Posted: Oct 14, 2013 7:23 pm
The US military runs a test called the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to assess a person's ability to learn foreign languages. The languages are grouped into four categories based on difficulty for a native American English speaker to learn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_La ... Categories
The DLAB is a very interesting test - they teach you the rules of a language you've never heard of before, then run you through a progressively more difficult series of tests on comprehension and translation ability.
I scored 136 back in 1988.
Interesting trivia - the language used is Esperanto, though we don't tell young recruits that ahead of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_La ... Categories
Language Categories[edit source]
Category I language: 95 or better[4] (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish)
Category II language: 100 or better (German, Indonesian)
Category III language: 105 or better (Dari, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi/Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, and Uzbek)
Category IV language: 110 or better (Modern Standard Arabic, Pashto, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)
The DLAB is a very interesting test - they teach you the rules of a language you've never heard of before, then run you through a progressively more difficult series of tests on comprehension and translation ability.
I scored 136 back in 1988.
Interesting trivia - the language used is Esperanto, though we don't tell young recruits that ahead of time.