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Difficulty of Germanic Languages | ||
Tags: Afrikaans | Germanic Languages | Scandinavian Languages | Icelandic | Norwegian | Swedish | Dutch | Difficulty | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6562 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 1 of 20 30 May 2006 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
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Which Germanic language is easiet for an English speaker to learn? I'm thinking about Afrikaans and maybe German and Swedish later on.
-brumblebee 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Frisco Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6643 days ago 380 posts - 398 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 2 of 20 31 May 2006 at 12:20am | IP Logged |
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Out of the ones you're interested in, I would say the least grammatically complex is Swedish. Scandinavian languages conjugate their verbs very simply and similarly to English. Nouns work in a different way (with the genders and all), but your experience with Spanish should help you out a bit with that.
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| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6562 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 3 of 20 31 May 2006 at 11:38am | IP Logged |
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What about Norwegian, is it easier than Swedish? Edited by brumblebee on 31 May 2006 at 1:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6696 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 20 31 May 2006 at 1:07pm | IP Logged |
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As a native Swedish speaker I'd say that Norwegian is just as easy, but if you're going to learn Swedish I think it's easier to find more books, movies, music et.c. in Swedish.
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| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6562 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 5 of 20 31 May 2006 at 1:14pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, it is nice to hear the opinions of a native speaker.
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| Kveldulv Senior Member Italy Joined 6740 days ago 222 posts - 244 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Italian* | Message 6 of 20 31 May 2006 at 1:21pm | IP Logged |
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I find the Norwegian spelling easier than the Swedish one. But Norwegian has two variants, Bokmål og Nynorsk, and even if Nynorsk is not as widespread as Bokmål, you can hear it on the radio on daily basis.
They don't differ so much, but can give some trouble. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| patlajan Triglot Groupie United States Joined 6936 days ago 59 posts - 65 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Turkish Studies: German, Mandarin, French | Message 7 of 20 31 May 2006 at 1:25pm | IP Logged |
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I've been working on German for a while now, and have found it less difficult than I expected. I expect that the Scandinavian languages would take about the same effort. Dutch is quite close to English, but I don't think I could make some of their sounds. Frisian is the closest language to English, but as I have only known one native speaker - this would be a purely academic effort for most non- europeans.
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| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6562 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 8 of 20 31 May 2006 at 2:17pm | IP Logged |
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All of my friends that take German at school say that it is "extremely easy" I don't know what materials they are using or how much they are actually learning though. I said to my friend "say something in German" it sounded like she didn't know very much (German)
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