Innovation in Language Learning

Author: Angelo DeLeo

Affiliation: The George Washington University, United States of America

Author's email address: [email protected]

What are the hardest languages to learn? The question seems obvious in some ways, but answers vary wildly according to context.  This paper will tackle this question through analysis of college students and professors in the Northeastern United States, specifically, the George Washington University.  The paper will focus on intercultural perspectives on language difficulty and complexity, recognizing and inspecting how speakers of different languages come to view both their own and others' native languages. Employing the notion of "language ideology" as outlined in linguistic anthropology, we will examine participant experience with foreign languages, travel, foreign cultures, and in the case of professors, teaching experience. Specific languages targeted include Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Russian, touching on how native speakers of these languages ideologically consider their own language “one of the most difficult in the world.” The paper's goal will be the development of a contextually articulated belief-structure associated with language "difficulty" and "impenetrability,” and how the mindset of a learner can be affected by this structure. The significance of this paper is that it will contribute to understanding the motivations of language learners and teachers, as well as the localized articulation of obstacles to fluency and proficiency.