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前文
Many of us have entertained the idea of expanding our horizons. Learning a foreign language is an obvious option.
It's one that I would personally endorse: My individual circumstances were such that, by the age of 12, I could speak German, Greek and English, so languages became my passion and my hobby.
My advice is that you should learn a language because you're also interested in the culture and the country.
If you like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, learn Russian. If you're going to live in Bangkok, learn Thai. If your partner is Mexican, learn Spanish.
And remember: Although you can get by as a tourist in, possibly, weeks, mastering a language is a long-term commitment taking years, not months.
Language and diplomacy
After World War II, the United States expanded its influence around the world by training its embassy staff in the local languages of the countries they were in.
Thankfully for language learners today, the US Foreign Service Institute's language books and tapes can be found online.
コレ、いいね
オンラインでアメリカ政府の外務職員局
つまり 外交官などの専門職を養成する米国務省の機関の使ってる
外国語習得の本やテープが見られるんだって
へぇ〜
この機関が出してるこんな記事も参考になるかも
「外国語の研修成果と学習時間に関する資料(1973年)」
https://makoto.bqspot.com/2005/05/246/
英語の習得には何時間かかるの？
アメリカ国務省が定義する外国語の難易度
https://lm-7.hatenadiary.org/entry/20090919/1253362856
英語話者に対する言語習得難易度表：日本語は最高難度
These are the best free courses available, though you can still detect a touch of the Cold War in the syllabus ("Where is the state clothing shop?").
Best of all, the FSI has done us a great service by classifying languages in degrees of difficulty for English speakers.
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ということでアメリカ人にとって簡単な外国語から紹介：
Here are a few examples, ranked in order of the number of hours it takes the average learner to master them from lowest to highest:
Easiest (about 600 hours of study) ６００時間で習得できる１番簡単な外国語は
Along with Dutch and Norwegian, the popular Latin languages -- Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese -- require about 600 hours of study to achieve "general professional proficiency" in speaking and reading.
Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.
They share many words with English, but it's that common vocabulary that creates "false friends" -- words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly as meanings have drifted with time. For instance, in Spanish an "embarazada" woman is pregnant, while a French "préservatif" is not something you add to your food, but a condom.
While French and Italian are pretty standardized, you must choose whether to learn Latin American Spanish or "castellano," which is spoken in Spain; they differ as much as US English and British English.
The choice is even more striking with Portuguese; long ago I opted for Brazilian and to this day I still can't properly understand speakers from Portugal.
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German (750 hours)
One of my German teachers used to joke that it takes you a year to say, "I'm traveling on the bus," but once you're on that bus, it's plain sailing.
ドイツ語の教師の中に
「君達が【バスで旅行中です】とドイツ語で言えるようになるのは１年かかるが
実際にバスに乗ってりゃ
誰にだって（ああ、バスで旅行してるんだな）と言わなくたって見りゃ分かる」
とジョークを言う人がいた。
With nouns that are masculine, feminine and neutral, verbs that conjugate heavily and an extremely strict syntax, German may appear insurmountable to start with.
ドイツ語学習のメンド臭いハナシ
名詞に男性と女性と中性があって
動詞もメンド臭い格変化があって
とにかく文法の規則がチョー面倒。
ドイツ語は最初っから敷居が高い。
わたしの英語の先生は（市河三喜先生の弟子だからワタシは孫弟子で良いのか？）
ドイツ語の悪口を１つ教えてくれました。
Wie alt ist das Mädchen? あの少女は何歳ですか？
「Mädchenが 中性なのは まだ オンナになってないから」
きゃはは
On the other hand, pronunciation and spelling is straightforward and once you learn the -- admittedly many -- rules, that's it.
なのにドイツ語は発音と綴りがチョー簡単。
そうだよね 病院はKrankenhausだもんね Kranken 患者の haus 家
You'll also realize why Germans never interrupt you during a conversation: they're waiting to hear the verb at the end to figure out what you were talking about.
ドイツ人が人の話を邪魔せず ずっと 最後までちゃんと聞いているのは
ドイツ人が行儀が良いとかマナーを守る民族とかじゃなくて
最後まで聞かないと 動詞が出て来ないから 何を言ってるか分からんからだ。
あの分離動詞とかさ ワケ 分んないよね
結局３年頑張ったけどモノに出来なかったな〜 Ich spreche kein deutsch.だ。
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Malay and Swahili (900 hours)
It's not surprising that the two exotic languages that are simplest to learn employ the Latin alphabet.
Malay is the lingua franca of several Southeast Asia countries and has been simplified by its use as a second language by non-native speakers.
For example, the Malay plural is formed by repeating a word twice -- buku means book and buku-buku means books.
Similarly, Swahili evolved as the trading language in East Africa and is described as having an Arab vocabulary upon an African grammar.
It's given us the safari, all the characters in "The Lion King" (Simba, Timon, Pumba) and the African-American holiday of Kwanzaa.
Hungarian (1,100 hours)
If you like a challenge, try Hungarian. It's like no other European language you've heard, except maybe Basque.
I remember a conversation I had once with a friend who insisted that "nouns are declined but verbs are conjugated"; except in Hungarian you both decline and conjugate nouns, sometimes together.
You denote possession (my garden, your garden, his garden and so on) by putting verb endings to the noun garden.
Think of the Shakespearean "thou takest" and "he taketh." In that case "your garden" would be "gardenest" and "his garden" would be "gardeneth."
You may well ask what happens to double possessives (my mother's garden's flowers) or the difference between my parent's garden's flowers (plural, singular, plural) and my parent's gardens' flowers (singular plural plural) -- but that's where I gave up.
Greek (1,100 hours)
Modern Greek is maybe the easiest language to learn that uses a different alphabet.
There's a tongue-in-cheek book titled "Learn Greek in 25 years," but you'll be surprised at how straightforward it is to learn the alphabet: those alpha males, beta releases and gamma rays have seen to that.
Because, yes, Greek is also a language that's contributed numerous words to English.
Indeed, in 1957 Xenophon Zolotas, the then governor of the Bank of Greece, gave two speeches to the IMF that contained just Greek loanwords apart from the inevitable basic English. (Example: "Our policies should be based more on economic and less on political criteria.")
ギリシャ語は高校の時に頑張ったけどギリシャ人のお婆さんの家でホームステイして結局モノにならなかった。
分かりません Δεν καταλαβαίνω でん かたらヴぇいのぉ の連発だった。
だって そもそも私が習ったのは でん かたらば だった。どこの方言だ？
Russian (1,100 hours)
The big advantage of learning Russian is that, once you're proficient, you can understand other Slav languages such as Czech, Polish or Bulgarian.
It's also spoken and understood in all former regions of the Soviet Union from Armenia to Kyrgyzstan.
Hidden behind a Cyrillic veil of mystery, it's one of the harder languages to master, so much so that even many Russians speak it incorrectly.
But any literature, music and ballet buff or aspiring astronaut -- Russian is a mandatory subject at NASA -- should study a language with over 500,000 words (some up to 38 characters long), where the letter "e" sounds as e or o and nouns are "alive" or "dead."
ロシア語は大学時代に習いに行ってた。
ドイツ語同様格変化に苦しめられた。
O おー の文字が 何番目に来ると ア〜になるとか
英語の発音みたいにメンド臭かった
その後チェコ語も習ってチェコ人家庭でホームステイした。
千野 栄一先生の弟子と知り合って チェコ人の奥様と離婚してたことを知った。
後妻さんは日本人だった。
チェコ語はロシア語を齧ってたから 分かってたものの やっぱりメンド臭かった。
ポーランド語はチェコ語を田舎訛りした感じだったけど
チェコ語はポーランド人にすればポーランド語を田舎訛りにした感じなんだろうな
と１人で悦に入った。
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Arabic (2,200 hours)
There's an urban myth about a pharmaceutical company that advertised an analgesic pill with three non-verbal images for international consumption.
The left picture depicted a woman with a headache. The middle one showed her swallowing the pill and the right one had her smiling after the pain had subsided.
It worked everywhere except in the Arab world, which read it from right to left.
そうそう アラビア語のテロップって右から左に流れるのよね
だから あの頭痛薬のCMの絵は 薬を飲んだから頭痛が起きた とアラビア語の世界じゃ逆になるのよね
The direction of reading and the cursive script, which may or may not include vowels, are the two major hurdles for Arab learners.
Classical Arabic -- the language of the Qur'an -- will make you understood everywhere, but colloquial Arabic may be more useful, because once the locals start conversing with each other, you'll lose the plot.
But who can resist a language with 11 words for love, five gradations of swearing and close to 100 words describing a camel?
これは聞いてる。
眠っているラクダ
走っているラクダ
ご飯食べてるラクダ
みんな言葉が違うって。
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日本語ですよ〜
Japanese (2,200 hours)
A country that's enriched the world with sushi, karaoke and manga, Japan has many devotees, especially among gamers and geeks.
日本は寿司とかカラオケとか漫画とか世界中に溢れているけど
特にゲーマーとかオタクとかの熱狂的愛好者を世界中に抱えている。
But they are confronted with an extremely challenging language that uses imported Chinese characters (Kanji) cut off from their original meaning as well as two syllabaries -- Hiragana and Katakana (you must learn when to use which).
メンド臭い言語なんだよな
漢字を輸入して そこから意味を無視して 平仮名とカタカナという音節文字を創り出してんだよな
Counting objects depends on whether they are long and thin (roads), small and round (apples), thin and flat (sheets of paper), broad and flat (rugs) and hundreds more varieties.
それに物を数えるのに イチイチ形状とかで 区別するんだよな
What Japanese you speak also depends on your gender. There's a "rough" language for men and a more "ladylike" language for women, but you must understand both.
それに君が話す時には君の性別で使い方を変えなきゃいけなんだよな
君が男性なら荒々しいオトコ言葉を使うとか君が女性なら淑女のように話さないといけないとか
その上 君は この両方の喋り方を理解しないといけない。
By all means start a course of Japanese at home, but if you want to progress at all, pencil in a month of intensive practice in the Land of the Rising Sun.
勿論初心者は家で日本語学習を始めればいいけど
ホントに上達したけりゃ
取り敢えず日の昇る国での１か月集中講座の予定を入れなよ。
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Cantonese/Mandarin (2,200 hours each)
広東語とマンダリン語
Each Chinese dialect is effectively another language but Mandarin (Putonghua in Chinese, which means the common language) is considered the official tongue in modern China.They all share (roughly) one evolving writing system, referred to as 書面語 (or written language) invented for administering a large, diverse empire.
いろいろな中国語がある世界だから共通語としてマンダリン語が最近は使われ
さらに書面語が発展したわけだ。
To complicate the matter further, there are two main types of written Chinese characters under the same writing system: the traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the simplified Chinese in mainland China (standardized and simplified in the 1950s to increase literacy in the country).
メンド臭いことに漢字には２種類あって繁体文字と簡略文字がある。
中国本土では文盲対策として1950年代から簡略文字を
台湾と香港では繁体文字を使う。
For example, fly is written as 飛 in traditional Chinese and 飞 in simplified Chinese. They're basically the same character written in two different ways but pronounced differently when spoken in different dialect.
そいでもって
発音が・・・
Confused yet?
何のことか分からないって？
Each written word when spoken is mutually incomprehensible between a Mandarin speaker in Beijing and a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. If you think that's odd, consider our number system: the symbol "9" is universally recognized but it's pronounced "nine" in English and "devet" in Slovenian.
つまり 「９」というシンボルは 数字の９だから 世界中、誰にでも「９」だと分かる。
しかし発音は 英語では ナインだが スロベニア語では「devet」なんだよ。
全然違うだろ？
Every word must be memorized separately as you can't guess its pronunciation from the script -- but one could say the same of English if you consider plough, dough and tough.
中国語のワードは１つ１つ区別して覚えなきゃいけない
書いてあるように同じに発音するとは限らないんだよ
英語だって
plough ぷらう や dough だぁう（日本人にはド〜だね）や tough たぁふ （日本人にはタフだね） みたいに
OUGH の音はみんな違うだろ？
Meanwhile, dictionaries list words according to stroke count.
なのに 字書は言葉を ワードを 画数に従って載せてるんだよ。
These go from one to over 60 strokes. The archaic character zhé -- which, appropriately, means "verbose" -- has 64 strokes.
それも1画だけの文字から60画以上ある文字まで、だぜ。
その上 ムカシの文字の zhé なんて音の言葉は 文字通り「くどい」って意味があって64画もあるんだぜ。
わたしは56画のビヤンビヤン麺のビヤンってのが最大の画数だと思ってた
シンニュウの上に
穴冠を書いて
その中に
ニクヅキ扁で 右が恋の旧字体みたいな 糸言糸に似てて その下に長馬長 と書いて 心
そして 中国語の最大の難関が発音と来たもんだ。
And then there are the pronunciation challenges.
In the days of the British Empire, if you were going to be sent to Hong Kong as a civil servant, you had to pass a musical test first because all Chinese languages are tonal.
大英帝国時代に香港に送られた官吏は音楽の（絶対音感）テストにまず合格しなきゃいけなかったんだぜ。
中国語ってのは 音色とか音質 ってのがあるんだぜ。
There are four tones in Mandarin: high pitch (say G in a musical scale), rising pitch (like from C to G), falling (from G to C) and falling low then rising (C to B to G) -- and if you think that's difficult, there are nine tones in Cantonese.
中国語の４声の説明。
声調については日本人のワタシどころか子供の時に中耳炎やってるからスッゴイ音痴なんで説明できない。
In Mandarin, there is a whole poem, "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" with just the syllable "shi" repeated 107 times in various intonations.
例として ある漢詩に "shi"という１シラブル（日本では モーラだっけ？）の音が 107回使われているけど
イントネーションがコロコロ変化をつけて詠まれるんだよ。
In other words, if you are tone-deaf you might as well give up now.
つまり ヒトコトで言うならね 君が音痴だったら 中国語を勉強しようなんて野望はムチャだから 今ココで スグに諦めなさい。
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今朝ドイツ人と話してた時
向こうは日本語で
わたしはドイツ語で
会話したけど
向こうの日本語は理解出来たけど
わたしのドイツ語は理解されてなかった。
恥
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