The Off Topic Topic

[Duque de Bragança]

Friends from other countries who speak English as a second language have complained to me that they don't get corrected by native speakers. I think for two reasons - one is politeness it seems rude to correct if you understand them even if their precise phrase wasn't correct; and the other is that (certainly in the UK for my generation) we didn't learn English grammar, so I might not what's right but I don't know why. I also wonder if that's why people are more comfortable picking up on errors in pronunciation v grammar.

Guess what, grammar learning is extremely important in other languagues, even in Romance languages, with dictée/ditado being the applied part of the learning.

But from the perspective of trying to learn/improve/master another language I can understand why it's frustrating that people aren't flagging when you're wrong and what's correct. Having been told this by a few people I'm not so sure it is as polite as we think or that correcting is as rude - obviously context matters, I don't think anyone should be correcting randos or someone in a cafe

If it's a language café you should correct them. Of course, if you don't know your own language very well, have trouble with its syntax, abstaining from doing so may be the better choice. 

[Sheilbh]

Guess what, grammar learning is extremely important in other languagues, even in Romance languages, with dictée/ditado being the applied part of the learning.

I totally agree - I think it was not a great decision in the education system As much as anything else I think it complicates learning another language because - again when I was a kid - you didn't really do much grammar until a lot later and it's more difficult if you have to basically learn the concept for the first time in order to learn it in a foreign language.

From what I understand, including from English teachers, grammar is now being taught again.

[Savonarola]

The difficulty I've found with Spanish, at the more advanced level, is that the vocabulary is enormous; much more so than French (and many Spanish words come from Arabic so there aren't as many cognates with English.)  I would expect that's one of the difficulties with English, we have about twice as many words as Spanish (and we've taken them from every language we could find.)

[The Larch]

The difficulty I've found with Spanish, at the more advanced level, is that the vocabulary is enormous; much more so than French (and many Spanish words come from Arabic so there aren't as many cognates with English.)  I would expect that's one of the difficulties with English, we have about twice as many words as Spanish (and we've taken them from every language we could find.)

Advanced vocabulary in English can indeed be tricky, but at least for romance language speakers we have the leg up on the more "sophisticated" vocabulary derived from Latin.

Now, phrasal verbs, those are a bitch, and you can only learn them by rote and practice.

[Sheilbh]

And because of the way English developed often multiple words from different sources for the same thing with slightly different connotations.

[Duque de Bragança]

The difficulty I've found with Spanish, at the more advanced level, is that the vocabulary is enormous; much more so than French (and many Spanish words come from Arabic so there aren't as many cognates with English.)  I would expect that's one of the difficulties with English, we have about twice as many words as Spanish (and we've taken them from every language we could find.)

Advanced vocabulary in English can indeed be tricky, but at least for romance language speakers we have the leg up on the more "sophisticated" vocabulary derived from Latin.

Now, phrasal verbs, those are a bitch, and you can only learn them by rote and practice.

Define vocabulary and words.  Even within a language, it may vary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words

As for Castilian, 4,000 arabic words as compared to 1,000 in Portuguese and hundred in other Romance languages, is not that decisive, I think.

Language   Approx. no. of headwords   Approx. no. of definitions   Dictionary   Notes
Korean   1,100,373   
 
우리말샘 (Woori Mal Saem, 2017)   Online open dictionary including dialects of South and North Korea.[3]
Portuguese   818,000   
 
Aulete Digital   Online dictionary including expressions.[4]
Tamil   803,113   
 
Sorkuvai   An online open dictionary run by the Tamil Nadu government.[5]
Finnish   800,000   
 
RedFox Pro   Online dictionary. The free version has over 300,000 Finnish words and the Pro version has over 800,000 Finnish words. The dictionary has agglomerated other dictionaries, such as technical ones,[6] and the largest set comes from Wordnet.[7] Note that even this dictionary essentially doesn't include inflections.
Kurdish   744,139   
 
Authority of Kurdish Language Dictionary, Kurdish Language Unit Dictionary   It contains 744,139 key words from a few Kurdish dialects, but in this census, the Kurdish dialects, terms and buildings in Kurdish were not counted, and in all the dialects Kurdish contains a total of 1.2 million words containing 1.6 million words with all conventions and phrases. Southern Kurdish dialects not examined in (Rojhilat Kurdish Dialects): (Leki, Bayrayi, Fili, Jarossi (Bijari), Kermanshahi, Kulayi, Kerd Ali, Malkshahi, Sanyabi, Kalhori (Kalhuri), Zangana, (Lori), Bashoori Kurdish dialects, Kurdish dialects in Rojava, Bakurian dialects.[8]
Swedish   600,000   
 
Svenska Akademiens ordbok, Swedish Academy   After having completed letters A through T SAOB included 470,000 words, but 600,000 words when the alphabet was completed in 2017. Svenska Akademiens ordlista, which includes only commonly used words, currently includes ~126,000 words after having added 13,500 and removed 9,000 in its latest edition, SAOL 14, plus an additional 200,000 still encountered words in earlier editions.[9][10]
English   578,707   
 
1,317,179   English Wiktionary   Contains 578,707 gloss entries and 1,317,179 total definitions.[11]
Korean   511,282   
 
Standard Korean Language Dictionary[12]   Contains 511,282 entries.
Italian   500,000   
 
Grande Dizionario Hoepli Italiano[13][14]   The number of "sayable and writable" word-forms is estimated at over 2 million[15]
Japanese   500,000   
 
Nihon Kokugo Daijiten   [16]
Lithuanian   500,000   
 
Lietuvių kalbos žodynas (Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian)   22,000 pages in 20 volumes with quotations from all kinds of writing and dialect records between 1547 and 2001. Accessible online at www.lkz.lt.[17]
English   470,000   
 
Webster's Third New International Dictionary and Addenda Section   Contains 470,000 entries[18]
Serbo-Croatian   400,000   
 
Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika   Published from 1880 to 1976 in 97 fascicles collected into 23 volumes under the auspices of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, estimated at a minimum of 400,000 words by Dragica Malić.[19][20] Includes only words found in the Shtokavian dialect; words from Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects are excluded.
Dutch   400,000   
 
Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal   The 43 volumes of the WNT (including three supplements) consist of 49,255 pages, describing Dutch words from 1500 to 1976.[21]
Chinese   378,103   
 
Hanyu Da Cidian   The 3rd edition of the digital version contains 18,014 single-character words, 336,706 compound words, 23,383 idioms (chengyu), 504,040 definitions, and 861,956 examples.[22]
English   350,000   
 
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition   In the introduction to the 4th and 5th editions, it is mentioned that more than 10,000 words have been added, thus the total for the 5th edition will be more than 370,000 words.[23][failed verification]
Finnish   350,000   
 
Suomen murteiden sanakirja (in progress)   Suomen murteiden sanakirja (SMS) will include 350,000 words from different dialects, with well-documented definitions, based on the archives (Suomen murteiden sana-arkisto) of 400,000 words, with over 8 million definitions.[24][25]
Persian   343,466   
 
Dehkhoda Dictionary, 1998, ISBN 9789640396025   The original series initially consisted of 3 million records (Persian: فیش (French: fiche) or برگه "barge") (up to 100 meanings/records for each word or proper noun) until Dehkhoda's death in March 1956, and currently contains 343,466 entries that, according to the latest digital release of the dictionary by Tehran University Press (version 3.0) are based on an ever-growing library of over 2300 volumes in lexicology and various other scientific fields.[26][27][circular reference]
Norwegian   330,000   
 
Norsk Ordbok   The finished dictionary has about 330,000 headwords, whereas the corpus it's built upon contains about 500,000 words in total.[28]
German   330,000   
 
Deutsches Wörterbuch   330,000 words in use since the mid-fifteenth century.[29]
Turkish   316,000   
 
Ötüken Türkçe Sözlük[30]   Turkish dictionary (modern and Ottoman Turkish), includes 316,000 entries.[31]
Dutch   300,000   
 
Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands   [32]
Norwegian   300,000   
 
Tanums store rettskrivningsordbok (10. utgave)   A dictionary of orthography.[28]
Ukrainian   300,000   
 
Український лексикон кінця XVIII — початку XXI ст.: словник-індекс: у 3-х томах   Лексичний словник.[33]
Gujarati   281,377   
 
Bhagavadgomandal   2.81 lakh words and their meanings in 9 volumes. Also serves as an encyclopedia with almost 8.22 lakh words.[34]
English   273,000   
 
600,000   Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition   Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords; 171,476 of them being in current use, 47,156 being obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives in bold type, and 169,000 phrases and combinations in bold italic type, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms.[35][36]
There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words — but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific terminology, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical acronyms.[37][38][39]
Urdu   264,000   
 
Urdu Lughat[40]   [41]
Ukrainian   253,000   
 
Великий орфографічний словник сучасної української лексики   A dictionary of orthography. Contains 253,000 entries (253,000 words).[42][43]
Czech   250,000   
 
Příruční slovník jazyka českého [cs]   Nine volumes of this dictionary were printed in years 1935–1957. They contain about 250,000 words, their meanings and example usage from literature. The dictionary is available online.[44][45]
Serbo-Croatian   241,000   
 
Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language   This dictionary is incomplete. So far, 20 volumes of the planned 40 have been published. These 20 volumes contain 241.000 headwords. When complete, this Dictionary will have around 500.000 headwords.[46]
Portuguese   228,000   
 
382,000   Houaiss Dictionary of the Portuguese Language   228,000 entries and 382,000 meanings.[47]
Belarusian   223,000   
 
Вялікі слоўнік беларускай мовы: арфаграфія, акцэнтуацыя, парадыгматыка   [48]
Russian   220,000   
 
250,000   Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка   The 3rd edition by Baudouin de Courtenay contains about 250,000 entries (220,000 words and 30,000 proverbs)[49][50]
Finnish   201,000   
 
Nykysuomen sanakirja, 1961   Nykysuomen sanakirja can be translated to The Dictionary of Modern Finnish or The Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish, but the language can be quite dated; the dictionary only reflects the language as it was no later than 1961. Even though it has been published again, it has not been updated. The dictionary contains over 201,000 headwords in six volumes.[51] For modern language, The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish is more relevant.
German   200,000   
 
Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache   Dictionary by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities of over 200,000 contemporary words.[52]
Norwegian (bokmål)   200,000   
 
Det Norske Akademis ordbok   The Norwegian Academy Dictionary contains more than 200,000 entries and more than 300,000 literary quotes. Furthermore, it contains fixed expressions and pronunciation.The dictionary is free and edited daily.
Danish   200,000   
 
Ordbog over det danske Sprog   Dictionary maintained by the Society for Danish Language and Literature [da]. Covers Danish language use 1700–1950.[53] The society also maintains a sister dictionary, Den Danske Ordbog [da] covering language use since 1950.
Slovak   200,000   
 
Slovník slovenského jazyka z r. 1959 – 1968, Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka A – G, H – L, M – N z r. 2006, 2011, 2015   Here is the information about the number of words in Slovak written by Jazykovedný ústav Ľ. Štúra SAV.
Tibetan   195,919   
 
Rangjung Yeshe Dharma Dictionary   Considering the large number of Buddhist terminology, colloquial expressions and modern literary Tibetan neologisms not included in this dictionary, the actual total number is probably about twice the number of terms included on this website (195,919), perhaps 375–400,000 Tibetan words in total.
[54]

Hindi   183,175   
 
Hindi Wiktionary   A free dictionary that gives everyone the right to edit.[55]
Romanian   180,000   
 
dexonline   Online dictionary. Project of digitisation of 67 general, specialty and archaic dictionaries. Launched in 2001. As of 2013, it contained over 180,000 unique words and 576,000 definitions.
Kazakh   166,000   
 
15 томдық "Қазақ тілінің түсіндірме сөздігі"   Explanatory dictionary of the Kazakh language[56]
English   155,327   
 
207,016   WordNet, 3.1   As of November 2012 WordNet's latest Online-version is 3.1. The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs.[57]
Belarusian   150,000   
 
Слоўнік беларускай мовы   [58]
Icelandic   150,000   
 
Orðabók Blöndals[59]   The dictionary contains 150,000 headwords in 17 volumes.[60]
Russian   150,000   
 
Большой академический словарь русского языка   Great Academy Dictionary of Russian language[61]
Swiss German   150,000   
 
Schweizerisches Idiotikon[62]   The dictionary contains 150,000 words from the late Middle Ages to today.[63]
German   148,000   
 
Duden – Die deutsche Rechtschreibung   The most influential dictionary in Germany, a dictionary of orthography.[64]
Polish   140,000   
 
Wielki słownik ortograficzny PWN   Big orthography dictionary PWN contains new words, proper nouns and latest spelling changes.
German   136,240   
 
German
Wiktionary   Contains 136,240 german gloss entries and 1,042,211 total entries.[65][66]

French   135,000   
 
Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé   ATILF[67] (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française – Computer Processing and Analysis of the French Language)
135,000 (Larousse Dictionnaire de français, published by Editions Larousse)[68][69]

[Josquius]

I've never seen this idea seriously addressed, but I reckon the question of which language is hardest depends on you and your learning style (and what other languages you know of course but that's well known).
For me for instance French with its emphasis on pronunciation as the key point is a nightmare. Japanese on the other hand with its scripts and emphasis on written pattern recognition gels well.

[Duque de Bragança]

Nothing really specific about French and its alleged emphasis on pronunciation.

Stress barely exists, if at all, which incidentally is the biggest problem for Francophones learning a stressed foreign language.

[The Larch]

I've never seen this idea seriously addressed, but I reckon the question of which language is hardest depends on you and your learning style (and what other languages you know of course but that's well known).
For me for instance French with its emphasis on pronunciation as the key point is a nightmare. Japanese on the other hand with its scripts and emphasis on written pattern recognition gels well.

There are several charts around on language learning difficulty for native English speakers, and French is routinely placed amongst the easiest ones. You have an obsession about it.

[celedhring]

Love that the Basque and Celtic languages are "unclassified" 

[The Larch]

Love that the Basque and Celtic languages are "unclassified" 

It's from a training manual for US diplomats, so it's not that weird. 

[Duque de Bragança]

Love that the Basque and Celtic languages are "unclassified" 

It's from a training manual for US diplomats, so it's not that weird. 

I'd rather learn a Celtic language than Basque, so that's weird indeed. 

[Iormlund]

Wonder why German ends up being harder to learn than all Romance and the other modern Germanic languages.

[celedhring]

Love that the Basque and Celtic languages are "unclassified" 

It's from a training manual for US diplomats, so it's not that weird. 

I mean, I can concede basque, but I'm sure there's enough British people that have learnt Welsh/Irish as non-maternal languages to have them categorized.

[Duque de Bragança]

Wonder why German ends up being harder to learn than all Romance and the other modern Germanic languages.

Grammar probably.

Notice that Icelandic is judged unsurprisingly harder, significantly so compared to other Scandinavian languages.