What makes one language harder or easier to study than one other? Sadly, there isn’t a one easy answer. There are some languages which have a number of characteristics that make them relatively troublesome to learn. But it relies upon much more on what languages you already know, particularly your native language, the one (or ones) you grew up speaking.
Your native language The language you were surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for these lucky enough to grow up speaking more than one language) is the most influential factor on how you study other languages. Languages that share among the qualities and characteristics of your native English might be simpler to learn. Languages which have very little in common with your native English shall be much harder. Most languages will fall someplace in the middle.
This goes both ways. Although it is a stretch to say that English is harder than Chinese, it is safe to say the native Chinese speaker probably has practically as hard a time to be taught English as the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. In case you are finding out Chinese proper now, that’s probably little comfort to you.
Associated languages Learning a language intently related to your native language, or another that you simply already speak, is way simpler than learning a totally alien one. Associated languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them simpler to be taught as there are less new ideas to deal with.
Since English is a Germanic language, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are all closely related and thus, easier to learn than an unrelated tongue. Another languages associated in some way to English are Spanish, Italian and French, the more distant Irish and Welsh and even Russian, Greek, Hindi and Urdu, Farsi (of Iran) and Pashto (of Afghanistan).
English shares no ancestry with languages like Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, all languages considered hard by English standards.
Related grammar A type of characteristics that are typically shared between related languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully just like English which makes learning it much easier than say German, which has a notoriously more advanced word order and verb conjugation. Although each languages are related to English, German kept it’s more complex grammar, the place English and Swedish have largely dropped it.
The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a number of different languages) are famous for sharing many characteristics. It isn’t stunning since they all advanced from Latin. It is vitally frequent for someone who learns one in every of these languages to go on and study one or two others. They are so comparable at instances that it appears you could study the others at a discounted price in effort.
Commonalities in grammar do not just happen in associated languages. Very different ones can share related qualities as well. English and Chinese even have comparableities of their grammar, which partly makes up for among the different difficulties with Chinese.
Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is a kind of characteristics that make the Romance languages so similar. And in this, they also share with English. The Romance languages all have the huge mainity of their vocabulary from Latin. English has borrowed a lot of its vocabulary directly from Latin and what it did not get there, it just borrowed from French. There is an enormous amount of French vocabulary in English. One other reason that Spanish, French and Italian are
considered easier than different languages.
There are always borrowings of vocabulary between languages, and not always between related languages. There’s a stunning amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It’s a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, but it’s to discover it.
Sounds Obviously, languages sound different. Though all people use basically the identical sounds, there always seems to be some sounds in different languages that we just don’t have in our native language. Some are strange or troublesome to articulate. Some could be quite subtle. A Spanish ‘o’ will not be precisely the same as an English ‘o.’ And then there are some vowel sounds in French, for example, that just do not exist in English. While a French ‘r’ is very totally different from English, a Chinese ‘r’ is
really very similar.
It might probably take a while to get comfortable with these new sounds, although I think that faking it is acceptable until you can get a better deal with on them. Many individuals don’t put enough effort into this side of learning and this makes some languages seem harder to be taught than they should be.
Tones A number of languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This could be very subtle and tough for someone who has by no means used tones before. This is without doubt one of the fundamental reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.
Chinese isn’t the only language to use tones, and not all of them are from unique far-off lands. Swedish uses tones, although it isn’t almost as complex or troublesome as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that can only really be realized by listening to native speakers.
By the way, there are examples of tone use in English but they are very few, often used only in particular situations, and aren’t part of the pronunciation of particular person words. For instance, in American English it’s frequent to boost the tone of our voice at the finish of a question. It isn’t quite the identical thing, but if you happen to think about it that way, it might make a tone language a little less intimidating.
The writing system Some languages use a distinct script or writing system and this can have a significant impact on whether a language is hard to be taught or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but additionally embrace just a few other symbols not in English to signify sounds particular to that language (think of the ‘o’ with a line by it in Norwegian, or the ‘n’ with a little squiggly over it in Spanish). These are typically not tough to learn.
But some languages go farther and have a special alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and lots of the other Slavic languages of Japanese Europe all use a different script. This adds to the advancedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are also written from proper to left, further adding difficulty.
If you loved this information and you would such as to receive more info regarding Online dutch course kindly visit our web-page.