Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Mapping The Amount Of Time It Takes To Learn A Foreign Language

In most RPG's there are allowances for characters with a high enough intelligence to learn additional languages. Quite a few systems are vague on the details and allow the DM to come up with his own time frame on how long this would take. I found these real world examples quite enlightening. That and I'm a sucker for maps.

The map above  visualizes the languages of Europe (at least those deemed diplomatically important enough to be taught at the FSI), coloring them according the average time commitment they require of an English speaker. In pink, we have the English-speaking countries. The red countries speak Category I languages, those most closely related to English and thus learnable in 575 to 600 hours of study: the traditional high-school foreign languages of Spanish and French, for instance, or the less commonly taught but just about as easily learnable Portuguese and Italian. If you'd like a little more challenge, why not try your hand at German, whose 750 hours of study puts it in Category II — quite literally, a category of its own?

In total, the FSI ranks languages into six categories of difficulty, including English's Category 0. The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might look to an English-speaking monoglot. Category III contains no European languages at all (though it does contain Indonesian, widely regarded as one of the objectively easiest languages to learn). Category IV offers a huge variety of languages from Amharic to Czech to Nepali to Tagalog, each demanding 44 weeks (or 1100 hours) of study. Then, at the very summit of the linguistic mountain, we find the switched-up grammar, highly unfamiliar scripts, and potentially mystifying cultural assumptions of Category V, "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers."

To that most formidable group belong Arabic, Chinese both Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, and — this with an asterisk meaning "usually more difficult than other languages in the same category" — Japanese. Now if, like me, you consider studying foreign languages one of your main pursuits, you know that possessing a genuine interest in a language — in its mechanics, in its ongoing evolution, in the cultures that created it and the cultures it in turn creates — can do wonders to get you through even the most aggravating difficulties on the long journey to commanding it. Then again, I'm also a native English speaker who chose to move to Korea, where I study not just the Category-V Korean but the Category-V* Japanese through Korean; you might want to take with a grain of salt the words, in any language, of so obvious a masochist.

You'll find the full Foreign Service Institute language difficulty ranking list below.

Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours)Languages closely related to English 
Afrikaans
Danish
Dutch
French
Italian Norwegian
Portuguese
Romanian
Spanish
Swedish

Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours)Languages similar to English 
German

Category III: 36 weeks (900 hours)Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Indonesian
Malaysian
Swahili

Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours)Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English 
Albanian
Amharic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Croatian
Czech
*Estonian
*Finnish
*Georgian
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
*Hungarian
Icelandic
Khmer
Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
*Mongolian
Nepali
Pashto
Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik)
Polish
Russian
Serbian
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Tagalog
*Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
*Vietnamese
Xhosa
Zulu

Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers 
Arabic
Cantonese (Chinese)
Mandarin (Chinese)
*Japanese
Korean
* Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category

Friday, November 24, 2017

Mapping Thanksgiving

Here's what your part of America eats on Thanksgiving.

Who eats what where? This Survey  about Thanksgiving traditions had 1,058 respondents.

Some things like chicken, pork and roast beef got cursory shout-outs as main Thanksgiving dishes, but turkey rules, with 82 percent of respondents saying the other, other white meat is the centerpiece of their meal. When you get past the poultry and check out the side dishes, though, the regional distinctions really come out.

Here’s the most disproportionately consumed side dish in each region:

Full Article


Saturday, November 11, 2017

Navigating the Top 100 NPR SF/Fantasy Books

Source.
As much of an avid reader that think I am, there are still several works on here I have not yet gotten to. The decision tree makes it so much easier for anyone looking for their particular flavor in reading material. Have at it all you avid readers.