What makes one language harder or simpler to be taught than another? Unfortunately, there is no one simple answer. There are some languages which have a number of traits that make them comparatively troublesome to learn. However 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 these lucky enough to develop up speaking more than one language) is the most influential factor on the way you be taught other languages. Languages that share some of the qualities and characteristics of your native English will likely be easier to learn. Languages that have very little in widespread with your native English will likely be much harder. Most languages will fall someplace within the middle.
This goes each 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 study English because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. In case you are learning Chinese right now, that is probably little comfort to you.
Related languages Learning a language closely associated to your native language, or another that you already speak, is much simpler than learning a very alien one. Associated languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them simpler to study 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 related and thus, simpler to learn than an unrelated tongue. Another 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.
Related grammar One of those characteristics that are typically shared between associated languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully just like English which makes learning it a lot easier than say German, which has a notoriously more complex word order and verb conjugation. Though both languages are associated to English, German kept it’s more complicated grammar, where 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 is not surprising since all of them advanced from Latin. It is very widespread for somebody who learns one among these languages to go on and learn one or two others. They are so comparable at occasions that it seems you can be taught the others at a reduced price in effort.
Commonalities in grammar do not just occur in related languages. Very totally different ones can share similar qualities as well. English and Chinese even have relatedities in their grammar, which partly makes up for a few of 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 majority 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 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 related languages. There’s a shocking quantity of English vocabulary in Japanese. It is a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, but it’s to discover it.
Sounds Clearly, languages sound different. Though all people 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 might be quite subtle. A Spanish ‘o’ shouldn’t be precisely the same as an English ‘o.’ After which there are some vowel sounds in French, for instance, that just do not exist in English. While a French ‘r’ may be very totally different from English, a Chinese ‘r’ is
really very similar.
It might probably take some time to get comfortable with these new sounds, although I think that faking it is acceptable until you will get a greater handle on them. Many people don’t put sufficient effort into this aspect of learning and this makes some languages seem harder to study than they need to be.
Tones A couple of languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This may be very subtle and difficult for somebody who has never used tones before. This is without doubt one of the principal reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.
Chinese is not the only language to make use of tones, and never all of them are from exotic far-off lands. Swedish uses tones, though it is just not almost as complex or tough as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that may only really be realized by listening to native speakers.
By the way, there are examples of tone use in English however they are only a few, usually used only in particular situations, and aren’t part of the pronunciation of particular person words. For example, in American English it’s common to raise the tone of our voice at the end of a question. It’s not quite the identical thing, however in the event you think about it that way, it may make a tone language a little less intimidating.
The writing system Some languages use a special script or writing system and this can have a significant impact on whether a language is hard to study or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but also embody a couple of different symbols not in English to represent sounds specific to that language (think of the ‘o’ with a line via it in Norwegian, or the ‘n’ with a little squiggly over it in Spanish). These are typically not difficult to learn.
But some languages go farther and have a different alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and many of the other Slavic languages of Jap Europe all use a special script. This adds to the advancedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are also written from proper to left, additional adding difficulty.
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