A while back I tried to assess how hard it is to learn a foreign language, based on a number of criteria: pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary, reading/spelling, and culture.
I've had a little more exposure to a handful of new languages, so I thought I'd extend the table here.
Hindi - IndoEuropean,
- grammar - 2 Except for gender, the syntax is very straightforward.
- vocabulary - 3 Beyond the basics, it is very non-European
- pronunciation - 3 All the sounds are very straightforward except for t/d. Most languages just have 2 - a voiced and unvoiced alveolar or dental stop. Hindi has 8, voiced/unvoiced, aspirated/unaspirated, retroflex/regular. Oh yeah and sometimes an r is a d.
- writing/spelling - 3 The devanagari script is simple, easy to learn and few if any complications. consonant plus a vowel, always shown. Very one-to-one. A small handful of weird ligatures and combos.
- cultural - 3 There is lots of media produced in India: news, movies, youtube videos. There is very little immigration to India (and for those it is easy to get by with English). But Hindi is battling with English as the most equal of equals in official languages. It is taught in secondary school alongside English and the main local language. So there should be lots of Hindi learning material but it is not directed at native English speakers (my personal concern). There is some but not much online language learning, but HindiPod101, Duolingo, italki, etc are making many languages more accessible.
Swahili
- grammar - 3 Totally easy... except for noun classes. First the easy part... no articles, verbs just use particles for tense, word order is pretty strict, modifiers after nouns. But instead of two genders,, there are 10 (? more?) classes of nouns that have different prefixes for singular and plural.
- vocabulary - 3 Very non-European vocab. A handful of English/Arabic/Persian/German loans.
- pronunciation - 2 No tones, some very doable but unexpected nasals before stops is about as strange as it gets.
- writing/spelling - 1 Roman letters, English digraphs, orthography matches pronunciation well.
- cultural - 4 Very little online instruction. Duolingo and SwahiliPod101, few movies, little children's lit.
| Language | Grammar | Vocabulary | Pronunciation | Writing/Spelling | Culture |
| Hindi | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Swahili | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
