What makes one language harder or easier to be taught than one other? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a one easy answer. There are some languages which have a number of characteristics that make them comparatively difficult to learn. But it depends 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 have been surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for those lucky enough to develop up speaking more than one language) is probably the most influential factor on how you study other languages. Languages that share among the qualities and traits of your native English shall be easier to learn. Languages which have very little in frequent with your native English shall be much harder. Most languages will fall someplace within 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 because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. In case you are studying Chinese right now, that is probably little consolation to you.
Related languages Learning a language closely related to your native language, or one other that you simply already speak, is way simpler than learning a totally alien one. Related languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them easier to be taught as there are less new concepts to deal with.
Since English is a Germanic language, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are all closely associated and thus, simpler to be taught than an unrelated tongue. Some other languages related 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 can be usually shared between related languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully much like English which makes learning it much simpler than say German, which has a notoriously more complicated word order and verb conjugation. Though each languages are related to English, German kept it’s more complicated grammar, the place English and Swedish have largely dropped it.
The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a number of other languages) are well-known for sharing many characteristics. It isn’t shocking since they all developed from Latin. It is vitally widespread for someone who learns one among these languages to go on and learn one or others. They’re so similar at instances that it seems that you would be able to study the others at a discounted cost in effort.
Commonalities in grammar don’t just happen in related languages. Very different ones can share related qualities as well. English and Chinese even have similarities of their grammar, which partly makes up for some of the other difficulties with Chinese.
Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is a type of characteristics that make the Romance languages so similar. And in this, in addition they share with English. The Romance languages all have the vast majority of their vocabulary from Latin. English has borrowed a lot of its vocabulary directly from Latin and what it didn’t get there, it just borrowed from French. There is a gigantic quantity 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 never always between associated 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 Clearly, languages sound different. Although all people use basically the same sounds, there always seems to be some sounds in different languages that we just do not have in our native language. Some are strange or troublesome to articulate. Some will be quite subtle. A Spanish ‘o’ will not be exactly the identical as an English ‘o.’ And then there are some vowel sounds in French, for example, that just don’t exist in English. While a French ‘r’ could be very completely different from English, a Chinese ‘r’ is
really very similar.
It may take some time to get comfortable with these new sounds, although I think that faking it is settle forable until you can get a greater deal with on them. Many individuals do not put sufficient effort into this facet of learning and this makes some languages seem harder to learn than they need to be.
Tones A number of languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This could be very subtle and troublesome for somebody who has by no means used tones before. This is one of the principal reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.
Chinese isn’t the only language to use tones, and not all of them are from exotic far-off lands. Swedish makes use of tones, though it isn’t almost as complicated or tough as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that may only really be learned by listening to native speakers.
By the way, there are examples of tone use in English however they’re only a few, often 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 raise the tone of our voice on the finish of a question. It is not quite the identical thing, however for those who think about it that way, it would possibly 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 or not a language is hard to study or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but in addition embrace a couple of different symbols not in English to signify sounds particular to that language (think of the ‘o’ with a line by way of it in Norwegian, or the ‘n’ with a little squiggly over it in Spanish). These are generally not tough to learn.
However some languages go farther and have a special alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and lots of the other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe all use a different script. This adds to the complicatedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are additionally written from right to left, further adding difficulty.
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