A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html <comment><USER6> These language categorizations are famous and have been around since the 50's - not sure what the colored map really adds. When looking at the suggested number of hours, keep in mind that these measurements are for:

* a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already).

* 5 hours/day of continuous study, with classroom instruction at the FSI's internal language school (which is considered the gold standard in language education). Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies.

* Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1.

I would never want to discourage someone from learning a foreign language, but the notion that one could reach professional proficiency in French within ~6 months is unrealistic for 99% of learners. Even if you _lived_ there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly.

<comment><USER7> Your personal difficulty with a language will also obviously drastically shift once you've picked up another language.

E.g. I've never learnt Dutch, but I can read it passably because of my combination of Norwegian, German and English. While getting to proficiency written and oral would take some work I'd certainly be far easier than starting from the base of a single language.

Same with e.g. Spanish or Italian because of the bits I remember of French from school..

<comment><USER8> Yep, I'll agree with this. I studied Latin for about 8 years at school and enjoyed it, even though at the time I had thought it pretty useless.

15 years later I moved to Spain for a while and was amazed at how naturally everything came together. Within a very short time, I was able to make sense of written Spanish.

Conversationally, not so much but I'm sure the Latin helped.

<comment><USER9> My Latin teacher often reminded us that "Spanish is just lazy Latin".

<comment><USER10> That's a common statement but somewhat inaccurate, as it omits the fact that what most of us think of as Spanish is Castillian, which has a heavy influence from Arabic languages.

<comment><USER11> Spanish native speaker here. The influence from Arabic is mostly in vocabulary, about 10% of our words have Arabic roots. However, Arabic had negligible influence in structure and grammar. Spanish is your standard Latin derived language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might seem a stupid comment, and it probably is, but looking at the most difficult languages list at the bottom (Arabic,Chinese,Japanese,Korean) the first thought that came to mind by looking at the pattern was "the US (largest English speaking country) have been at war with countries speaking two of these languages, might be at war soon with a country speaking another one and surely are not best friends with the country speaking the remaining one".

This could be pure correlation without any cause-effect, but I still wonder how easy would be for any country to go to war with another one when most citizens of both countries spend years communicating each other. The usual propaganda which depicts others as demons in order to fuel hatred and "sell" the war to the public would be a lot more difficult.

<comment><USER13> Historically that's kind of true, but we also count Japan, South Korea, and several Arabic-speaking countries (e.g., Kuwait) among our closest allies...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non- NATO_ally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-NATO_ally)

<comment><USER14> Also Great Britain and Australia. From whom we are 'separated by a common language'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you really want to learn a language, you can. However, throw your assumptions about learning a language in X months or Y years. It's really up to your actions. And it gets harder until you learn your first language, then you can "ladder" (learn a 3rd language by using your 2nd language, not your 1st language).

There is a lot of snake oil sold out there. Similar to self-help, they all sell the wishful idea that you can learn language without strain or effort. That is not the case... if you are over the age of about nine. Before the age of nine, almost every human has the ability to pick up multiple languages without effort. As you transition into adulthood, that ability diminishes, until it is an effort. Yes, there are people who can pick up a language without effort like my friend in Canada who can speak many languages after just having spent about a month or two in a place where they speak it. However, for the vast majority, it is not going to be easy.

"Ultimately, it's not about the number of months or years [that you study], but the number of minutes every day that you devote to this challenge. These minutes are what truly count."

-Benny Lewis, "Fluent in 3 Months"

Remember language is to communicate. If you can communicate, express emotions, tell people about your day, ask people about their life that might be enough. Yes, you might not know the 10 ways to express the nuances of an emotion like excitement. But you might know the one generic word.

Reading Harry Potter or the original novels that are so popular that they were translated into English in your new language might take more time. Ask yourself if you really want to be able to do that.

Going to see a comedy show in your 2nd language is not going to be fun. You'll be knocked off your presumed language level ability perch. You likely won't understand anything, likely. That is because humor is quite possible the highest form of any language.

<comment><USER16> Conversely I only really started to learn english after watching american standups and british comedy. Maybe thats more a motivational thing though

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious if the converse applies: e.g. English is more difficult for native Chinese speakers than for native Hindi speakers.

> The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might > look to an English-speaking monoglot.

Author seems to imply a "distance" between 2 languages that would go both ways.

For practical purposes though, I'd think other factors like the popularity of English/Western media and artifacts of British colonialization would make learning English for non-native English speakers slightly easier, than the other way around, as a result of greater chance of previous English exposure.

<comment><USER18> Yes, the converse applies, at least with the caveat that the week estimates are pretty much bullshit, and the map in general is very speculative. In foreign language teaching, you will typically speak of L1 and L2, L1 being your native language, L2 being the language you're picking up.

The typological distance (linguistically) between languages plays a major role in acquisition, both positively and negatively. A _positive L1 transfer_ is something the learner can infer about the target language from their own, while a _negative L1 transfer_ is something they assume about the target language based on their own, but it's wrong. Overall, positive L1 transfer in closely related languages will overwhelmingly outweigh negative transfer, but be a lot more tricky when the languages aren't closely related typologically.

Note that typological similarity often coincides with distance in the historic sense, but isn't the same thing. For example, both Thai and Chinese are tonal isolating languages (same typological features) but aren't related at all. Also, Russian and Bulgarian, for example, are very closely related, but have a vastly different grammar, making Russian harder for a Bulgarian speaker than, say, for a Polish speaker.

<comment><USER19> I pretty much agree with most everything you write, but just want to add the caveat that this is all a function of relative competence or learning stage in an L2 language. That is to say, some languages that may be relatively easier to partially acquire then to fully master and visa versa. A case in point, and dear to my heart at that by way of experience, is the relative difficulty for an L1 English speaking in forming simple grammatically correct sentences in German and Mandarin, respectively. Whereas there is no question that Mandarin is the harder language to master (especially if we are talking about literacy), the high degree of analyticity relative to German makes forming sentences from words rather intuitive for the English speaker (even if English isn't quite as analytical as Mandarin in it's core modules). In other words, at least from the perspective of grammar, the beginnings of Mandarin are much easier than the beginnings of German, despite typological similarity even in inflections for plurality and the like shared between English and German.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The choice of the colors is strange. The most difficult languages are painted blue and green, and the easiest are red, and English is pale red. I suppose it should be the opposite.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, the map is hard to parse. I think that this presentation gives good advice regarding maps design: [https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/data-looks- better-naked-...](https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/data-looks-better-naked- maps-edition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a German, I'm a bit puzzled as to why Latin languages like Spanish and Romanian, are more "similar to English" than German is.

I get that English borrows a lot of words from French but overall English and German should have more similar origins than say Portuguese or Catalan.

Is this because of our "annoying" grammar (would make sense since Icelandic, another Germanic language with much more complexity in this regard even makes it into Category IV) or because German leaves little room of ambiguity (and thus fun)?

<comment><USER23> They're not "similar to English", they're easier than German to learn

2 genders instead of 3 and some complication on the verb conjugations but overall not too many difficulties.

"No gramatical cases" (as in German, but of course the cases exist), no mix and match of ambiguous endings, no separable verbs, no crazy word order, etc

<comment><USER22> I was quoting the page:

"Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English: Afrikaans, ..., French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, ... Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours) Languages similar to English: German"

This I understood as a ranking in similarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This map is based on data from US Foreign Service Institute. The data are quite notorious among second language acquisition researchers for its lack of credibility – apparently there has never been published research papers presenting the data, and the exact methods how the data were obtained, categorized and how they arrived at the conclusions, were never published.

This should make a skeptical person wince.

From modern perspective there is AT LEAST the following concerns:

1) How was proficiency measured? The research has shown that one can reach hugely different conclusions depending on the measure. Measuring explicit knowledge about the language using paper test has been, and still is, a very popular way of assessment, but the research has shown that it's hardly and adequate one in measuring proficiency, communicative competence or grammatical competence.

2) Are the results generalizable? It might be that the obtained results were just an artifact of the teaching method used. It doesn't mean that Finnish would be necessarily harder using some OTHER method than the teaching method used at FSI.

Note that this doesn't mean to say that the data is false. It means that we have no ways to assess if it's true or false with any confidence.

<comment><USER25> What makes me skeptical, is they rate Arabic as much more difficult than Hebrew, two languages with some mutual intelligibility.

<comment><USER26> I would think that too, if not for this excellent comment downthread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024).

<comment><USER27> Adding to that, I believe that Modern Hebrew has lots of loan words from Russian and probably quite a few from English.

<comment><USER28> That probably isn't going to make a huge difference - English speakers don't get much of a leg-up on French despite the gobs of shared vocabulary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> People often ask me in China how long it took to learn Chinese. "16 years" I tell them - "I'm still learning!" I've dabbled in French, Latin, Tai languages, Arabic, Vietnamese, Malay/Indonesian, etc. I personally prefer non Indo-Aryan languages as I find the grammar and conjugations too tedious, but make an exception for French because it's so pleasant to drink there!

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm really surprised (bordering on shocked) that French and Spanish are rated the same. Not to dispute the experts, but me, Spanish seems much easier than French. German also seems easier than French.

<comment><USER31> The grammar in German is killer. Damn verbs at the end, it ain't right I tell ya. (German is the only other language I know)

<comment><USER32> I took three years of German. Never had problems with the word order, including verbs. I guess I'm lucky in that; I've taken some Japanese too, and _all_ the verbs are at the end there ;-)

After all these years, I've forgotten the genders of most nouns, and I'm very shaky on my declensions.

<comment><USER33> "At the end, all verbs are."

<comment><USER34> I'd say "Alle Verben _sind_ am Ende? Das muss nicht _sein_ ". Well, it's not that simple.

<comment><USER35> In your second example, you should have highlighted _muss_ , which is the inflected verb here, which is always in the second position in an in a declarative sentence (as opposed to a question or a relative clause or whatever).

Same as in English: "All verbs _are_ at the end? That _doesn 't_ have to be".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've always heard that Dutch (and one of its northern variants) is the closest language to English in the world, yet it is clumped together in this map with languages from a much different linguistic origin. Romance languages should be harder to learn than West Germanic languages, which include English, Dutch and German, yet some of the Romance languages are listed here as easier than German. So that surprises me. Many sentences sound almost identical between Dutch and English, for example. You can't really say that about a Romance language. And the structure of the English language has much more in common with Dutch and German than with most other languages.

<comment><USER37> I moved to Belgium 7 years ago from the UK. I live in the Dutch speaking half.

I had a very rudimentary grasp of Dutch after 18 months mostly through just speaking to my mother-in-law and watching Dutch TV.

Then I spent another 18 months doing 3 hours a week evening classes. After that I was proficient enough to have hour long conversations.

I don't find it very similar to English, if anything the similarities makes it worse because they often mean something else. It is very close to German and I can understand some German now. You do spot lots of interesting similarities but everything is backwards for starters, it's "four and twenty" not "twenty four" and "what want you eating?" instead of "what do you want to eat?". So it's kind of similar but you sound really stupid unless you get it in the right order.

I think there's a big difference between making yourself understood and speaking without making errors. I've made a big effort to try to get the accent correct which very few do.

<comment><USER38> "Four and twenty" is idiomatic English in that it survives in the children's nursery rhyme _Sing a Song of Sixpence_.

It was composed around the same time that William of Orange reigned as king of the UK, so maybe that's a Dutch influence on our language!

I only know this because Four'n Twenty is the unofficial national dish of Melbourne. :)

<comment><USER36> Dutch in general is much closer to Shakespeare's era of English, which is not modern English. Shakespeare includes phrases like "he knows not what he does" instead of modern English, "he doesn't know what he is doing." The "is ..." conjugations are a relatively recent invention in English, and Dutch more closely follows old English-style construction.

<comment><USER37> I did try to imagine myself speaking Shakespearian English at times in the beginning.

That's actually the problem of translating Shakespeare into Dutch, it just sounds normal and less romantic.

"Romeo, where are you?"

If they'd translate it into old Dutch [0] it would give a better feel of the language but still wouldn't be correct as Old Dutch died out in the 12th century.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dutch](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dutch)

<comment><USER39> "Wherefore art thou Romeo" isn't confusing to modern English speakers because of the archaic "art thou", it's confusing to modern English speakers because it actually means "why are you [named] Romeo [implicitly, Montague]", the where- prefix has nothing to do with location.

It's extremely common for modern speakers to be unaware what wherefore means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In practice there will be a lot of other factors affecting the ease of learning, especially if you live in respective countries. Scandinavians and the Dutch pretty much all speak english and is internatuonally oriented so you don't necessarily get that much practice speaking the native language as say in Italy or Spain.

My native Norwegian is somewhat harder to learn than similarities with english suggests, because dislects are widely spoken everywhere including radio and TV. In addition large number of other Scandinavians live here who speak their native language while interacting with Norwegians.

It means my American wife can't often decide whether she is listening to a northern Norwegian dialect or e.g Swedish while listening to a Norwegian talk show.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting map but the color choices are strange to me. I typically associate Red with difficult and Green with easy but it seems that this reverses that. I wonder if there is a reason.

<comment><USER42> It could be a reference (possibly an unconscious one) to the fact that British maps of the world traditionally coloured territories of the British Empire in pink or red.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> As an American, I can say that it takes at _least_ two weeks in Ireland before you can understand a damned thing they say.

<comment><USER44> It's because your movies and tv shows move only in one direction across the Atlantic. Also there's dozens of regional Irish accents, quite distinct from each other, some easier to understand than others. You'd probably find Northern Irish accents (or someone from Glasgow) most difficult to understand.

<comment><USER45> The Irish lilt is a bit of an obstacle but my money's on the the accent in the Scottish highlands. There are times when I dunna ken a single word people are saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why did you link to this page, which is little more than blogspam wrapped around the original source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/)

<comment><USER47> You're right, that does appear to be the primary source. It's a Redditor called Fummy who creates various maps:

[https://www.reddit.com/user/Fummy/submitted/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Fummy/submitted/)

Fummy has created a new version that corrects the colors for the rankings (so that red is now the most difficult, green is easier), updated the data on language difficulty, and wisely added their Reddit user link to the new image:

[https://i.imgur.com/37xlzKE.png](https://i.imgur.com/37xlzKE.png)

<comment><USER48> But he still has the "concidered"...

<comment><USER47> Hah! Well spotted! Maybe Fummy will fix that for v3...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I have always wanted to learn another language of course, so I took an introductory Russian course but did not follow through with my studies. The language is interesting, but I wasn't making many connections to English so it was difficult to keep interest. I'm taking Latin now and find I'm almost breezing through it. I'm nowhere near conversational, but I can now read and write grammatically complicated Latin texts. The parallels between English and Latin, and the development of similar languages from Latin is absolutely fascinating and I feel it will be useful in the future if I choose to learn another language-- even if that language is not Latin-derived. I've learned a lot about grammatical structure in general, and can extrapolate how grammar may be used in other languages more easily. I highly recommend learning Latin, it is a very cultural and practical study.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why is Arabic twice harder than Hebrew, as hard as Chinese? Hebrew and Arabic are closely related (the alphabet (well, an abjad) is almost the same, grammar is almost the same).

<comment><USER51> As an Arabic speaker, I would say it's because of regional Arabic variants.

For example, a Moroccan Arabic user would have trouble conversing with a Tunisian Arabic user, _even though both countries are in North Africa_. On the other hand, a Saudi Arabic user likely wouldn't even be able to tell Moroccan Arabic from Tunisian Arabic[1], let alone understand a Moroccan or Tunisian Arabic speaker!

The further east/west you go, the more differences arise (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar), and the harder it becomes for Arabic users to understand one another. But it can get even more hairy: in some cases, Arabic users _from the same country_ can face trouble understanding one another in day-to-day speech.

Given that the goal of an FSO is to understand as much of a language as possible (I assume?), learning Arabic becomes a much more difficult task. If the goal was just to learn MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), which is the formal and written form of Arabic, then I think it would fall under the same category as Hebrew. But MSA can only take you so far and won't really help you integrate with the local population.

[1] Middle Eastern TV channels (e.g., Al Jazeera) typically include on-screen captions in MSA if the speaker is using an "unintelligible" dialect such as Moroccan Arabic.

<comment><USER52> I don't know anything about Arabic but can't see how this can affect English speakers learning rate. This same situation exist in almost every large country. German, for example, can have different phonology and cases based on region. Similarly, Russian too. Turkish pronunciation changes very heavily based on region.

<comment><USER53> I have never had any trouble understanding anyone speaking Russian from any part of the country. The differences in dialects are hardly noticeable, and these days almost non-existent (probably due to Soviet standardization efforts). The most prominent difference is probably pronouncing unstressed "o" as "a" (akanie, this is considered "correct" pronounciation) or as "o" (okanie).

<comment><USER54> When I just began speaking English more or less fluently I had no problem with American English but British just sounded like a different language to me. I had to watch any movie with British English with subtitles. Nowadays I have to make an effort to recognize British accent otherwise it sounds no different than American.

I imagine different regional accents in Russian could be the same for non- native speakers. What a native speaker does not even notice could be completely unintelligible for somebody with just few hundred hours of studying the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Warning: Certain tech jobs and other fields, can enable options to take a couple of years and work in some pretty cool places.

If you have any such romantic thoughts entering your head after reading those numbers, please just throw them out the window if you tend toward jobs with crunch modes, big ambitious goals, etc, especially ones without a lot of personal interaction (like coding in a cube for 12hrs/day). These factors can drastically reduce your efficiency in learning the language.

I did an expat tour for a few years and it was a great experience, but at the time didn't have the foresight to think through this part and it was quite frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER56> Anyone whose intrerested, this website has the old version of my map. After I posted it to reddit people had some suggestions. Switch the colours, update it for the new German and French rankings, show Asia also.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7ewn04/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7ewn04/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/)

[https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc](https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc)

these are the final versions.

</comment><comment><USER57> Lots of people pointing out that languages are hard, the numbers given are for really intensive programmes etc.

Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to learn which I found interesting:

[https://www.fluentin3months.com](https://www.fluentin3months.com)

The theory is to start from day 1 with 15 minute real conversations with native speakers (Skype pals). You either pay them or offer them the same in English afterwards. You are _not_ permitted to fall back to another language during the call! This makes you study damn hard between sessions to improve you vocabulary and reduce the awkwardness. Benny (the author) spent months working in Spain and learning no Spanish, and stumbled on this method as a last resort.

It is very similar in spirit (immersion, but not requing presence in a native speaking country) to the Kato Lomb approach:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb)

Which is documented in her book "Polyglot". (Cut off from native speakers she used romance novels, which have a very low reading age, dictionaries of the language itself, rather than translation ones, and radio broadcasts, and was so successful that the Russians arrested her as a spy when they took Hungary in WW2, and she addressed a soldier in perfect Russian.)

<comment><USER58> > Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to > learn which I found interesting:

> [https://www.fluentin3months.com](https://www.fluentin3months.com)

He hasn't had any success with it either. Benny is incredibly bad at speaking the languages he's claimed to have "learned" in 3 months.

<comment><USER59> I had years of classroom German in high school and basically cannot hold a conversation. Yes, Benny sounds like shit, and has to work pretty hard to express himself, but he is able to hold conversations with people (there are videos). To me the idea that one could get to even that rudimentary level of conversational use in 3 months is pretty revelatory.

My point is even if he's "bad" at these languages, he's done something I didn't previously think was even possible.

<comment><USER58> The only languages that he's become even somewhat competent at are the ones closely related to languages that he already knew.

Here's a video of him "holding a conversation" in Mandarin: https: [https://youtu.be/hoWXYmLpNJY?t=643](https://youtu.be/hoWXYmLpNJY?t=643)

It's a series of non-stop "uh-huh's" and, frankly, it's embarrassing. He's a marketing gimmick and pretty reviled by the polyglot community for trivializing how much effort learning a language actually takes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> As an English speaker who learned basic Korean as my second language I am surprised to see it ranked as hard as Japanese and Chinese. There are only a handful of phonemes that are difficult (largely because they split the difference between g/k and l/r) and the language is highly regular and the alphabet is simple. Chinese seemed near impossible with the tonal nature as well as needing to memorize a large number of chinese symbols.

</comment><comment><USER61> I saw a few comments regarding the difficulty of languages within Category V. Particularly Japanese/Chinese.

I speak Mandarin Chinese and Japanese on a near daily basis, and definitely consider Japanese to be more difficult than Chinese. Nowadays Chinese everyday, previously Japanese everyday. I find both languages and cultures to be very fun and will point out some of the key differences that I think make Chinese easier than Japanese. I also encourage anyone to jump in either of the languages and have fun. It has been life changing for me. :)

\- Chinese grammar is far simpler (less fluff) and somewhat maps to similar word ordering as English. Japanese also has lots of fluff and rigid rules for grammar, and the word ordering/sentence structures are much more alien than Chinese to an English speaker. For example, English: "I will go to the store", Chinese: "I go store", Japanese: "I SUBJECT_MARKER store DIRECTION_MARKER go". (fun fact, Japanese grammar is not actually backwards as people often say, it's more like a bubble of nested clauses, can elaborate more if anyone cares.)

\- Chinese verbs/adjectives for example, don't conjugate, you just add a few context words. Japanese, while logical, still has more conjugation rules/exceptions (though not near as awful as English) For example, English: "I was a Marine", Chinese: "I before is Marine", Japanese: "I SM Marine was".

\- Japanese formalities are far more deep/complicated than Chinese. Yes, Chinese has formalities, but anyone who has done serious deep dives in Japanese business / honorifics will understand.

\- Chinese while written has a high barrier to entry because it's all characters, they at least with very very few exceptions, all have only one reading. This makes memorizing them much easier than Japanese. In Japanese, you have two forms of reading (onyomi & kunyomi), you can think of it as the Chinese & Japanese readings. Most characters have at least 2 readings, and some even more. This makes memorizing them more complicated.

\- Chinese characters are simplified, thus easier to write.

\- Japanese in addition to Kanji (Chinese characters), also has 2 phonetic systems, katakana (for foreign/loan words), hiragana (Japanese words). And hiragana gets mixed in with kanji (loosely as the conjugated part of verbs and other grammar). A new learner of Japanese would be excited to learn hiragana, only to find out, no one writes in all hiragana (which would be awful to read). So, they end up not being able to really read much, until they start learning lots of kanji. So the phonetic systems only really help when you are writing and forget a kanji. But honestly, you'll find that you just type both languages 99% of the time so it doesn't matter as much. Except that I type Chinese much faster since words are literally just shorter.

\- The hard parts of Chinese are the tones. Japanese pronunciation is by far easier. Cantonese pronunciation is harder than Mandarin as there are also more tones. (to me at least)

\- Both China and Japan have deep histories and cultures, which finds themselves at the heart of both languages. Both will take many many years to sink in and feel comfortable.

\- Another cultural item but I find Japanese people much more willing to speak to foreigners in Japanese, and have patience with bad Japanese. Chinese people are much more direct and likely to laugh at your Chinese pronunciation or make fun of your speaking early on, or even just never speak to you in Chinese and prefer to use English. This happens in both cultures, and the better you get the more likely both countries will be willing to speak in their native languages with you, so just push through it, and don't take it personal. When you're abroad, they'll be much more likely to speak their native language with you since most people abroad won't be able to speak very proficient English. Which is one of many reasons why studying abroad can be hugely helpful to learning the language. I also recommend to just be conscious of whether or not that native wants to use speak with you. Some people try and force it.

I have also studied Korean and put it on par with Japanese, and thankfully because I know Chinese/Japanese characters, I can more easily remember/guess many Korean words which are actually rooted in Chinese. I feel bad for people trying to brute force memorize hangul words (or any alphabet to be honest)

<comment><USER62> If the article is about speaking skills, I'm surprised to see these languages as the most difficult. Most English speakers I know that have lived/worked in Korea/Japan/China have found it rather easy to pick up the language. Writing is another matter of course...

(I live in HK btw)

<comment><USER61> I think the primary focus was relative difficulty amongst languages. I found picking up conversational Chinese to be about 1.5-2x easier than Japanese due to how different Japanese grammar was than English. Similarly, Spanish is far easier than both.

Fun side note, My trip to HK was interesting because people told me English would get me around easily, but when I arrived I found Mandarin far more conveneient which surprised me. (I'm planning on visiting HK sometime next year)

<comment><USER63> Not anywhere near proficient in either, but personally found it more difficult to approach Mandarin because of tones and the writing.

At least with Japanese, you can start practicing by writing/saying aloud romaji and begin to make sense of pronunciation (later transitioning away from romaji entirely once you have learned hirigana).

With mandarin there is no 'romaji' and as such you can't just practice by writing down Chinese words and reading them aloud as you would an english word (cause tones).

Maybe it's different once you get over the initial hump in Mandarin.

So would it be fair to assume that Mandarin is easier 'long term' versus Japanese; ie- Japanese easy to start/learn, hard to master - <USER2> difficult to start/learn but easier to master?

<comment><USER61> I think Chinese is also easier to get started with. Chinese actually does have a "romaji" like alphabet called "pinyin". Most Chinese books will start with pinyin and will often have either pinyin written above the characters early on, or have a dialogue section in characters and another section in pinyin. Example: "I am American" -> 我是美国人(is is america person) -> wo shi meiguoren

You could also write the pinyin as "wo3 shi4 mei3guo2ren2" or as "wǒs hì měiguórén", but the tones aren't usually only written in textbooks. If two Chinese people are typing pinyin (because they don't have access to Chinese input method), they won't write the tones and will write it as my first pinyin example.

I actually think, all-around, with the exception of pronunciation Chinese is easier. Both are difficult to master due to their deep and unique cultures/histories/ traits.

Anecdotally speaking, I have a good number of friends/acquaintances who have come back from China/Taiwan/Japan and I feel that on average the people speak better Chinese than the Japanese counterparts.

I also studied through business Japanese and Chinese in college and lived/studied in Japan. My finding was that the students in advanced Chinese class could speak significantly more than that students in Japanese class could speak. This did imo, have a bit to do with the differences in how the classes were taught, but it didn't seem to account for everything.

This is just from my anecdotal experience, and opinion from myself learning/speaking both languages for the past 13 years, so I wouldn't be surprised if others have a different experience.

<comment><USER63> Thanks for those insights - that is interesting and very helpful.

Seems you have more Chinese background so you may be a tad biased but please give your honest opinion (which is valued greatly, given your extensive experience!): which is more fun to speak & listen to, Japanese or Mandarin ?

Also you're planning to visit/live in HK do you plan to (or already) learn(ing) Cantonese ?

<comment><USER61> I have much more experience with Japanese. I started Japanese a year earlier than Chinese and studied them concurrently after that. I also studied abroad in Japan for a year. I have also written/read/used Japanese considerably more. While I did concurrently speak/use Chinese often during that period, I found I had to put less effort into Chinese. (We're still talking 1000s of hours). Nowadays, I use Chinese much more frequently because my wife is Chinese and our language-of-communication is Chinese. We've been married for 6.5 years, so that certainly helped my Chinese ramp up and overtake my Japanese. However, in terms of scientific vocabulary, only until recently, my Japanese vocab was greater than my Chinese. I've been reading many more books and forcing myself to write more in Chinese to build up my skills. (Have a few random posts on my blog) It's amazing how important all aspects: listening/reading/writing/speaking are important to learning a language. :)

<comment><USER63> Thanks again KC ! Inspiring stuff. Bookmarked your blog for future reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Fun to see _Breton_ , the local language from Brittany appearing on this map. unfortunately, this language was decimated by decades of coercive measures from the French government during the 20th century. And nowadays, almost no- one speaks it as its first language even among the elderly in the most remote places of the countryside. :(

</comment><comment><USER65> I have a harder time (at least as a beginner) with Russian than I do with Mandarin, because of the multiple cases and verb forms. In Mandarin I learn one word and can use it. In Russian that word has 10-20+ different forms. (This is about speaking, not writing.) Maybe it clicks at some point. I never got past the beginner stage.

<comment><USER66> Do you mean the declinations? In that case if I remember correctly Russian has 5 declinations, not 10-20+. I never tried to learn mandarin but I guess that it will be _much_ more difficult than Russian. I learnt to read Russian in my free time during a couple of days. I can't even imagine how long I would need to learn to read mandarin. I was quite quick with hiragana and katakana but all in all they are just over 100 characters and now I almost completely forgot them after years of not practicing. Mandarin has something like tens _of thousand_ unique characters.

<comment><USER54> Russian has 6 cases for nouns (and rudimentary 7th), together with plural this is already 12 forms a noun can take. Verbs change by tense, person, plurality and gender in the past singular. However there is also aspect and you probably want to know both perfect and imperfect verbs for the same action. Movement verbs have directionality on top of that. Adjective are changing together with the nouns and also have "brief" form. So yeah, you need to learn about a dozen forms for something which is one-two syllables in Mandarin. Of course, most of the forms are just semi-regular mutations of prefix and/or suffix but it doesn't help when you are trying to recognize them in speech.

<comment><USER67> > Russian has 6 cases for nouns (and rudimentary 7th)

And rudimentary 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th :)

Vocative: exists for religious words (Боже - Oh God), names ending in а/я (Кать - Hey, Katya!), and some archaic expressions.

Partitive: exists as a separate case for many common mass nouns (чашка чаю - cup of tea, ложка мёду - spoon of honey) but usually can be replaced with genitive.

Locative: exists as a separate case for a small number of nouns (в лесу - <USER3> the forest, на дому - at home, на двери́ - on the door; compare with о две́ри stress pattern in the prepositional); for most nouns, it just coincides with the prepositional case.

Counting form: exists only in the plural for many units of measure and only with exact numeric quantities greater than or equal to 5 (восемь бит - <USER4> bits; compare to количество битов - number of bits)

Paucal counting form: exists as a separate case for a few common nouns, used with exact numeric quantities between 1.5 and 4 (полтора часа́ - one and a half hours; compare to ча́са, which would be the expected stress pattern for the genitive); for most nouns, this coincides with the genitive.

<comment><USER54> I just meant vocative since it's a proper case in other Slavic languages. A technical question - how do you type stress accents? Phone?

<comment><USER67> Technical answer - <USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code)

In Windows, you'll need to enable a registry key.

In Linux, I do Ctrl-Shift-u 0301 after the vowel to insert the stress mark (U+0301, combining accute accent).

If you don't have unicode input, the simplest solution is to copypaste from Wikipedia.

<comment><USER54> I see. Thought there could be a regular input method like in French. French accents actually work with US English keyboard layout on Mac but not with Russian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Language is a fascinating subject as always, I just wish there were a way to filter out non-native/fluent speakers from comments on said languages. Repeating what was read elsewhere doesn't really matter.

I once had a guy sit at my dinner table telling me how easy Spanish is to learn when he didn't know the language. I had my wife (a native Spanish speaker) promptly embarass him, he claimed to speak Spanish, why insult my wife who has native fluency (but still works at her own language, as I try to improve on my native English) by trivializing the language as 'easy'?

His wife spoke Cantonense and he never could figure it out, so I assume it was a defense mechanism to say the language I'm around is "easier". Objectively easy? Don't say so unless you're fully fluent, because you might get punked at my dinner table.

</comment><comment><USER69> This map doesn't make much sense as it doesn't seperate between speaking, listening, reading and writing. Which is critical for e.g Chinese or Korean. You can learn to speak Chinese in 2 days to max 2 weeks. It's so extremely simple and regular. Same for Korean which is even simplier. But Chinese had by far the most difficulties in reading and writing the irregular and historically loaded kanji signs. In opposite to Korean, which is of all written language on Earth the simplier and easiest. Any alien landing on earth will immediately be able to pick up Hangul. Thanks to the most recent modernization, which is always simplification.

Eg think of English as modernized German. Or upper German to lower German. And then the old dialects from the mountains. And then all back to India.

<comment><USER70> > You can learn to speak Chinese in 2 days to max 2 weeks

I don't speak Chinese, but my understanding was that the tonal stuff was pretty tough for those with no background in Asian languages?

<comment><USER69> Nope, cannot confirm. Just try a "Learn Chinese in one day" course. Speaking a proper r in other languages is much harder, than the Chinese sing sang without any r.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> As far as I understand it, modern English is a mix of Germanic and Romance Languages, just radically simplified. It explains why there are often two words in english which mean the same:

      - liberty => libertas (Latin)
      - freedom => Freiheit (German)

So being born as an english native speaker gives you the advantage of not having the immediate need to learn a foreign language, but on the other hand it is much harder to learn one, as your own language doesn't use many of the widespread grammatical elements.

So while you might easily pick up a lot of vocabulary for central european languages, German seems to be harder to learn as its grammar is a little more complicated (but still very close compared to asian languages).

</comment><comment><USER72> Too bad they don't mention Esperanto, just to give some perspective. The evidence and my experience as someone who struggles with foreign languages is it's about 10x easier than Dutch.

That would make makes all the languages in this map seem much more similar in difficulty.

</comment><comment><USER73> I always found it interesting that English is classified as a Germanic language while it is more similar (vocabulary and grammar) to Romance languages than to some Germanic languages, including German.

</comment><comment> eric-hu I'm learning Thai right now and I just started learning the writing system.

Coming from a native English speaking background, speaking Chinese with my family, I can empathize with people whr find tones hard.

I've found it fairly easy to pick up Cantonese words even though there are more tones than Mandarin. But with Thai, there are long vowels and short vowels in addition to tones. It's a totally new concept to me. I can't confidently distinguish between "nam" and "naam" except for certain tones.

<comment><USER74> I'm Thai and can confirm. Words with five different intonations can have totally different meanings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Can't stop thinking of that `concidered` in the top image...

<comment><USER48> Me either... Ironic that a graphic made by a group who trains diplomats in foreign languages won't pay that much attention to writing correctly in theirs.

Edit: Apparently the image was not produced by the FSI, but by a redditor: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822493)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> So as you go further out from English speaking country, language becomes more different and more harder to learn? The gradient coloring on the map would have been nice.

</comment><comment><USER77> Spanish is definitely more easy to grasp than French. There are a few traps in the road and many variants, but phonetically is much simpler. You can recite any text in standard spanish correctly in a day even if you do not understand a word of what you are saying. The main problem in this sense is the local vocabulary and idioms. American spanish is extremely diverse and rich in terms and meanings.

</comment><comment><USER78> I am learning Chinese and have been for 2 years and I think I still will be in 5 more years. Hoping to add Korean and Japanese at some point though.

</comment><comment><USER79> Finnish 834+ weeks for me.

</comment><comment><USER80> Is it just a coincidence that the farther out from the UK you go the more weeks it takes to learn the language?

<comment><USER81> I don't think it's a coincidence at all. The closer a language and it's speakers are to English speakers the more likely those languages are to cross- pollinate, by sharing vocabulary, grammar, and culture. It makes sense that the closer someone is to you both culturally and geographically that the easier it is to speak their language, and understand their meaning.

<comment><USER82> Absent are Celtic languages, which have hardly any shared vocabulary with English, and completely different grammars (though lots of shared culture). Irish is listed as taking 1100 class hours to learn here:

        http://multilingualbooks.com/languagedifficulty.html

i.e. category 4 on the original web page.

<comment><USER83> the likelihood an american foreign service employee would ever need to use a celtic language is not very high. similar probably holds for basque which i hear is not the easiest to learn either.

<comment><USER84> I'm basque and I can confirm that basque is quite more complicated than english.

In fact, if you check the map, there's a gray spot on the north of Spain/South of France. That's Euskadi (Basque Country area).

<comment><USER85> The region where Basque is spoken is not gray because of its difficulty, but because there's no data [1].

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/dpylzbx/)

<comment><USER84> Yes, poorly explained on my comment (not native english speaker, obviously). I just wanted to point out the region where basque is spoken. Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Something I discovered recently is that learning a second language is hard and takes a lot of work. I moved to Germany 3 years ago thinking I would just kind of pick it up as I go. Well, that didn't really happen. So now I am spending 3 of my evenings per week learning German after work.

<comment><USER87> I take that you've never heard of Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"[0]? My favorite quote is

 _" My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it."_

Although, as a native speaker I can't comment on whether that's actually accurate.

[0]: [https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)

<comment><USER88> German definitely is difficult in some respects for an English speaker. English grammar has simplified over time in ways that German has not. For instance English used to have a distinction between formal and informal you (thou and ye), centuries ago but that long since passed into disuse. Nowadays there is only one form of "you". Likewise, the English of the 11th century had the Germanic three genders: male, female and neutral. However Old English would be unintelligible to a modern speaker. Gender was gone by the 1300's.

All these things cause tremendous problems for learning the language because you have to track distinctions in the language that don't exist natively so you never had to think about before. Native speakers learn genders just by hearing them repeatedly, at the same time as learning the words, but English speakers learning German normally need to study dictionaries a lot to learn new words and as such genders often get lost or muddled along the way.

One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation for is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar than modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than others. German seems to have hardly simplified at all outside of the forced spelling reform. The simplification of English grammar has been continual and is ongoing today - we're in the middle of losing the distinction between "less" and "fewer" for example, and "whom" is virtually dead. Presumably there's a grammatical limit somewhere, and presumably _very_ old languages were simpler than medieval languages. But Latin is often held up as the archetype of crisp, consistent yet complex grammar and that's thousands of years old.

<comment><USER87> > _One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation > for is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar > than modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than > others._

I can recommend the book _The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind 's Greatest Invention_ on that subject. It really can't be answered in a short summary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Tried to learn Japanese. Gave up after 5 years.

I really did make an effort, signing up to Japanese courses at my local Kumon (when I lived in Japan), trying lots of different methods (e.g. Rosetta Stone), but it just wasn't to be.

I'll stick to learning programming languages - those I can relate to.

<comment><USER90> I'm teaching myself Japanese now, and plan to take courses later. I don't even plan to be super fluent in 5 years, but it's an interesting challenge to do while I'm not in school anymore. Its hard for me to imagining dropping something like that after a 5 year commitment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I highly doubt that learning German and learning Swiss German is actually in the same category. You essentially have to learn two languages as as Swiss German is only spoken, the written language is German. And there are many different dialects in a very small country.

</comment><comment><USER92> This is probably also skewed toward learners of a certain age. I'm a bit older than the likely target demo. I can read and write Spanish and German with proficiency and a little Korean, but I have great difficulty understanding the spoken languages.

</comment><comment><USER93> Why Turkish is easier than Hungarian? Both are almost same in grammer like wovel harmony, suffix oriented language etc.

Also, I hear from Turks that learned Japanese and Hungarian that these languages are easy to learn.

<comment><USER52> (Disclaimer: not a linguist, conlanger enthusiast)

Turkish grammar is extremely regular. The only weird/non-regular thing in Turkish language is its past tenses. Its past tenses are relatively complex and change suffix based on hear-say, story-telling, context, complaining, mood, fact etc... Hungarian and Turkish are similar only up to both being heavily agglutinating (as you know, they're not from the same language family). And its entirely possible English speakers find Hungarian harder than Turkish.

Turkish phonology also isn't very complex. Stress is always in the same syllable. There are two very hard phonemes to pronounce: [ɰ] and [ɯ]. But overall Hungarian phonology is more sophisticated.

Vowel harmony is very hard to learn. You cannot think about it as you speak, since it takes a lot of time and is used in every word. It has to be intuitive to you. So it makes sense that both Hungarian and Turkish are hard languages to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> I find it surprising that Malayalam is rated less difficult than Hindi. As speaker of several Indian-aryan languages, Dravidian languages like Malayalam always seemed more difficult to comprehend.

<comment> half-kh-hacker There are a few that I thought were surprising, for instance, as a half- Cambodian person, I was surprised to see that Korean (a language that I am learning, and have picked up relatively quickly) was ranked _two ranks_ above Khmer, (my father's native language, with a much more difficult script compared to Korean, and similar vocabulary difference to Korean.

Furthermore, way more English loanwords exist in modern (South) Korean, so comprehending sentences is way easier for me in Korean than Khmer, even though I've only been doing it for about 4-5 months (on-and-off).

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I'm a native English speaker who is moderately fluent in French and German. I was always lousy at English grammar until I learned German. Then all my English grammar just maid sense.

</comment><comment><USER96> where is the actual data? how much base size do they have? are the differences in weeks any significant? without such information this is just another junk infographic on the web.

</comment><comment><USER97> Ha! I'm living in Vietnam now and it is listed as "Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category." which is a complete understatement!

</comment><comment><USER98> This is a stupid study.

It depends on the language they are learning.

Suppose a native hindi speaker who knows english is learning bengali, he would learn bengali faster than a native english speaker.

</comment><comment><USER99> There are Group IV languages like Greek which are Indo-European -- what makes them harder than Group III, which are all more distant from English?

</comment><comment><USER100> Surprised by Korean being in the hardest category - I've learnt Korean & Spanish to a similar level, and found them about the same.

<comment><USER101> I'm guessing that for Korean it's mostly the grammar differences, honorifics, and writing system.

<comment><USER102> >I'm guessing that for Korean it's mostly the grammar differences, honorifics

Definitely! And some other differences too. As someone living in South Korea currently, the reading/writing part is trivial, but beyond that it is a lot harder to learn (for an english speaker (although I'm danish)) than, say, French.

I definitely disagree that Korean and Spanish would be considered equally hard, and know literally no one here that would say that either.

<comment><USER103> Maybe that person is the speaker of Arabic. For them, Korean and Spanish should be equally distant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Icelandic and Greek should be Category I or II? Icelandic is a germanic language and Greek has many influences on English. At most C3.

<comment><USER105> Icelandic seemingly has not gone through the process of simplification that most modern European languages have. It is more like Old Norse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language)

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> How "open" this "culture" if it involves anti-adblocker?

</comment><comment><USER107> I am curious. How do we say that a language is hard/easy to learn

<comment><USER51> The average time it takes an English learner to reach some level of proficiency?

<comment><USER107> Okay. Cool, so we average out based on the students that particular site/course teaches. But that can't really be the national average right?

Thousands vs millions in the set of students vs those who never applied for learning.

but yes, we can average it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Can confirm, Thai is a fucking PITA to learn, coming from English.

<comment><USER109> What's your strategy? I'm learning as well and I found that learning the alphabet lays a great foundation.

<comment><USER108> well to be honeat I don't have one, and I have literally no expectations of learning to read/write it.

For me it's just learning via immersion.

The tones are the problem for me: kao/kao (white/rice).

Well, and the fact that most people _here_ don't actually speak "properly" \- they abbreviate everything. "Kob khun krub" becomes a fleeting, almost doppler-like "karrrb".

I've come to accept that I'll never be fluent, or even conversational in thai. I can ask for a tank of gas, I can order a coffee or a meal, I can explain that I don't speak Thai (oh how I understand the situation of non-English speakers knowing 'I don't speak English' in perfect clear English), etc.

My son will be bilingual, and as he learns I'm sure I'll pick up more too, but at this point, having seen the struggle of native speakers (one a former teacher) helping a Thai 7 year old with her homework, I have zero illusions about how hard this language is, and after taking Japanese at school, I have zero illusions about my own aptitude for learning other languages.

<comment><USER109> For the tones, I recommend this apps section on the tones, after I went through it (its only one page with all tones next to each other) it clicked for me. Never really had issues since then. [https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/walen- thai/id733242683?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/walen- thai/id733242683?mt=8)

But I really recommend learning to read. I started with literally learning the consonants names (ด = 'do dek'). Then things kind of just naturally follows.

Actually I'm on the opposite. Maybe the language is hard, but when you learn it step by step it feels very easy, since the next piece is just another step.

Most sites wants you to learn "5 consonants, 4 vowels, a few rules, 1 tone" at first. All this does is to make it more confusing IMO. Just learn all 44 consonants, and once you have them down, learn all vowels. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Threads about language on HN always turn into "why my language is harder to learn than yours". It's all relative, there's more to learning a language than just learning the words and grammar.

</comment><comment><USER111> I think data from LDS Church would be more interesting.

</comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Where are yellow colored (level III) countries?

</comment><comment><USER112> Wow Finish harder than Russian. I believe it.

<comment><USER113> Finnish (and Hungarian) are part of their own linguistic group (Finno-Ugric languages). They both basically have no cognates with the Indo-European language group (which includes not only the Germanic languages like English and German but also the Romance languages and languages like Hindi and Persian, all of which are more similar to each other than they are to Finnish or Hungarian).

Basically, Finnish and Hungarian are the hardest European languages to learn for non-native speakers, almost without comparison.

<comment><USER114> Those two, and Basque, I've wondered a lot about. Hungarian, presumably deriving from the Huns, goes back to pre-historic Central Asia, possibly as far east as Mongolia or Siberia. Finish, I'm not as sure of the consensus provenance. And Basque? Who in the world knows? Possibly some kind of pre- Celtic holdout, I've seen it posited.

<comment><USER115> Hungarians have nothing to do with Huns. They're Magyars, which was a different population in Eastern Europe/the Uralic regiom. "Hungarian" itself does not come from "Hun", the etymology is different. In many countries, such as mine, it's easier to spot the difference since their name is either Ungur (notice the missing H) or Maghiar.

The origin of the population is unclear before they were in the Uralic region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Can people not put stripes, and dots, or something? I cannot for my live read this map as my color vision is impaired. It's frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER117> Category 0: Esperanto 4-8 weeks

</comment><comment><USER118> I wonder why having access the sea makes it easier to learn English for north- western residents of Russia.

</comment><comment><USER119> it takes no time at all to judge a person, why do we think these things?

</comment><comment><USER120> Those colors are very unintuitive. You'd think that "red" means "more hours"..?

Weird.

</comment><comment><USER121> Anyone wants to learn Chinese? I offer personal teaching service of Chinese for English speakers. I am a native Chinese, and major in English in Zhejiang University, I am able to help you with Chinese learning. Welcome to contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER121> Seems not very welcomed, anyway, if anyone come to Wuhan, China, welcome to contact me(my email above), I may be able to show you around here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> Japanese is usually more difficult than Cantonese? Really? As an English native speaker who has learnt some rudimentary Cantonese I find this hard to believe.

<comment><USER82> Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons.

Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji.

Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers (correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak.

Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana.

Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.)

The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese wins by a country mile.

<comment><USER122> > Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it > would be easier to learn to speak.

Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)? If so, Cantonese has that in spades.

Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in Mandarin).

<comment><USER114> As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little daunting.

On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.

<comment><USER32> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

<comment><USER122> > Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> There is no way Spain should be listed in the same bracket as Sweden/Norway/Denmark or Portugal. All these countries have a far greater portion of the population with good levels of spoken and written English. Everyone in Spain studies English from the age of about 8 or 9, but about 1 in 100 have anything approaching basic conversational English.</comment>


HN Podcast #1: Kickstarter, Raspberry Pi, And Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://hnpod.com/episodes/kickstarter-raspberry-pi-instagram?hn=1 <comment><USER2> Feature request: could you upload the podcasts as videos with a still image on YouTube? It would improve the UX and help with discoverability.

Google gives some easy ways to do it: [http://www.google.com.hk/m/search?q=mp3%20to%20youtube&c...](http://www.google.com.hk/m/search?q=mp3%20to%20youtube&client=mobile-360)

<comment><USER3> Truth be told, I use YouTube to listen more than I do to watch.

<comment><USER4> Same here. I often take advantage of the playlist feature and listen to songs, at least those not monetized upon yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had the iTunes link approved. It's now on the site, but for anyone who missed it:

<http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/hnpod/id521083409#>

<comment><USER6> Can you please post on the Zune Market place as well?

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I've tried. I found nothing searching for Zune Marketplace. Then I searched around and found this page - <http://social.zune.net/podcasts/> but it says "Sorry, the requested page is not available in your region." I clicked 'Sign in' and tried to create an account but it's just redirecting me in an endless loop. Feel free to submit the RSS through your own account if that's possible.

<comment><USER7> If you've still trouble with it, I've submitted the RSS. Usually it's reviewed and appears in marketplace after few days. Still then users can just add the RSS in the podcasts section of the Zune player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Had a fuzzy feeling when I started playing it and Orbital is playing as the intro for the podcast.

And suddenly I was in the 90's, seeing Angelina Jolie during the movie Hackers.

Subtle touch at least on the nostalgic side.

<comment><USER9> So opening song really is from the movie! I felt the same :-)

<comment><USER8> yeah, but don't let the RIAA know about it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> c.f. Alex's idea to start this podcast 3 days ago - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3848892>

A big thanks to Alex for getting this together so fast and for hosting a great first show. It was a lot of fun to be on.

<comment><USER5> Thanks Chad. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it'll be a pleasure to have you back on a future show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"Can you bear my Northern English accent?"_

Your Northern English Accent sounds very professional. Like a BBC news correspondent. Don't ever worry about it. Accents in general stand out and make a person very memorable.

<comment><USER11> I find it very helpful when the voice talent of a podcast consists of different accents, or at least very different voices so you can tell the speakers apart and get a sense of distinct personalities.

One of my favorite thing about the Tested.com podcast is Gary Whitta's Southern English accent.

<comment><USER12> Good point. I listened to several episodes of This Developer's Life before realising there were two presenters involved.

Maybe I'm just slow :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This podcast is amazing. Exactly the type of news I want to hear. Just in case you don't check hn every day (or even every couple of days) this podcast has you covered.

</comment><comment><USER5> The French startup I referred to as a forerunner to Kickstarter is Crowdspirit - <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/crowdspirit>

</comment><comment><USER14> Any chance of a write-up on how you managed to get this together so fast? Id especially like to know the software used and how you managed to get organise the guest speakers as the time zone difference must have been a challenge. 3 days for this an impressive feat and I will definitely be a regular listener.

<comment><USER15> As one of the guests, I have to say I was equally impressed with Alex's quick work. I'll leave it to Alex to explain the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Added to PocketCast on my phone. (Highly recommend that app for both video and audio casts. All I had to do was do a search for HNPod and it quickly found the stream and added it to my subscriptions.) (For the lazy <http://pocketcasts.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd prefer a video podcast, even if there's just talking involved. I can't just listen to something anymore, because I'd have to do something else in the same time, and then I won't be able to focus on listening. With video I can just watch it.

<comment><USER18> Try working on a spatial problem. I can't listen to podcasts while writing code, but I can while laying out a PCB.

Drawing or doing a jigsaw puzzle might work too.

<comment><USER5> Or cleaning. On the rare occasion when I clean the house, I find a podcast lets me drift right off.

<comment><USER11> Podcasts make cooking and cleaning and yardwork so much more bearable for me. Sometimes I get completely engrossed and wind up doing a far deeper clean than necessary just to have an excuse to continue listening.

But I absolutely can't code while listening to people speaking, my brain is just too old for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had previously registered for the email notification, and I received the notification at 9:28 PDT this morning. It's inspiring to see how fast you took this from idea to implementation. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great initiative, looking forward to new shows.

PS: the site is broken on my iPhone, the absolutely positioned bottom links cover the top ones.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great idea. Not only does this make for good audio content while I work, it's a godsend for when I'm driving. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be nice if one could listen directly in the browser, maybe using the <audio>-tag and an .ogg version?

</comment><comment><USER23> Kudos on getting decent audio. Are you using a Rode Podcaster? I'd love to try one.

I've had to unsubscribe to countless podcasts with decent content just because they didn't invest the £100-200 on a decent microphone & pop filter.

As you can probably tell yourself, it's harder when the guests don't have decent mics, but a good first effort.

<comment><USER24> I'd like to apologize for the echo from my side. I have a quality mic, but had to change rooms at the last second and didn't realize the acoustics were that bad or I would have tweaked the sensitivity or grabbed a more forgiving mic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone with an iOS device who is new to listening to Podcasts, I strongly suggest buying the Podcaster app. It's just a few bucks and about 100 times nicer than using iTunes on the phone or on the desktop.

Yes, I know that "better than iTunes" damning with faint praise.

<comment><USER25> Just about anything is better than the built in. I use Instacast myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Despite this not being in iTunes yet, you can still subscribe by going to "Advanced" -> "Subscribe to Podcast" and pasting the RSS feed: <http://www.hnpod.com/episodes.rss>

<comment><USER27> Awesome! I was browsing Downcast to see if this was up yet but no luck, but now subscribed manually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've added it to Flapcast, in case anyone uses it: <http://flapcast.com/index.php/podcasts/podcastInfo/4592>

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I had no idea there were so many outlets!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really enjoyed this. It's short and doesn't meander with stupid jokes or idle chatter. Good work, especially by the moderator. Can't wait for the next one.

</comment><comment><USER30> Thanks for doing this. I'll be a regular listener.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes! This is what we needed this whole time! thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyway you can add this to Stitcher?

</comment><comment><USER33> anyone got another link? server down for me

<comment><USER5> I broke it. redeploying now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Honestly I think TechZingLive is way better. They talk startups, tech, and every week talk about some of the biggest HN stories.

<comment><USER35> Needless comparison. There's no limit on the number of podcasts there can be. It's the first one. Give it a chance to find its legs.

<comment><USER34> There is, however, a limit to the number of podcast I can listen to.

I simply wanted to voice my opinion that I choose a different podcast over this one for the same subject area - and I thought this was worth say publicly because there are others out there that maybe don't know about the other podcast and could benefit from my mentioning them. That is all.

<comment><USER36> You could mention the other podcast without dissing this one on the first day of its existence. The thing barely exists yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a nice idea, and I'm sorry for being so negative, but: isn't this just a summary of HN news & comments, but in audio and we can't vote and most of us will already know the subjects (since we have read the links on HN)?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you define a junior developer? - <AUTHOR> For a web development position that requires basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript companies can easily find junior developers, people with little to none experience in programming. But for system programming, how can you define a junior? Is it a person with experience as a programmer in other languages (say Ruby) but little to none experience in the language of the offer (say C++)? Or can someone without any programming experience at all find a job as a C++, Scala, Swift, Go developer? <comment><USER3> It depends on when and why I'm defining it, but my guidelines are more based on how they work than what they know:

* Junior developer - Will not produce much business value if left alone, and may produce nothing at all. Requires supervision.

* Intermediate developer - Will produce something if left alone, but not necessarily what the business most needs. Needs minimal supervision, but defined goals.

* Senior developer - Will produce immediate business value if completely ignored.

The domain and language don't matter for these, really. A Senior Go developer is going to produce immediate business value if you suddenly throw him/her into a Lisp team, too. Just slower.

When someone is considering hiring you, this is more or less what they're thinking about. It's not "do you know Scala," it's "are you going to make us more money than you cost." It's just hard to prove, for either side, so we talk about past experience instead.

<comment><USER4> >* Junior developer - Will not produce much business value if left alone, and may produce nothing at all. Requires supervision.

This is what people here like to believe. But I don't think it is really true. A kid straight out of college can generate immediate business value if he/she can set up an online shopping cart in Php to give a business an online presence. I am pretty sure that the same kid can code up any business requirement of most of the local organisations that does not need to scale much or work with great reliability.

Also, it is not true that a junior dev requires supervision. Anyone with sufficient motivation and an internet connection can figure stuff out by themselves. I mean, they can get things done, even if in a fantastically stupid fashion.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. My observation is that most graduates out of college are able to formulate strategies to high level problems, rapidly create working solutions and generally be productive.

What sets us apart from the senior developers as pointed out by the CTO of my company seems to be experience in writing good, scalable code. More often than not this means adhering to best practices, linting and testing extensively and many other things that in general come with experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Junior <\-- +--> Senior

Requires Supervision <\-- +-> Provides Supervision

Creates Systems that are Resistant to Change <\-- +-> Resolves Technical Debt

Looks for "easy wins" <\-- +-> Seeks to understand tradeoffs

Capitulates easily to PMs/etc. (usually to the detriment of the business) <\-- +-> Demands cogent plans from business concerns

Is always right <\-- +-> Fosters discussion and examination of practices (especially their own) by the whole team

Easily dazzled by new things (libraries, etc.) <\-- +-> Carefully weighs benefits and drawbacks of potential tools and practices

Easily frightened by new things (libraries, etc.) <\-- +-> Carefully weighs benefits and drawbacks of potential tools and practices

<comment><USER7> I don't see looking for quick and easy wins is not a negative, nor is in opposition to understanding trade-offs.

<comment><USER6> Notice I didn't say "Negative -> Positive". It says "Junior -> Senior". Thinking about it further, I don't think it's _possible_ to properly get to the second state (tradeoff-understanding) without _going through_ the first (win-seeking) at some point in your career... in fact, when I'm hiring Junior devs I select for _win-seeking_ behavior. "Tradeoff-understanding" is more of a philosophical disposition that one (IMHO the best engineers) arrives at later. "Win-seeking" is kind of related to the "I'm always right" point: A junior will say "Of course this is the best possible thing to do and there are no drawbacks" where a senior will say "Wait a sec - this might be worth doing, but let's understand what we're changing or giving up".

So, in a sense yeah - the Senior is still "looking for a win", so-to-speak but in a deeper zen-state where they realize "There _are_ no wins: only tradeoffs".

<comment><USER8> I think the "looks for wins" attribute is just a desireable trait period (like "tries to write good code"), but the ability to weigh trade offs comes with experience and changes how one looks for wins.

In the end, you're making a smart vs. wise distinction, and the two are neither independent nor opposed.

Perhaps fixes the problem in front of them vs. thinks about the problem in context (with the context getting bigger and hairier with more experience).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would define a junior developer as anyone who is not going to be very effective without some supervision. In other words, they have things to learn and need guidance and oversight before they will be able to do much correctly on their own. This could focused on tools, techniques, processes, it doesn't really matter. So I don't think the definition is different for web or systems development, although the tools and depth of experience might be.

<comment><USER10> This.

Without supervision:

* can they be trusted to take a story and turn it into a list of one or more problems which are solvable and sensible to solve?

* given a list of problems, can they be trusted to select appropriate tools for solving each problem in a sane manner?

* given a problem and an approach, can they be trusted to fill in an implementation?

If you can't answer any of these questions with a firm "yes", they're definitely a junior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Do you have ten years of experience, or do you have one year of experience ten times?"

A junior programmer is someone who has never learned from a serious mistake they've made while programming professionally. A junior programmer is someone who thinks they should be senior thanks to the Dunning-Kruger Effect ("Hey, I was an honors student at this great college!"). A junior programmer is someone who can't usefully mentor anyone else. A junior programmer is someone who is not aware of the downstream impacts of their decisions, and is not aware that they're not aware of it.

<comment><USER12> Nothing fixes this type of junior engineer faster than giving them some real responsibility. Let them fail then learn from it. Don't hold them back because that just builds up resentment.

<comment><USER11> Sadly, it's at odds with the psychology of corporations. At big companies, it's more important to not be wrong than to be right. This is not conducive to the sort of mistake-based learning that really advances people. "Move slow and don't break anything!" is what the corporation wants, whether or not they phrase it that way.

So junior engineers aren't given responsibility, because they might break something.

I was lucky. The first time I was given real responsibility, I broke something badly (which turned out to be an actual OS bug, but that's another story). It was a learning experience - in large part, because I had to learn _why_ things broke in production, but not in development. That lesson sticks with me to this day, 20+ years later.

<comment><USER13> "At big companies, it's more important to not be wrong than to be right. This is not conducive to the sort of mistake-based learning that really advances people. "Move slow and don't break anything!" is what the corporation wants, whether or not they phrase it that way."

This is a perfect summary of working at corporations

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's an easy way to tell if someone is junior or not.

Are you an implementer, a solver or a finder?

An implementer is someone who gets given a task and does it. That's a definition of a junior.

Middle of the range is a problem solver. You give someone a high level problem and they solve it.

A senior is a problem finder. They tell you problems before you even know they're a problem.

This guy puts it much better than me: [https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and- fin...](https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-finders.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Junior developer is someone who was unable to negotiate a stronger position for any reason, such as experience, recent unemployment, expertise in an outside specialty, company is super tightwad about 'status' and/or pay levels, naive about negotiation, etc. Conversely, sometimes you'll also see someone at a 'senior' level because the title meant more to them than pay or other benefits. Sometimes a title distinction is engineered by HR and the hiring team at a company to function that way.

It is often thought of as a prediction about what level of contribution is expected, but that's basically a farce. In every organization I've seen that makes distinctions between junior and senior developers, the only thing different between them is that senior developers are paid more. They don't do more, manage more, design with more foresight, or anything like that.

The exception is that developers who are brand new to a job function as junior engineers until they get calibrated and learn some parts of the codebase in which they can be effective. But this is just as true for a brand new senior dev with 10 years experience in your company's primary domain application as it is for a kid straight out of a bachelor's program whose only prior work experience has been theoretical REUs or something.

Basically, it's just a status tool.

<comment><USER16> This is absolutely not true.

I would expect a senior engineer to come into a new job and be able to propose the design a new service very quickly - its API, architecture, datastores (including sharding, replication, active-active multi-master designs, ...), DR strategy, how it fits into the ecosystem, how to scale it to thousands of QPS, etc.

<comment><USER12> I would too, but I have worked with plenty of people with the word senior in their title who wouldn't be able to do a any of that. I've also met "juniors" who do carry the world and build great systems.

The problem is that titles get inflated and can't be relied on as much as we would hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is highly subjective and very much depends on many variables, including what you mean by "systems programming" (more specifically: what level of the stack is your boundary for "system" versus "application").

There is a traditional boundary. System programming is programming at a lower level, code meant for consumption by other software, and never directly used by an end user, while application programming is meant for consumption directly by an end user. Think "game engine's network stack" versus "text editor (that isn't Emacs)".

It's possible to work as a very junior system programmer with no prior programming experience. Everyone has to start somewhere. I've put such people to work doing everything from debugging problems with some data structure implementation to debugging thorny concurrency issues. Generally I take the view that a person is no longer junior when he has had sufficient experience that he can do more than bug fixing in more than one sub-domain of system programming. That wouldn't mean he or she is necessarily senior at that point.

</comment><comment><USER18> To me, a junior is someone who doesn't know what or how much he doesn't know. From either a technical or a practical/logistical perspective. A junior might also be someone who doesn't know how to find answers when she does recognize something she still needs to know.

A junior will either get paralyzed by being unsure where to start, or will confidently plow through a problem creating an enormous mess of unstructured code until he gets stuck either on a hard part or because his creation is collapsing under its own weight.

A mid-level engineer is aware of how much he doesn't know and also knows and uses techniques to remedy that situation. A mid-level engineer can't yet do everything on his own, but he knows that. The best mid-level engineer knows when to go to Stack Overflow for details on how to use a library, and when to ask a senior teammate for design or architecture advice.

A senior can be trusted to work almost entirely unsupervised. She still doesn't know everything, but she's had enough experience in how not to do things to be able to write maintainable and extensible code on her own. She may still run her choices by a colleague for a sanity check, and she still needs to google anything from a method signature to workarounds for a library bug to tutorials for a new framework. But she's capable of producing excellent output even in professional isolation.

And job titles mean nothing. Apparently in the iOS world, if you're not entry- level (as in fresh out of a 6-week boot camp) you're a "senior". Which is ridiculous. Not to mention making hiring actual experienced people impossible.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd argue _experience as a programmer in other languages (say Ruby) but little to none experience in the language of the offer_ isn't a junior. Even if you start out in a "new" field with a different stack, the experience in other languages is transferable knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER20> As you can see from the responses, job titles and their "levels" (junior,senior,associate,principal,etc) mean effectively NOTHING or at best vary so widely across different organizations that it really isn't feasible to take those words seriously when evaluating a candidate.

Instead of spending one second fretting about the exact useless definition of "junior", take a look at the candidate, their background, aptitudes and aspirations, their personality, your team, what the job actually requires, what you're willing to pay, and also what responsibility your org is willing to take on to train next-generation professionals. If you do that, it won't matter what "junior or senior or level X" means. The goal is to fit the right person to the right job.

</comment><comment><USER21> IMHO, Junior developer or junior whatever means that the person has little to none experience in the field. That doesn't mean that this person has no knowledge.

Personnally, I see a Junior whatever as someone who has some theoric knowledge about the whatever but did not have the time to apply it yet.

<comment><USER22> What about those who have little theory but some application? e.g. I did marketing in college but developed and published 3 iOS apps.

<comment><USER21> As a side project / alone or in an organisation? I assimilate the former as theory, usually your work in this sort of project was not challenged by your pair. In an organisation, your work has been reviewed, challenged and you had gain real experience from that.

I don't know how to categorize the next case: A group side project. The work is challenged, but it is difficult to prove.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't offer specifics, but the way I typically evaluate jr. vs. sr. is whether the person can understand things at the conceptual level or not. Do they understand the design / architecture / reasons why things are/were done in a particular way, do they understand the benefits and downsides, and do they have knowledge about alternatives.

Junior developers almost always only know about concrete things they worked on previously. They typically have a hard time talking about anything other than implementation details.

</comment><comment><USER24> A good senior developer is proficient in more than one languages, knows or figures out quickly the pros and cons of any technology. They have both depth knowledge in certain part of the development stack and breadth overall.

Assessing seniority by just number of years of experience, or knowing a hot technology doesn't make one a senior developer. A solid Aptitude + Attitude towards software development will make you a stronger developer, and that will also help you pick up any new tools, needed to get the job done!

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER25> We define it as:

Junior: requires supervision.

Mid: individual contributor: can take stuff and get it done.

Senior: goes beyond their own individual code, more involvement in larger project (process, architecture, people, client, ...)

</comment><comment><USER26> Technical skills required for senior: understand the fundamentals of networking and concurrent development, be able to effectively debug and troubleshoot. Tell me how a HTTP request works, be able to whiteboard a deadlock, be able to step through code with a tool (don't really care if it's VS or gdb).

Soft skills required for senior: help teammates help themselves by documenting and/or improving the development process and providing constructive criticism/best practice advice.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a rope making / knot tying analogy on the web for generally defining Junior<->Intermediate<->Senior<->Expert levels.

The chart I've linked draws distinction between Management / Professional Individual / Support Individual.

Word Doc: files.meetup.com/10036672/Leveling%20Charts.docx

I believe Software Developers fall under the Professional Individual Contributor class in the Leveling Chart.

</comment><comment><USER28> A good junior dev asks _lots_ of questions and eventually gets tasks done assigned to him or her on a somewhat reasonable timeline. Tasks get done progressively faster as they grow and they ask fewer and fewer questions (and usually said questions are unique, so no repeat questions for the most part).

<comment><USER29> That's a cultural thing. On a team of mine, I would worry if people weren't asking as many questions. It means they aren't finding the problems and pitfalls.

The questions should change, to be sure, but they shouldn't diminish unless we're not throwing progressively more complex tasks at them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Junior developer: can use a computer to solve computer problems.

Senior developer: can use a computer to solve business problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is the best resource that I could find on this topic, very clear: [http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency- matrix/](http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I consider a junior developer someone that is able to implement clearly defined specifications following existing patterns.

People with little or no experience in programming I wouldn't call junior developers, but perhaps apprentices.

</comment><comment><USER33> Someone who identifies primarily with their favourite programming language is a junior. Someone who identifies with the problem domain they work in is a senior.

</comment><comment><USER34> The junior developer is blown around by every wind of shiny they know about. They want to build an infinitely flexible framework for everything, even if it's only being done once in your codebase.

They follow all the rules they were taught in school, like 'never ever use goto in C', until their first code review by a senior developer, who shows them that 'goto err' is much easier to understand than writing your cleanup block before every single return statement.

<comment><USER35> I hope I'm gonna stay Junior longer! I don't want to start using goto...

<comment><USER34> Without goto, you get to maintain several copies of your cleanup code, all different:

      int
      insane()
      {
          FILE *a = open("a", "r");
          if (!a) {
              return -1;
          }

          FILE *b = open("b", "r");
          if (!b) {
              fclose(a);
              return -1;
          }

          FILE *c = open("c", "r");
          if (!c) {
              fclose(a);
              fclose(b);
              return -1;
          }

          int rv = (do something with a, b, and c);

          fclose(a);
          fclose(b);
          fclose(c);
          return rv;
      }

Now here's an example where you only need to maintain one copy of your cleanup code:

      int
      reasonable()
      {
          FILE *a = NULL;
          FILE *b = NULL;
          FILE *c = NULL;
          int rv = -1;

          a = open("a", "r");
          if (!a) { goto out; }
          b = open("b", "r");
          if (!b) { goto out; }
          c = open("c", "r");
          if (!c) { goto out; }

          rv = (do something with a, b, and c);

      out:
          if (a) { fclose(a); }
          if (b) { fclose(b); }
          if (c) { fclose(c); }
          return rv;
      }

Avoiding goto gets impossible the second you start doing socket twiddling, or message generation. Yes, languages with context managers (Python's with blocks), RAII (C++ or Rust), or defer (Go) make this easier, but some of us are stuck writing C sometimes.

<comment><USER36> Of course in this case you can avoid both the repetition and the goto at the cost of more nesting:

      rv = -1;
      a = open(...);
      if (a) {
        b = open(...);
        if (b) {
          c = open(...);
          if (c) {
            rv = something(a,b,c);
            close(c);
          }
          close(b);
        }
        close(a);
      }
      return rv;

I wonder if there is some sort of program organization analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where the product of some measure of repetition, some measure of non-structured jumping, and some measure of nesting must be greater than a certain value?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have a different answer/approach to this question. Junior/senior is not only experience-related but attitude and posture. Basically, a senior professional is a more responsible, experienced and thinking-guided person.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's primarily the ego of the person doing the labeling.

<comment><USER16> No, it's not. Senior and junior convey real, tangible differences. A senior development is more empowered by their experience and is much more effective than a junior developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm a non-technical recruiter.

I get triggered when people confuse Entry & Junior developers:

Entry - Cant be trusted on their own - need hand holding.

Junior - Can be trusted on their own - like a slow mid-level developer - <USER2> need to check their code a bit after but generally know what they are doing with a little input from more senior developers in the team.

<comment><USER40> How would a non-technical recruiter know about developers and what's the difference between you and a technical recruiter?</comment></comment>