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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| grt223 Triglot Newbie Bulgaria Joined 6025 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, German | Message 1 of 31 21 June 2008 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I know that English is considered a Germanic language because of certain similarities it shares with other members of this language group in terms of grammar, synthax, etc. However, on the basis of my studying experience, I believe that English vocabulary is more closely related to that of Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, rather than to the vocabulary of other Germanic languages.
Thus, would it be easier for an English speaker to learn any of the aforementioned Romance languages rather than, let's say, Dutch or Swedish, or vice versa? Thanks in advance.:) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5922 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 3 of 31 21 June 2008 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Although English is a Germanic language, Spanish and Italian are generally considered the easiest to learn. The
Germanic languages are quite a diverse family and English's verbal system is much more similar to that of the Romance languages, especially Spanish, than, say, Dutch or German. They say that English is Germanic in its grammar and words of less than 5 letters, then it becomes heavily dependent on Latinate loans. Although correct grammar is essential, at the end of the day much more time is spent learning vocab than grammar. If you compare a news article in English, Spanish and Dutch you will see than the English and Spanish versions will have much more vocab in common and be much more similar to one another than to the Dutch version. I think Bulgarian is in a similar situation whereby the languages it shares grammatical similarities with like Greek, Romanian and Albanian have difficult vocab but the other Slavonic languages, with familiar vocab, have different grammatical structures. As a Bulgarian speaker is it easier to learn Romanian or Greek, with grammatical similarities, or another Slavonic language such as Czech or Russian? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5922 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 5 of 31 21 June 2008 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I can assure you as a native English speaker that the Romance languages are much easier to learn than the
Germanic ones. Just because languages are closely related doesn't always mean that their easier to learn. I alluded to the Sprachbund effect in my question to grt223 where languages often share traits across family boundaries and I think that the close relationship between French and English may have had a profound effect over the last thousand or so years. I have found that the use of tenses in Spanish is much closer to English usage. Eg, I was reading a book, just use the imperfect in French/Spanish but in the Scandinavian languages you would have to say something like "I sat and read a book" while in German you can only use the imperfect as a substitute for the perfect. Also if I'm unsure of a word in a Romance language you can generally use the "literary" English equivalent, whereas Germanic languages tend to construct their own forms (especially verbs), which are quite easy to decipher but not to construct from scratch. It's possible as a French speaker you feel overwhelmed by the number of Germanic synonyms for Latinate words but a monolingual Englishman (there are many of them) would find it much easier to understand written Spanish or French rather than German or Dutch in anything more complicated than a shopping list. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| grt223 Triglot Newbie Bulgaria Joined 6025 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, German | Message 7 of 31 21 June 2008 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Being a native Bulgarian speaker, I think Bulgarian hardly has anything in common with Greek, Romanian and Albanian in terms of grammar. There are some loan words from Greek origin, though. As to Russian, it shares many common traits with Bulgarian, both as far as the languages' grammar and vocabulary are concerned, but I am not really willing to study a Slavic language for now. Edited by grt223 on 21 June 2008 at 1:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5816 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 8 of 31 21 June 2008 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Things develop a bit fast on this thread, so please excuse me if I am repeating somebody.
German is the champion in terms of grammatical weirdness and I imagine Swedish is the same if not worse. Dutch should be a bit closer to English. On the other hand, I can tell you that by studying a romance languages you will get a lot of gratis vocabulary and will also enhance your English :p.French grammar is also quite monstrous but you will get accustomed to it, don't worry :).
This concurs with my own observations :). I can't fail to notice another interesting tendency. Many English words that are very formal also exist in French but are used without this air of formality, they are just plain and simple.
It is unlikely that Bulgarian shares any grammatical features with Greek, Romanian or Albanian. Romanian for one is actually a romance language and I suspect it is closer to Italian than any Slavic language. I cant's really relate Bulgarian grammar to that of any of those languages but you can find many similarities with other southern Slavonic languages (Macedonian, Serbian, etc.) I guess you can say the relation English-French is somewhat similar to Bulgarian-Russian. Strangely enough, French and English seem to have more in common, despite of being in different language families. However, this is a biased opinion since Bulgarian is my native language an I'm probably more sensitive for the differences. This is totally unrelated but I wonder why but Dutch reminds me so much of Scots. Maybe it's just because I can't understand either ;p. Edited by Sennin on 21 June 2008 at 2:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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