kitakitsune Wrote:That's the US government's scale for when they try to teach people (from zero) to be linguists. It's based on many years and lots of experience teaching native English speakers how to speak these languages.
As far as I know, German gets its own category because of some grammatical quirks English speakers have trouble overcoming.
Maybe also because while German may be closely related to English, it often uses Germanic terms that existed in Anglo-Saxon dialects, but that were replaced by French terms after the Norman conquest, like "ymbsprǽc" which isn't far from German Gespräch, but has been replaced by "conversation" in modern English.
For the same reason French and Romanian are easier to learn for English native speakers because their vocabulary is largely Latin-based, so even if the grammar is different, you don't spend much time on learning words... like with Japanese for example...
One of my British classmates who learned both German and French put it like this: In French, all the easy words are different from English, but you use them every day, so you don't forget them, and the difficult words are the same. In German, all the easy words are the same as in English, and the difficult ones are all different... which is why he forgot most of his German and remembered most of his French.
So you could say that for English native speakers:
Swedish: easy grammar, more difficult vocabulary (not to mention pronunciation)
French: harder grammar, easy vocabulary
German: harder grammar, more difficult vocabulary
Not sure though why Dutch wouldn't be in the same category as German, but it's the FSI and they've been doing this for decades, so they're probably right. Not to mention that there is hardly any professional incentive to learn Dutch because everybody there speaks excellent English already...
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