Hello all,
On my blog I have written articles about difficult and simple languages before and I realized that I didn’t write anything about intermediate languages yet, so I will try to dedicate an entire post to them now. As I mentioned earlier, there are probably much better divisions of languages based on their difficulty. I do not challenge them, but I find that up until now, all the languages that I’ve learned fall into three simple categories: simple, intermediate, difficult – depending on how far a language you already speak at a native/advanced fluency level is from these languages.
For me an intermediate language (or a language that I find to be intermediately difficult to learn) is:
- A language that is outside of my native language group, or outside the language group of a language that I already speak well, but still within the same general family[1]
- The grammar is at least 50% identical with the languages I already speak at an advanced/native fluency level
- Another 30% of concepts present in the grammar are concepts that can also be found in the languages I already speak but are used rarely or formulated in a different way
- At least 10% of grammar concepts are completely alien to me
- There is a large number of cognates in the language, but different pronunciation might leave them unrecognized at first
- The sound system is at least 50% identical[2] with the languages I already speak
- Literal translations are often possible
- Cultural difference is not a substantial issue
From a strictly analytical point of view, if you look at English and Italian for instance, you almost can go as far as saying that they are two distant dialects of Indo-European. They both share large amounts of Latin or Greek based vocabulary, Italian vocabulary has received a lot of influence from English, there are numerous grammar concepts that overlap, a lot of expressions in Italian can be directly translated into English, often literally.
