NADSFL

National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Languages

FSI Languages by Categories of Difficulty for speakers of English

Dear Colleagues,

I have been searching high and low for the FSI table that lists the FOUR categories of languages according to their difficulty for English-speakers.  (The World Language Content Standards for California refers to four categories).  On the web, I have only been able to find references to three categories,  e.g. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty...

If anyone has a PDF or other form of the four categories handy, would you please post a reply or email me at william.chang@lausd.net?

Much appreciated!

--William

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Greta Lundgaard on March 7, 2012 at 12:59pm
Permalink Reply by William Chang on March 13, 2012 at 12:38pm

Thanks, Greta!  Tausend Dank!

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Aldrich on March 13, 2012 at 11:47am
Permalink Reply by Jeremy Aldrich on March 13, 2012 at 11:52am
It looks like FSI itself has indeed collapsed languages into 3 categories:

"The Foreign Service Institute characterizes languages into three general categories:
• World: generally the Western European languages that are closely related to English, e.g., French, German, Portuguese, Swedish;
• Hard: languages more distant from English, e.g., Albanian, Finnish, Hindi, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese; and
• Superhard: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean."

Source: http://fsitraining.state.gov/training/Language_Toolkit.pdf
Permalink Reply by William Chang on March 13, 2012 at 12:39pm

Thanks, Jeremy!  Great resource.

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