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What Makes One Language Harder or Easier Than One other?

What makes one language harder or easier to learn than another? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a one simple answer. There are some languages which have a number of characteristics 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 have been surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for those lucky enough to develop up speaking more than one language) is essentially the most influential factor on how you be taught different languages. Languages that share a few of the qualities and traits of your native English shall be simpler to learn. Languages which have very little in common with your native English might be much harder. Most languages will fall somewhere in 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 be taught English because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. If you're studying Chinese right now, that's probably little comfort to you.

Related languages Learning a language carefully related to your native language, or one other that you simply already speak, is much simpler than learning a completely alien one. Associated languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them easier to learn 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, easier to be taught 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 characteristics which can be often shared between related languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully similar to English which makes learning it much easier than say German, which has a notoriously more complicated word order and verb conjugation. Although both languages are related to English, German kept it's more complex grammar, the place 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's not surprising since all of them developed from Latin. It is extremely frequent for somebody who learns one in all these languages to go on and learn one or others. They're so similar at instances that it seems you can study the others at a reduced price in effort.

Commonalities in grammar don't just occur in associated languages. Very different ones can share similar qualities as well. English and Chinese actually have comparableities in their grammar, which partly makes up for a number 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, in addition they share with English. The Romance languages all have the huge mainity 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 an enormous quantity of French vocabulary in English. Another reason that Spanish, French and Italian are

considered easier than other languages.

There are always borrowings of vocabulary between languages, and not always between associated languages. There's a shocking amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It's a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, but it's to discover it.

Sounds Obviously, languages sound different. Though all humans use basically the identical sounds, there always appears to be some sounds in different languages that we just haven't got in our native language. Some are strange or troublesome to articulate. Some could 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 don't exist in English. While a French 'r' could be very different from English, a Chinese 'r' is

really very similar.

It will probably take a while to get comfortable with these new sounds, though I think that faking it is settle forable until you may get a better deal with on them. Many individuals don't 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 can be very subtle and difficult for someone who has by no means used tones before. This is likely one of the principal reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.

Chinese isn't the only language to use tones, and never all of them are from unique far-off lands. Swedish makes use of tones, though it is just not almost as advanced 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 but they're very few, usually used only in particular situations, and aren't part of the pronunciation of individual words. For example, in American English it's frequent to lift the tone of our voice on the finish of a question. It isn't quite the identical thing, however when you think about it that way, it may make a tone language a little less intimidating.

The writing system Some languages use a different script or writing system and this can have a major impact on whether a language is hard to be taught or not. Many European languages use the identical script as English but also embrace just a few other symbols not in English to symbolize 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 typically not troublesome to learn.

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

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