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Most difficult Romance language?

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Hexaglot
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 Message 1 of 18
10 August 2005 at 3:45am | IP Logged 
I wish to write a new article about which Romance language is the most difficult to learn (that is, for people whose native language is not a Romance language).

My conception was that Spanish was the simplest and French the most difficult, and although I still believe this I would be highly interested to know the experiences of non-Romance-language-native-speakers.

French being highly irregular, with a difficult spelling, seems to me harder than Spanish with its extremely user-friendly spelling system.

What do you think?

Edited by administrator on 10 August 2005 at 3:46am

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Socrates
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 Message 2 of 18
10 August 2005 at 6:48am | IP Logged 
I would tend to agree with French being more difficult than Spanish for English learners not only because of spelling but pronunciation.

Followed by Italian.

However Brazilian Portuguese is I believe the most fiendishly difficult of all the Romance languages to learn.

It's more of a stress-timed language not unlike Russian rather than it's syllable-time Continental Portuguese counterpart.
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LaMofeta
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 Message 3 of 18
10 August 2005 at 12:39pm | IP Logged 
I have always found French more difficult than Spanish. It is harder to pronounce, and harder to understand. I also find it much harder to write. However, for a beginner, I think French would be easier to read than Spanish, because French vocabulary seems to have more similarity to English.

As for the others, I have never studied Italian or Portuguese, but I have briefly studied Romanian, and it seemed more difficult than the others.
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Shusaku
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 Message 4 of 18
10 August 2005 at 1:20pm | IP Logged 
I agree that French is more difficult than Spanish from both a pronounciation and spelling standpoint.

I seem to remember someone (maybe Ardaschir?) stating that Romanian was the most difficult of the Romance family. I wonder if there is any specific reason for it, or if it's just because there isn't much opportunity to practice it outside Romania?

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czech
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 Message 5 of 18
10 August 2005 at 5:06pm | IP Logged 
Is Latin a Romance language?
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Qbe
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 Message 6 of 18
10 August 2005 at 7:21pm | IP Logged 
In my experience the term "Romance" is always used for languages which descend from Latin but not for Latin itself.
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administrator
Hexaglot
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 Message 7 of 18
11 August 2005 at 12:32am | IP Logged 
Right, Latin is the father of Romance languages but not really a Romance language for the purpose of this discussion. Or if he is, he must be in an honorary category and barred from participating - there would be no competition otherwise.
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czech
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 Message 8 of 18
11 August 2005 at 8:42am | IP Logged 
How similiar are the intonation patterns of French to those of English? I know the pronounciation is hard. I'll have to go with that.


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