From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de   
      
   "Carlos E.R."  wrote or quoted:   
   >On 2025-12-02 14:53, s|b wrote:   
   >>We had to learn French from the age of 12 and then another 6 years. IMHO   
   >>it's easier than German.   
   >It is easier at that age.   
      
     I'm a late self-taught learner of French myself. I can   
     understand simple texts with no special vocabulary, but   
     can't speak nor write myself.   
      
     The "equal complexity hypothesis" claims that, in the end, all   
     language have the same complexity. One language might have fewer   
     word forms but makes up for this by a more complex grammar etc.   
      
     Measured by the number of hours of instruction required   
     to bring native English speakers to a certain level of   
     proficiency, the simplest languages are French (indeed!),   
     Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian,   
     Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, and Swedish.   
      
     German is in the next, more difficult, group together with   
     Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu,   
     Indonesian and Malay.   
      
     But the list does not stop here, the third group has languages   
     that are even more difficult than German: Amharic, Bengali,   
     Burmese, Czech, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer   
     (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian,   
     Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, and Vietnamese.   
      
     And, finally, we have the most difficult languages of all   
     (as far as languages were part of that survey): Arabic,   
     Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.   
      
     So, how much French can I understand?   
      
     Well, I listened to TV shows, and whenever I got something,   
     I wrote it down. So here are some French sentences I once understood   
     listening to TV shows. (I would not have been able to write them down   
     in correct French spelling, so I used a service for the writing.)   
      
   Monsieur Data, vous prenez les commandes.   
      
   Vous êtes capable de rire.   
      
   Vous pouvez disposer. (Here, I actually got the meaning of   
     "disposer" from the situation in the TV show.)   
      
   Vous avez des raisons personnelles ?   
      
   Ma mémoire fonctionne parfaitement bien.   
      
   alimentation principale, alimentation de secours   
      
   Je crois que maintenant ça marche.   
      
   . . . (about 160 lines altogether)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)