User talk:77.100.4.112

I am afraid you did not understand Frank Lin, while he understood quite well what Girdi was saying. Girdi was trying to establish the list from the FSI as a universal list and then said it was useless (and American etc. etc.). If you take it as a universal list, it is indeed useless, but there never was a claim that it is universal. It is not a deductive nomothetic list that gratuitously assigns labels to languages. It is simply a statement of what the people at the various government language institutes have inductively found over decades of professional language work using a consistent standard as to what it means if we say that someone 'knows' a language. The list ranks languages for speakers of English, but for the non-Indoeuropean languages, the findings are likely to be similar, no matter which major European language you speak. If you speak Japanese it will be easier for you to learn Korean and vice versa. If you speak Dutch, German is quite easy and vice versa (except you don't always know where one ends and the other one begins). If you speak any of the European languages, Chinese will be quite difficult, just as learning a European language is quite difficult for someone from China. Even if Chinese only has 4000 words, someone who starts from a European language must learn all of these words one by one since there are practically no cognates. This will take years, even if the grammar is easy. If you learn a major European language speaking another European language natively, you know hundreds of words and cultural references already and you can typically understand vastly more than you can say. This makes certain languages easier TO LEARN for a speaker starting out from, e.g., English. The Foreign Service Institute has taught hundreds and often thousands of adults in various languages, and they state an average how long motivated and language-experienced English speakers need to achieve a very high level of ability. As in all statistics, there may be large variations for each individual. Sometimes there are real outliers. I have been teaching a foreign language for 40 years now, and every two years or so, a student will soak the language up as if it were nothing. That does not change the fact that 'normal' students will progress at a certain fairly predictable pace, given my instructional methods. If someone should come up with a different method which makes average progress faster, I will have to revise my teaching. Having a rating of languages will help students and decision-makers in being realistic in their expectations.

One last note: Of course one teach a language in more difficult and easier ways. If you have various languages taught in schools, they may all be taught roughly at the same level of difficulty, but the learning outcomes won't be the same. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius