Are some languages really more challenging to learn than others?

In this month’s translation industry updates we’ll be thinking about what exactly makes languages complex, and how our experience of learning a language is impacted by our mother tongue and other factors.

On the one hand, there appears to be a general consensus that all languages are objectively equally complex, with no particular language being more challenging than any other. This theory states that if a language is more complicated in certain areas then it will be simpler in other areas, meaning that all languages are complex in different ways but their overall level of complexity balances out. This theory has the advantage of avoiding making value judgments about different languages, and by extension the people that speak them, while also acknowledging that there are complex elements to all languages.

However, counterarguments to this claim have been made by individuals such as Juliana Barembuem who compares German and English and argues that in her view German is more complicated in every aspect, including grammar, morphology and sound system. Thinking along similar lines, people who argue in favour of equal language complexity tend to say that more complex elements of a language can create greater simplicity elsewhere in that language, such as a case system doing away with the need for prepositions. Yet the argument has also been made that some elements of language tend to create complexity without reducing it elsewhere, such as irregular plurals and gendered nouns, as argued on the Fuzzy Grammar blog. By that same logic, languages with a lot of these elements would then tend to be more complicated and therefore difficult to learn than others.

Another argument in favour of the notion that all languages are equally complex is the idea that there is only a finite amount of concepts that language needs to express, and that languages will always look for the most efficient balance between expressing ideas effectively while avoiding overcomplicated structures and redundancy. If, in a sense, we are all trying to say the same basic things regardless of our language background then it would make sense for every language to have a similar level of complexity. Detractors of that argument would argue that if languages are a reflection of the circumstances and environment of their speakers then they would be likely to change over time in different ways, which may indicate levels of complexity, or that there’s nothing to stop any particular language from having a greater level of complexity than the minimum level required for effective communication.

Perhaps the most commonly used argument in favour of the idea of equal complexity is that human babies are capable of learning any language fluently, and the amount of time it takes them to reach fluency is fairly common between languages, indicating that no single language is more challenging for a child to learn than any other. But in adulthood the question is different. The US Foreign Service Institute places languages into four different categories based on the length of time needed for native English speakers to master them, with Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean considered to be substantially more time-consuming than languages which are more similar to English such as Dutch and Danish. From this point of view, it seems that languages are likely to present different levels of challenge depending on the native language that each of us starts from, which will be a familiar idea to anybody who’s found it easier to learn a language that shares some elements in common with a language that they already speak. But since nobody can speak all of the world’s languages, and since we tend to take the more complex elements of our own native language for granted, it is difficult to imagine reaching an objective conclusion about which, if any, languages are more complicated and therefore challenging to learn.

Of course, all of the above points only consider the argument from a linguistic point of view, and it’s important to remember that there are a great number of other elements that impact on our experience of learning another language, such as the extent of our exposure to the language, the quality and availability of learning materials, opportunities to engage with the language formally and informally, and socioeconomic factors such as having enough free time and disposable income to be able to pursue our studies. Over and above this, we all have languages that we tend to gravitate towards and that’s different for different people, so there is a personal element in every language-learning journey too.

If you’ve learned or operated in more than one additional language, how did you find this in comparison to your native language? Do you believe that all languages are equally complex?