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Germanic family learning sequence | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | Polyglottery | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| morprussell Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7094 days ago 272 posts - 285 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 3 18 September 2005 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
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What do you think a good sequence is for learning the Germanic family? In this case a sequence for a native English speaker. Thanks for the input.
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| orion Senior Member United States Joined 6952 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 2 of 3 18 September 2005 at 1:28am | IP Logged |
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Morprussell-It seems that German would be a good first choice. If you are an English speaker, it would help open up Dutch and Afrikaans. Then if you want to tackle the Northern Germanic languages, perhaps Swedish would be a good next choice. I don't speak Swedish, but from what others have said, a person can switch pretty easily between it and Danish or Norwegian. Icelandic seems to be the hardest of the Germanic languages. Maybe you would want to save that one for later. I am curious what others on the forum, with more experience than I, would say. Edited by orion on 18 September 2005 at 1:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paul Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7052 days ago 114 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 3 18 September 2005 at 2:06am | IP Logged |
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For an English speaker, German is the definite first choice. It has the most
speakers, and both the missing vocabulary, and the typical Germanic grammatical structure that english partially lacks (it's like filling in the missing pieces). So to start with i'd say English German For example with English and German you probably have 60-90 % (i don't know exactly) of Swedish vocabulary and virtually all of the grammatical structure (there are still minor differences such as the definite article forming a suffix at the end of a noun). The simple words are refreshingly similar to english, and higher vocabulary is shared with German (whereas english obviously shares this with French). Basically once you know English and German, all the other major Germanic languages will be very easy. So i would say 1.English 2.German =3.Swedish (Norwegian and Danish are so similar they need not be learnt.) or =3.Dutch =4 Icelandic (This is going to take a couple of years, and had less in common with the other languages so is best saved for last. Again German grammar and Scandinavian vocabulary will give you a starting point. =5 Faroese, if you really want to. It only has 70,000 odd speakers. This is very similar to Icelandic. Hope this helps. Edited by Paul on 18 September 2005 at 2:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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