Profile

Registered: 4 years, 4 months ago

What Makes One Language Harder or Simpler Than One other?

What makes one language harder or easier to learn than one other? Sadly, there isn't a one easy answer. There are some languages which have a number of traits that make them relatively tough 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 were surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for these lucky enough to grow up speaking more than one language) is essentially the most influential factor on how you learn different languages. Languages that share some of the qualities and traits of your native English will likely be easier to learn. Languages which have very little in frequent with your native English can be a lot harder. Most languages will fall somewhere 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 almost as hard a time to learn 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.

Related languages Learning a language intently related to your native language, or another that you already speak, is far simpler than learning a totally alien one. Related 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 be taught 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 traits which can be typically shared between associated 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. Though each 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 different languages) are well-known for sharing many characteristics. It's not surprising since all of them advanced from Latin. It is extremely widespread for someone who learns certainly one of these languages to go on and learn one or others. They're so comparable at times that it seems you could be taught the others at a reduced price in effort.

Commonalities in grammar do not just occur in associated languages. Very different ones can share similar qualities as well. English and Chinese actually have comparableities of their grammar, which partly makes up for among the other difficulties with Chinese.

Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is one of those traits 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 an enormous amount of French vocabulary in English. One other reason that Spanish, French and Italian are

considered simpler than other languages.

There are always borrowings of vocabulary between languages, and not always between related languages. There is a stunning amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It is a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, however it's to discover it.

Sounds Clearly, languages sound different. Though all people use basically the identical sounds, there always appears to be some sounds in other languages that we just do not have in our native language. Some are strange or tough to articulate. Some might be quite subtle. A Spanish 'o' will not be exactly 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' could be very totally 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 settle forable until you may get a greater deal with on them. Many people don't put enough effort into this side of learning and this makes some languages seem harder to learn than they need to be.

Tones A few languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This can be very subtle and difficult for somebody who has never used tones before. This is one of the foremost 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 uses tones, though it is not almost as complex or difficult 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, usually used only in particular situations, and are not part of the pronunciation of particular person words. For instance, in American English it's widespread to boost the tone of our voice on the finish of a question. It's not quite the identical thing, but 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 special script or writing system and this can have a major impact on whether a language is hard to learn or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but additionally embrace just a few different symbols not in English to represent 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 usually not troublesome to learn.

However some languages go farther and have a special alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and most of the other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe all use a distinct script. This adds to the advancedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are additionally written from proper to left, further adding difficulty.

If you beloved this short article and you would like to get additional facts about Online dutch course kindly go to the website.

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

Forums

Topics Started: 0

Replies Created: 0

Forum Role: Keymaster