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What language did you find easiest? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5923 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 33 of 66 06 February 2015 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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The language that was easiest for me to learn to a level where I could read and write was Afrikaans even though I didn't always know what I was doing.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 34 of 66 06 February 2015 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Getting to the point of reading German with the help of a popup dictionary has been surprisingly fast for me. I'm reading a fantasy book in German now, after a week of study, doing seven Assimil lessons a day (I currently have a lot of spare time). I'm blown away at how much of an advantage my Swedish and English are giving me for German. I think the "cognate discount" is much intensified when it's coming from one's native language, since a lot of the cognates might be with very low-frequency words.
Of course, I'm far from being able to write, listen to or speak German, and I'm not going to be reading Kafka without a dictionary anytime soon, but I expected it would take a lot longer (months) to reach this point, seeing how opaque German always seemed to me before I started studying it. But a little study has really revealed the hidden connections. German and Swedish really are very close, not just because of the genetic relationship, but also because of the enormous amount of German loan words in Swedish (most of which look "Swedish" to us today). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 35 of 66 06 February 2015 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
As a native English speaker I am always surprised by how many cognates are present in the language - it seems also as I get more advanced that the cognates are more obvious (and helpful) than not. The only ex-pats I know who tend to learn German fairly quickly here in Berlin are Dutch and to a lesser extent Swedes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 36 of 66 07 February 2015 at 3:16am | IP Logged | ||
The loan words are Low German most of the time. The real problem is that the orthography obscures the cognates in German (whereas they are directly clear if you speak Dutch - sometimes we just add a letter or change the verb ending). For example to pay "att betala" "bezahlen" is more complicated with German because the t changed to a z (ts sound) and the verb conjugation adds in an umlaut for good measure. That makes it harder to derive the correct form, even though betala clearly is a Low German word. Dutch has betalen (n usually not pronounced) and then the cognate is immediately clear, you just pronounce the word with a different accent depending on the language. Dutch, German and the mainland Scandinavian languages really are much closer than people think and it's the reason why people from those cultures can learn each other's language really, really fast. Most of the time it's another way of saying the same thing. Even strange things like the garpegenitiv in Norwegian pop up in spoken Dutch and in Afrikaans. Or weird old vocabulary items. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4487 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 37 of 66 07 February 2015 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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When I was studying at my university, like most other Filipinos, I found Spanish the least difficult of all foreign
languages I studied. Filipinos get a pretty big discount studying Spanish with all the Spanish loan words we have in Tagalog. Of all the commonly studied foreign languages you'd find in a university, studying Spanish is usually considered the "easy" choice for a Filipino student. I haven't studied Bahasa Indones (Indonesian) yet though, or talked to many Filipinos who've studied Bahasa Indones, but I have a hunch that studying Bahasa Indones might be easy for a Filipino. But I guess Bahasa Indones is not quite a popular offering at universities as compared to Spanish, even in the Philippines which is Indonesia's next door neighbor. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 38 of 66 07 February 2015 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
What really surprised me was the grammatical similarities. I always thought German and Swedish grammar were really different, what with all the cases and three genders and whatnot, but a lot of the details are the same. Especially the usage of prepositions. Halten | Hålla | Hold Zurückhalten | Hålla tillbaka | Hold back Aushalten | Hålla ut | Bear Behalten | Behålla | Keep Erhalten | Erhålla | Get And so on. There are countless examples of where the German way of contructing a word with a prefix like this has an exact counterpart in Swedish. There are a few counterexamples ("Anhalten" means "to stop" in German, but "Anhålla" means "to arrest" or "to ask for" in Swedish), but the vast majority of cases seem to match up. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 39 of 66 07 February 2015 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||
That's not the best example, given that the noun "anhalt" means a short stop in Swedish. "Första anhalten på vår resa var Berlin." 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 40 of 66 07 February 2015 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have never found learning any language to be easy when it comes to actually writing, speaking and
interacting with natives. Yes, because of similarities in related languages - the so-called cognate discount - certain languages are initially quick to understand passively. For example, between my native French and Spanish, there is a ton of similarities. But writing anything close to native-quality Spanish with few mistakes is very challenging. Ditto for speaking. Sure I was able to get the gist of what was being said very quickly, but to say that after all these years that I can interact effortlessly and idiomatically with natives is a stretch of the imagination. When I look at or listen to Italian, my initial reaction is: "This is going to be a piece of cake, it's just like Spanish." But I don't doubt that to actually speak it or write it well is not as easy as it looks. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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