It’s a lot more than just an opinion, though. Linguists have spent quite an amount of effort in tracing word origins by branching methods not unrelated to those used by evolutionary biologists for finding relationships of organisms. And yes, German has its own Romance influences, some of which got based into English (and which are not counted as “Romance” vocabulary). The most famous example is “cheese”. This is derived from the Old High German “chāsi” (modern Hochdeutsch “Käse”), which in turn was derived from the Latin caesum (also the origin of modern Spanish “queso”). Incidentally, it is this word (along with “Kaiser”) that gives strong evidence that the Roman “c” was hard, like English “k”.
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That assumes that there is any meaning there to understand in the first place. I find it very hard to write, because I keep trying to form complete sentences.
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A friend of mine spent some time in Japan and tutored kids in English while she was there. Unfortunately, the Japanese that they teach foreigners is the “very polite” level because it is safer to be too polite rather that too direct. But that is NOT effective when you want to get children to behave. They don’t take you seriously…Indeed, the disconnect between your polite words and angry affect is quite amusing to them.
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Ei se ole mitenkään erityisen vaikeaa. Suomessa pikkulapsetkin onnistuvat siinä!
(“It’s not especially hard. Even Finnish babies can do it!” 
)
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Turkish is a Turkic language - goes with Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, etc. Completely unrelated because those all come from Central Asia. But part of the reason Turkic languages are hard to learn for English speakers is actually shared with Hungarian (don’t know about the other ones): they’re agglutinative. So you can have 22-syllable 45-letter words that a native speaker child can speak and understand perfectly but they’re going to be hard for you because they’re made of a bunch of smaller bits that don’t mean anything (or could mean something completely different) without the same context.
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The other thing this map doesn’t show is the relative likelihood that people will also know English and be willing to talk to you in English if it’s really important. My experience with France was that people often knew English decently well but wouldn’t want to talk to American tourists. In Estonia I believe you can get by barely knowing the language at all.
If you go outside Europe things are going to be a lot more difficult - Turkish people’s English is much more broken or nonexistent compared to Europe, imo, and the pronunciation is difficult for them, (there are many situations where I can understand what someone is trying to say in Turkish-accented-English but someone not used to hearing that would have difficulty) although they are getting more and more exposure through TV and music.
The foreign service and the military both need people who have some command of the language in the country they are assigned. They try to get native speakers when they can. A friend of mine grew up in a Russian speaking household in Ohio, so he was assigned the Russian desk at the CIA.
The training times are based on experience assuming a motivated student and usually one who has already taken at least one foreign language course. They don’t expect complete fluency. They expect a working knowledge of the language, more than that needed by a tourist, but not work at a technical or legal level.
This chart is useful for both managers and students. Suppose things start getting hairy in Afghanistan and there is a sudden demand for Americans who can speak Pashto. The chart gives an idea of how quickly they can be trained so that folks in the field don’t get their hopes up. Yes, English is the international language of business, and to a lesser extent diplomacy, but it always help to have people who know what’s being said and written.
Nothing funny about it. People who work for the United States in other countries need to be fluent in the local language. Native speakers are useful, but quite often, there aren’t enough native speakers to staff all the “job openings”. So the FSI trains them. And meanwhile, the employee isn’t useful for x number of years. Human Resources needs to know that. The employee, who’s planning a career needs to know that. And the people who design the courses need to know how to pace their students.
Bureaucracies often produce handy diagrams. It makes administration easier.
Quite often, the target countries are insular or downright hostile, and since the staffing requirements associated with the embassy are determined by treaty, sending an inexperienced speaker to immerse herself in the local culture and language would be a bad idea.
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And, of course, the Normans were… Vikings, who had settled in France and adopted the French language. In any case, all of the intermixing of linguistic influences has turned English into a linguistic vacuum cleaner; while foreign words easily slide into English, English words tend to sound jarring in other languages. I can understand why the Académie française gets uptight about Anglicisms, though it can be silly when an English word in question has French roots.
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Oh yeah. I picked up the skill of yelling at children from TV. Largely, the -nasai verb form, with a few other small things.
Shizuka ni shinasai!!!
As a foreigner, I just assume that I’m inferior to all Japanese.
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Yeah, my Japanese is terrible, but that’s mostly because I never went there for a prolonged period of time and never practiced it regularly after getting past the beginner level. I don’t see it as that hard of a language to learn, since it’s grammatically very clearly structured.
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Many years ago I started learning Norwegian. The grammar and vocabulary were remarkably easy, very similar to English. Pronunciation, on the other hand…Even if I knew enough to carry on a conversation with a native speaker I doubt I could.
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My fallacy may be simply to assume that this is a bidirectional relation. Simplified, French is mostly Romance, and English has considerably more Romance bits than German. That makes English easier to learn for the average native German speaker, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
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I really enjoy watching people sign, even if it might seem rude to ‘eavesdrop’. Of course, I have no idea what they are saying; I just like the fluidity of motion involved. However, there was one really odd time I saw someone furiously talking to themselves with sign language. The State School for the Deaf is on a bus route that I use frequently so…
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Navajo was very effective as a mostly unbreakable code during WWII.
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Not a national language for lack of trying. That doesn’t matter. There is literature written in euskara, just as there is in Catalan, Occitan, Romani, Ladino, and countless European languages that have no nation. And euskara is not weird to the basque peoples; Spanish is.
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This map puts Dutch in the easiest category, but I disagree.
The most important part of learning a language is speaking in with native speakers, and that’s impossible with Dutch. That makes it a much harder language to learn.
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Not me. Trying to stop languages from changing is like trying to stop the ocean with a rake.
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There are also mixed languages, which blend two languages together… I suppose that if you know one or both of the source languages, it’s easier.
Michif derives nouns, numerals, definite/indefinite articles, possessive pronouns, some adverbs and adjectives from French, while it derives demonstratives (in/animate), question words, verbs (in/animacy agreement with the subject/object), and some adverbs/verb-like adjectives from Cree.[8] The Cree components of Michif generally remain grammatically intact, while the French lexicon and grammar is restricted to noun phrases where nouns occur with a French possessive element or article (i.e. in/definite, masculine/feminine, singular/plural).[9][10]
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