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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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 Posted: Sat May 31, 2014 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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| aq8knyus wrote: |
| ETA wrote: |
| KimchiNinja wrote: |
Where is German on this list? I've been thinking of studying but hear it is crazy hard.
I actually didn't think Mandarin was that hard, the tones are fun. |
German was much easier to learn than Spanish for me and Spanish is considered to be the easiest lang for native English speakers to learn. Germanic vocab is more similar to English.
Shoes...
German: Schuhe
Spanish: Zapatos
An English speaker's brain can more easily relate to German vocab than Spanish. |
Everyone is different of course, but I would say that the Romance languages are a tad easier for an English speaker than German.
English is a Germanic language, but thanks to the Norman conquest English contains thousands of cognates with French and Spanish. Also German declension means that English shares more similarities with French and Spanish when it comes to word order.
As French was the language of the elite and government in England for over three centuries, many high register English words come from French. Just open Le Monde or El Pais and click on the headline article to see how even without any background in French or Spanish you can kind of get the gist of what they are saying.
You cant really do the same with Bild, at least in my experience. |
Yep, it all depends on the type of vocabulary. Newspapers are full of Romance vocabulary, everyday speech is mostly Germanic, so an English speaker is well prepared to read a French newspaper and talk in German or Dutch about regular things, but not the other way around. |
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Adam Carolla
Joined: 26 Feb 2010
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EastisEast
Joined: 29 May 2014
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 4:36 am Post subject: |
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I find Arabic to be easy enough, also Japanese in simple vocabulary is do-able.
Hard languages are the ones that take time to pronounce and tongue twist. Cantonese and Tamil fall into this category. |
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