Difficulty of learning languages

The issue of the difficulty of learning languages can be looked at in a number of ways.
# Which languages are the most difficult to learn? The answer to this depends of course to an extent on your first language. Many languages have been claimed to be the hardest language to learn. Assessments have been used to determine language difficulty based on the ease with which infants learn a particular language as their first language, and how challenging a language is to learn as a second language by older children or adults.
# Why do so many people struggle learning a second language and never achieve fully proficiency whereas learning the first language seems to happen as a matter of course for most of us? The answers to this question have been slow in coming but there is an increasing amount of attention paid to this conundrum. From the evidence it is clear that children do indeed learn the first language. It was no instinct that enabled us to learn something so complex as language. The Universe of Babies provides insightful analysis and observations into this. There are a number of reasons why most people seem to lose that capacity, to varying degrees, as they grow up and become adults.
Phonology
There are some researchers like A. Z. Guirora in the Journal of Language Learning, who say that the hardest part of learning a new language is pronunciation, which can result in a "foreign accent". There is a view by some that accents are caused by transfer between the sounds of the first and second languages, for which there are three possibilities:
# The second language phonemes are not found in the native language at all. For example, Korean does not have any phonemes corresponding to the English phonemes /f/ or /v/, so they would be completely new to Korean learners of English.
# The first language has one of the two contrasting phonemes. For example, Japanese has a /p/ sound as in the English paid, but no /f/ sound as in the English fade. Japanese learners of English need to learn a new phoneme.
# The second language phonemes both exist in the native language, but as allophones of the same phoneme. For example, in Japanese, and are allophones so Japanese learners of English need to learn to distinguish these sounds.
Totally new sounds do not always pose significant problems for second language learners, unless they are radically outside the classes of sound in the native language. The most difficult phoneme pairs to learn are often allophones of the same phoneme, as in Japanese learning to distinguish between /l/ and /r/.
Grammar
A study on speech comprehension by German immigrants to the USA and American immigrants to Germany found that native English speakers learning German as adults had a disadvantage on certain grammatical tasks, while they had an advantage in lexical tasks compared to their native German-speaking counterparts learning English.
Native English speakers
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages for their professional staff (native English speakers who generally already know other languages). Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and reading, requiring 88 weeks (2200 class hours), are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. The National Virtual Translation Center notes that Japanese is typically more difficult to learn than other languages in this group, while the Foreign Service Institute makes this statement about Korean.

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