Profile

Registered: 4 years, 11 months ago

What Makes One Language Harder or Simpler Than Another?

What makes one language harder or simpler to be taught than one other? Sadly, there is no one simple answer. There are some languages which have a number of characteristics that make them relatively difficult to learn. However 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 had been surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for those lucky sufficient to grow up speaking more than one language) is probably the most influential factor on how you be taught other languages. Languages that share a few of the qualities and traits of your native English can be simpler to learn. Languages that have very little in common with your native English can be a lot 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 almost as hard a time to be taught English because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. In case you are studying Chinese proper now, that is probably little consolation to you.

Associated languages Learning a language closely related to your native language, or another that you just already speak, is far easier than learning a totally alien one. Related languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them easier to study 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 intently related and thus, easier to study 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 One of those traits 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 easier than say German, which has a notoriously more advanced word order and verb conjugation. Although both languages are related to English, German kept it's more complex grammar, where English and Swedish have largely dropped it.

The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a number of other languages) are famous for sharing many characteristics. It is not surprising since all of them advanced from Latin. It is extremely frequent for somebody who learns one among these languages to go on and be taught one or others. They're so similar at times that it seems that you would be able to learn the others at a discounted price in effort.

Commonalities in grammar don't just happen in associated languages. Very different ones can share related qualities as well. English and Chinese even have comparableities in their grammar, which partly makes up for among the different difficulties with Chinese.

Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is a type of traits 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 much 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 other languages.

There are always borrowings of vocabulary between languages, and never always between associated languages. There's a shocking amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It is a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, however it's to discover it.

Sounds Obviously, languages sound different. Although all humans use basically the identical 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 difficult to articulate. Some may be quite subtle. A Spanish 'o' is just not precisely the identical as an English 'o.' And then there are some vowel sounds in French, for instance, that just do not exist in English. While a French 'r' could be very completely different from English, a Chinese 'r' is

really very similar.

It could actually take a while to get comfortable with these new sounds, though I think that faking it is acceptable until you can get a better handle on them. Many people don't put sufficient effort into this facet of learning and this makes some languages appear harder to be taught than they need to be.

Tones A number of languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This will be very subtle and difficult for someone who has by no means used tones before. This is one of the main 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, although it is not nearly as complex or troublesome as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that can only really be learned by listening to native speakers.

By the way, there are examples of tone use in English however they are only a few, often used only in particular situations, and are not part of the pronunciation of individual words. For example, in American English it's common to raise the tone of our voice on the end of a question. It isn't quite the same thing, but when you 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 significant impact on whether or not a language is hard to learn or not. Many European languages use the identical script as English but in addition include just a few different symbols not in English to characterize sounds particular 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 usually not tough to learn.

However some languages go farther and have a different alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and most of the other Slavic languages of Japanese Europe all use a distinct 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 beloved this post and you want to be given guidance regarding Online dutch course kindly check out our own webpage.

Website: https://masterclassdutch.com/online-dutch-courses/

Forums

Topics Started: 0

Replies Created: 0

Forum Role: Keymaster