What makes one language harder or simpler to be taught than another? Sadly, there is no such thing as a one simple answer. There are some languages which have a number of traits that make them relatively difficult to learn. But it relies upon a lot 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 those lucky enough to grow up speaking more than one language) is the most influential factor on the way you learn other languages. Languages that share some of the qualities and characteristics of your native English shall be easier to learn. Languages that have very little in frequent with your native English will likely be much harder. Most languages will fall someplace within the middle.
This goes both ways. Though it is a stretch to say that English is harder than Chinese, it is safe to say the native Chinese speaker probably has almost as hard a time to study English because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. If you are finding out Chinese proper now, that is probably little comfort to you.
Related languages Learning a language closely associated to your native language, or one other that you simply already speak, is much 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 carefully associated and thus, simpler to study than an unrelated tongue. Some other 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.
Comparable grammar A kind of characteristics which are usually shared between related languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully much like English which makes learning it a lot simpler than say German, which has a notoriously more advanced word order and verb conjugation. Though each languages are associated to English, German kept it’s more advanced 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’s not shocking since all of them advanced from Latin. It is very frequent for somebody who learns one among these languages to go on and learn one or two others. They are so comparable at instances that it appears that you may study the others at a discounted price in effort.
Commonalities in grammar do not just happen in associated languages. Very different ones can share similar qualities as well. English and Chinese even have relatedities in their grammar, which partly makes up for among the different difficulties with Chinese.
Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is one of those characteristics that make the Romance languages so similar. And in this, they also share with English. The Romance languages all have the vast mainity of their vocabulary from Latin. English has borrowed much of its vocabulary directly from Latin and what it did not get there, it just borrowed from French. There is a gigantic 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 surprising quantity of English vocabulary in Japanese. It’s a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, but it’s to discover it.
Sounds Clearly, languages sound different. Although all humans use basically the same sounds, there always seems to be some sounds in different languages that we just haven’t got in our native language. Some are strange or difficult to articulate. Some will be quite subtle. A Spanish ‘o’ isn’t precisely the identical 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 different from English, a Chinese ‘r’ is
really very similar.
It might probably take a while to get comfortable with these new sounds, though I think that faking it is settle forable till you can get a greater deal with on them. Many individuals don’t put enough effort into this aspect of learning and this makes some languages appear harder to be taught than they should be.
Tones A few languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This could be very subtle and difficult for someone who has by no means used tones before. This is among the main reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.
Chinese is not the only language to use tones, and not all of them are from exotic far-off lands. Swedish makes use of tones, although it is just not almost as complex or troublesome as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that can only really be discovered by listening to native speakers.
By the way, there are examples of tone use in English but they’re very few, usually used only in specific situations, and are not 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 end of a question. It’s not quite the identical thing, however if you happen to think about it that way, it may 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 serious impact on whether a language is hard to study or not. Many European languages use the identical script as English but in addition embody a number of other symbols not in English to signify sounds specific to that language (think of the ‘o’ with a line through it in Norwegian, or the ‘n’ with a little squiggly over it in Spanish). These are usually not troublesome to learn.
However some languages go farther and have a different alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and most of the other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe all use a unique script. This adds to the advancedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are additionally written from right to left, further adding difficulty.
If you adored this article and you would certainly such as to obtain even more information relating to Online dutch course kindly check out the web-site.