We’d love to hear your thoughts about languages in general, language learning and your motives for learning a language.
When you complete the survey you’ll be entered in to our prize draw and make a chance to win a lifetime Pro subscription or one of the ten 1-year subscriptions.
I’d like to fill out this survey but I had to give up partway through.
It suffers from that really common malady of so many surveys: Requiring you to answer questions from a predefined set of choices where either none of the choices are right, or multiple choices apply but you’re only allowed to pick one. Also, N/A is not an option.
The question that made me throw my hands up was the one about how long it takes to learn the basics of a language. That answer is hugely different based on whether you’re learning it in country, or taking real classes, or teaching yourself from books and online. It’s not just that I can’t pick an answer to that question myself, it’s that seeing questions like this (and this one is not the only offender) on a survey makes me confident that the survey’s results will be junk that I’d rather not contribute to.
Are you open to scrapping this survey, taking some feedback from people, and designing something more valid?
Umm… how are you supposed to rank languages by difficulty? It depends on your native language, the languages you know already and a gazillion other factors. It has been said many times that there is no factual way to pinpoint just one hardest language. Plus I’m not even sure how many of the memrisers have tried learning these ten languages. (I for one, didn’t – any of them.)
Are you looking for the reputation of different languages, language learning myths, if you will?
Same thing with the monolingualism question: there might be people who has been to all these countries, and tried communicating. That one is once again only looking for stereotypes, I’m afraid.
Agreed. This survey is beyond odd. It makes a bunch of assumptions - one of which being I have spent a lot of time in Europe. I haven’t. I haven’t traveled recently outside the country. I’ve only tried learning one of the languages in that list. I’d love to share my experiences using Memrise, but that question is not asked.
I hate to be “that guy”, but not everyone is black-and-white male or female. Among other things, stuff like intersex people (hermaphrodites) exist and are relatively common…
“Would you ever attempt to learn a language before travelling to a new country?” This question is too vague. You’re saying “would you ever attempt to learn Russian before travelling to Japan”?
Why isn’t “English” on that difficulty list? And the only language I know on the list is Japanese… but is German easier than Japanese? How would I know? Why don’t you ask me to just rate the languages I’m actually studying? What if German’s my native language, how do I rate it then?
“Do you struggle to understand different native accents when you are in another country?” You mean “dialects”, not “accents”.
“When abroad, in which scenarios do you feel it is essential to speak the language?” This obviously depends on the country. In some places you can use English/French/German even in a tiny village, in others it doesn’t work even in the capital.
Why in the world would Norway, Sweden etc be considered monolingual? I’m shaking my head here, though it’s even more shocking that the Netherlands is on the list…