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Many researchers suggest that several different concepts may be needed when approaching complexity: entropy, size, description length, effective complexity, information, connectivity, irreducibility, low probability, syntactic depth etc. Research suggests that while methodological choices affect the results, even rather crude analytic tools may provide a feasible starting point for measuring grammatical complexity.<ref name="Sinnemäki2011" />
== Language complexity and learning ==
A common conventional wisdom is that some languages are inherently harder to learn than others as first or second languages, due to their greater complexity. However this belief is as of yet not supported by sufficient scientific evidence.
The perceived difficulty of second language acquisition seems to largely depend on the similarity between the learner's native language and the language they are learning. In a study conducted in 2013, scientists <ref>{{cite book |last=Cysouw |first=Michael |editor1-last=Borin |editor1-first=Lars |editor2-last=Saxena |editor2-first=Anja |title=Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton |year=2013 |pages=57–82 |chapter=Predicting language-learning difficulty |isbn=978-3-11-048808-1}}</ref> used [[Foreign Service Institute|FSI]]’s data to try to identify the criteria that have an influence on the difficulty of foreign language learning.
* First, a language that is genetically related to the learner's native language will be easier to learn than a language from a different family. This is mostly due to language structure. The closer a language is to another, the more similar their structures will be (this applies to sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and so on).
* Another criterion is the [[writing system]]. Learners will be quicker to learn a language which uses the same writing system as their own native language.
Therefore, the most complicated language to learn for an English native speaker would be for example a non-[[Indo-European languages|Indo European]] [[Ergative-absolutive alignment|ergative language]] with a different writing system and with [[Preposition and postposition|postpositions]] instead of prepositions.
Another study <ref>{{cite book |last=Stevens |first=Paul B. |editor1-last=Wahba |editor1-first=Kassem M. |editor2-last=Taha |editor2-first=Zeinab A. |editor3-last=England |editor3-first=Liz |title=Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century |publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum Associates |year=2006 |pages=35–66 |chapter=Is Spanish really easy? Is Arabic really so hard? Perceived difficulty in learning arabic as a second language |isbn=978-0-203-76390-2}}</ref> conducted in 2006, started with the common idea that Arabic is hard to learn for an English native speaker, more so than Spanish or German. This study is also based on the FSI classification of languages according to their difficulty, placing Arabic in the fourth (relatively difficult) group. The study compares Arabic with languages usually perceived as easier to learn and concludes that Arabic is not inherently more complex than these languages. The study provides a list of linguistic properties that make Arabic actually simpler than these languages. For instance, despite the complexity of Arabic consonant roots, the Arabic verbal system relies on very specific sub-rules and uses only a single [[Morphology (linguistics)#Paradigms and morphosyntax|verb paradigm]]. On the other hand, Spanish is more complex than Arabic in its verbal tenses. French is more complex in its phoneme-grapheme correspondence. German, Polish and Greek have more complex systems of case [[inflection]]s. Japanese has a more complex writing system. The fact that English native speakers perceive Arabic as particularly difficult to learn would then not be due to Arabic being inherently harder but rather to the fact that its structure and writing system are very different from English.
The belief that some languages are inherently harder to learn is less commonly found for [[language acquisition|first language learning]], although first language acquisition should probably be more strongly correlated with the language's inherent complexity. Some studies have tackled this question. For instance, there is evidence from Danish that children learning a language with a complex sound structure might be slightly delayed in their lexical development.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bleses |first1=Dorthe |last2=Vach |first2=Werner |last3=Slott |first3=Malene |last4=Wehberg |first4=Sonja |last5=Thomsen |first5=Pia |last6=Madsen |first6=Thomas O. |last7=Basbøll |first7=Hans |year=2008 |title=Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages: A CDI-based comparison |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/early-vocabulary-development-in-danish-and-other-languages-a-cdibased-comparison/D12A283664A8BA4A695D0DDF3378555A |journal=Journal of Child Language |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=619–650 |doi= 10.1017/S0305000908008714 |access-date=2020-05-18}}</ref> Danish has [[Danish phonology|a complex phonological system]], with extensive [[lenition]] of plosives. In line with the hypothesis that a more complex phonology entails greater difficulties in word learning, Danish children were found to have a slight delay in early lexical development compared to children speaking other languages (although they seem to catch up when they reach two years of age). This suggests that sound structure might have an influence on the difficulty of a language. There is, however, not enough evidence as of yet to confidently say that some languages are globally easier or harder to learn as a first language.
==Computational tools==
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