Yeah, I think their definition of mastering a language is pretty low. I live and work a lot in French and have for a while. While I would consider myself fluent I don’t think I’ve mastered it. I make guesses about vocabulary and grammar all the time and when people ask me a grammar question about French grammar I often don’t know the answer. I usually have a vague feeling that what they are asking about is either wrong or right, but can rarely tell if that is because I have developed some sort of intuition about the language or because I have just developed my own bad habits. Practice makes permanent, after all, not perfect.
TL:DR. The more fluent I get in French the more I realize I will never really master it.
I guess now the “finnish and hungarian are alike cauz they related” thing is an enduring internet cliché : it’s like saying Italian and Persian are alike because they’re both indo-european languages…
I’m kinda surprised that Mandarin ends up in the hardest category in these kinds of analyses. I took it in college - 1 hr a day for 6 semesters. I’ve never been fluent, but I could hold a decent conversation and muddle my way through a newspaper. Pronunciation is hard, but can be taught effectively in about a month, maybe two (the minority of students who didn’t get it by then, still didn’t years later). Grammatically, it is much, much simpler than the others on the list. No inflections for anything. It’s mostly syntactic algebra.
Reading and writing are hard, because you need to memorize thousands of characters, so maybe that’s what they’re talking about. But I learned (and have since forgotten, but it has been 10 years) over 2000 characters in a grand total of less than 400 hours classroom time, maybe 600 hours total study time, so I have to wonder how much they expect people to learn that takes 2200 hours? I also know two people who are in the foreign service, as Mandarin speakers, with less than half that much instruction.
When I moved to England it took me 6 months to master Yorkshire. And I’m not sure any native English speaker has ever mastered Geordie, or inebriated Glaswegian.
As for Norwegian, when I was living in Oslo this was big news:
The ratings come from people who send Americans to other countries. It’s from the Foreign Service Institute. Why would they include indigenous North American languages in their list?
I got a different impression. See: Iraq occupation. One of the reasons why the whole thing went pear shaped was that the US military and diplomats underestimated the need for foreign language skills. Why learn foreign languages when you just have to shout english loud enough …
There are 1,100 employees in the U.S. embassy in Iraq, all living in the middle of a war among and against Arabic-speaking enemies.
Of those embassy employees, the Iraq Study Group found that only six speak fluent Arabic.
“It is not an accident that three-and-a-half years into the war in Iraq, we really don’t know who the enemy is,” said Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and an ABC News analyst. “We don’t know anything about the insurgency. We know very little about the Shia death squads. We’re really operating in the dark.”
