1, Monterey Language Stats
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring students to a certain level of proficiency. Below are sample lists of the languages included in each group.
Group I: Languages included: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Protuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
Group II: Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi, German, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian, Malay
Group III: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, czech, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Cambodian, Lao, Nepali, Philipino, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese
Group VI: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Information on the Groups |
| Group | I | II | III | VI |
| Hours needed to reach Level-2 Proficency | 480 | 720 | 720 | 1320 |
| Speaking proficiency level expected of a student with superior language aptitude, after 720 hours of instruction | 3 | 2+/3 | 2/2+ | 1+ |
More information on levels of proficiency can be found in the DLI Student Handbook.
ACTFL Learning Guidelines, another proficiency measure, can be found on thier site.
2. Statistics Services for Russian Programs
The Committee on College and Pre-College Russian (CCPCR) offers a large database of well-maintained statistics, complete with contact information for reporting schools.
SRAS Statistics (coming soon) SRAS plans to soon launch a statistics service that will allow schools and programs to remain anonymous when reporting. The survey will also measure the presence of Russian Clubs, interdepartmental cooperation, and other marketing statistics to try to determine what type of marketing is the most effective for programs. If you are interested in helping us to develop this survey, contact us.
The Association of Departments of Forign Language (ADFL) did a survey of enrollment for undergraduate foreign language programs in 2002. Check their resources page for other interesting statistics.
Ethnologue is an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages. Unfortunately, its information is often dated and incomplete, but there is awful lot to work with here. See thier entry for Russian.
