel system. We have 5 written vowels (and sometime "y"), but depending on your dialect English easily has at least 10 different vowel sounds: long and short variations. They show up in minimal pairs too (which is why I'm often taken aback when I hear a non-native speaker ask where the "beach" is). On top of this, English also can have multiple pronunciations for a word depending on if it's being emphasized (consider "I'm going to the mall" versus "I'm going to the mall"). For crying out loud, we make our children participate in competitive spelling contests because knowing how to spell words correctly is actually quite challenging. So on this count, at least, one would have a hard time arguing that English is the easiest language in the world.