TagLanguage origin
Can We Really Study the Minds of Ancient Humans?
The design inference helps sort things out in human paleontology
Origin of Language: Still a Mystery, Despite All We Know Now
We aren’t even sure which is the world’s oldest spoken language, though Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese have impressively long histories
Some Questions and Answers About Language From Recent Research
The hardest language, the best way to learn a language, and peering into the shadowy origin of languageCan there be such a thing as “the hardest language to learn”? At ZME Science, science writer Tibi Puiu dives into the question, starting with the assumption that the learner is an English speaker: After 70 years of experience teaching languages to American diplomats, the U.S. Foreign Service has grouped foreign languages into four categories of difficulty. The easiest language group requires 575-600 hours of study (23-24 weeks of classroom study) for students to achieve sufficient competence to be posted overseas, whereas the hardest group requires at least 2,200 hours of study (88 weeks of full-time classroom study) to achieve the same level of proficiency. In other words, some languages can be 3-4 times harder to master than others. Tibi Read More ›