Let me ask you a question this morning: how many of you are bilingual—that is, you speak two languages? Or tri-lingual . . . if you want to show off? If so, were you raised speaking a language other than English, or did you learn that second language as an adult?

There is a federal agency called the Foreign Service Institute that trains diplomats to operate in other countries. The folks at FSI also provide advanced language training in over 65 languages.

Sometime back, they ranked all the major languages according to how difficult they are to learn. They discovered that among the easier languages for English speaking people to learn are Swedish, Spanish and French. You want to guess the more difficult languages? How about Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. (1) Of course, some of us w…