Is it true that native speakers of Western European Languages have advantage over others concerning

[Otkakönmişkılıç]

Is it true that native speakers of Western European Languages have advantage over others concerning learning English?

My observation from tourists, language schools, and conversation with people who work in tourism companies and agents, I have realized that native speakers of the German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian speakers have an absolute advantage over native speakers of other languages. They tend to achieve better results in English exams (especially Germans)

There are also a few interesting points to me:

Native speakers of Asian languages tend to be better at grammar,
Native speakers of Arabic language tend to have a good range of vocabulary,
Native speakers of Western European languages tend to have better skills at Listening and Speaking (they tend to be more fluent and have better understanding what a native speaker says while compared to others).

Am I the only one to observe these things?
Is it true that native speakers of Western European Languages have advantage over others concerning learning English? Or is it simply connected with the quality of education?
If it is connected with the quality of education, why do far eastern countries' people appear to have had struggle with learning English? (I assume Japan and South Korea have good mentality toward education)

I don't think it has anything to do with language family. As a native speaker of Turkish, I am sure I don't have any advantage over, for example, an English speaker when it comes to learn an another Turkic language.

[Terr]

Originally Posted by Otkakönmişkılıç

I don't think it has anything to do with language family. As a native speaker of Turkish, I am sure I don't have any advantage over, for example, an English speaker when it comes to learn an another Turkic language.

I am sure you would. There are probably a lot of common roots, and a lot of grammar overlaps.

For example, as a speaker of Russian, I would have a huge advantage in learning Ukrainian or Czech over someone who only spoke English.

[Capt Kirk]

I believe that English is easier to learn for Western Europeans because English is in some ways an amalgam of Germanic and Romance Languages. There are words,concepts and structures you already know and most schools in Western Europe have been teaching English since WWII if not before. Plus got to Europe and turn on a TV, American programs everywhere. Watching Malcolm in the Middle dubbed in German was a riot.

[Hello Again]

Perhaps you are not aware of the idea of "Language families." Languages did not all arise completely independent from one another. They evolved over time, spreading and changing, meeting and mixing. When languages are closely related to others in alphabet, grammar, structure, vocabulary, history,and underlying culture -- because they evolved from a "common ancestor" so to speak -- we say that are in the same language Family. One Language Family is the Indo-European, which contains all European languages, another is the Afro-Asiatic, containing all Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew; and yet a third is the Altaic, containing Japanese, Korean, and Turkic (but not Chinese).

All European languages are very similar to English by this measure. They are all in the Indo-European family. And specifically, English is in the bastard love child of two subfamilies of the Indo-European : Germanic and Romance. It is a Germanic language, with extensive borrowing from French-Norman, a member of the Romance language family. Since all European languages are either in the Germanic or Romance categories (except I think Hungarian?) they are all quite closely related to English.

You are not the first to observe differences between languages and language speakers' relative abilities at learning English. If you want to know ALL about it, I suggest a degree in comparative linguistics.

[Hello Again]

As a native speaker of Turkish, I am sure I don't have any advantage over, for example, an English speaker when it comes to learn an another Turkic language.

ETA: I don't know why you would say this, but I assure you, you are completely wrong. You would have a gigantic, enormous advantage over an English speaker who had never studied a Turkish language before.

Interesting little graphic:
http://twentytwowords.com/2011/04/07...lish-speakers/

[PSXer]

Why is Hebrew medium on that graphic and Arabic hard?

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

Originally Posted by PSXer

Why is Hebrew medium on that graphic and Arabic hard?

I can't speak to Arabic, but Hebrew is pretty easy- it's very phonetic.

[Noone Special]

Originally Posted by IvoryTowerDenizen

I can't speak to Arabic, but Hebrew is pretty easy- it's very phonetic.

Unless you learn Hebrew with the diacritic vowels ("nikud"), I assure you Hebrew is not phonetic -- in the very same sense that English "shorthand" is not; i.e., it lacks 50-70% of the vowels, and there is no consistency as to which vowels you will get in a given word.

I think Hebrew is probably considered easeir than Arabic because:
1. More "common ground" exists, due to many English speakers being familiar with adages and concepts from the Old Testament.
2. More Hebrew words have entered the English language -- for the same reason as above.
3. IMO, Hebrew printed characters are more easy to discern than the Arabic characters, which are basically always "script". This last point goes out the window as soon as you have to read handwritten Hebrew, which is significantly different from printed Hebrew.

[Anne Neville]

Originally Posted by Hello Again

Interesting little graphic:
http://twentytwowords.com/2011/04/07...lish-speakers/

From that graphic, it looks like the easy languages are all Indo-European, and all use the same alphabet (possibly with some diacritical marks) as English.

[Nava]

Originally Posted by Hello Again

Interesting little graphic:
http://twentytwowords.com/2011/04/07...lish-speakers/

I wonder how they're counting the native speakers of French, it seems to me like it should be higher. Maybe they're counting people from multilingual areas as "non-native"... (no, Celine, you're not a native speaker any more, at least according to the people who drew that pic)

Originally Posted by Hello Again

Since all European languages are either in the Germanic or Romance categories (except I think Hungarian?) they are all quite closely related to English.

Hungarian, Basque, Finnish, Greek and the Slavic family of languages, off the top of my head. Greek has influenced everybody else, but it's neither a Romance nor a Germanic language.

[Hello Again]

Originally Posted by Nava

Hungarian, Basque, Finnish, Greek and the Slavic family of languages, off the top of my head. Greek has influenced everybody else, but it's neither a Romance nor a Germanic language.

I meant Western European languages since that was the thrust of the OP's question but I kinda left out an important word; I intended to exclude the slavic group.

I forgot about Finnish and Basque. Basque has no language group, which is pretty interesting. It also sort of slid out of my brain that Greek is not in the Romance family (duh, how could it be?) and I should have mentioned that Greek is another language English has borrowed from heavily.

[John Mace]

Originally Posted by Hello Again

I meant Western European languages since that was the thrust of the OP's question but I kinda left out an important word; I intended to exclude the slavic group.

Then you forgot the Celtic languages (Irish, Breton, etc.), Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

[mister nyx]

. . . Albanian, Greek, the Baltic languages, Maltese, the Saami languages. (Aside from the aforementioned languages you apparently weren't aware of.)

The idea that all European languages are Romance or Germanic is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the idea that English is somehow some special kind of offspring of the Germanic and Romance languages, rather than (as those boring ol' textbooks all say) just a regular old Germanic language.

[Alessan]

Originally Posted by Noone Special

Unless you learn Hebrew with the diacritic vowels ("nikud"), I assure you Hebrew is not phonetic -- in the very same sense that English "shorthand" is not; i.e., it lacks 50-70% of the vowels, and there is no consistency as to which vowels you will get in a given word.

I think Hebrew is probably considered easeir than Arabic because:
1. More "common ground" exists, due to many English speakers being familiar with adages and concepts from the Old Testament.
2. More Hebrew words have entered the English language -- for the same reason as above.
3. IMO, Hebrew printed characters are more easy to discern than the Arabic characters, which are basically always "script". This last point goes out the window as soon as you have to read handwritten Hebrew, which is significantly different from printed Hebrew.

4. Don't forget that in many ways, modern spoken Hebrew is "Hebrew for Ashkenazim"; it was adapted and streamlined for immigrants from European countries, with many of the gutturals dropped.

[kmshrader]

English is my first language, and German my second. English is DEFINITELY a Germanic language, not a combination of Germanic and Romance. Any study of the vocabulary or grammatical structure will quickly clarify this. Of course we've borrowed words from Romance languages over the past centuries, but this is the case with almost every language that uses the Latin alphabet. German's borrowed heavily from French vocabulary, but no-one would suggest that it's part-Romance.

As for learning English as a Western European, a couple things make this easier:
1. Access - there's been extensive Americanization of much of the European cultures, and if half your pop music's in English, of course you'll pick some of it up.
2. Motivation - specifically, tourism. It's an enormously profitable industry, and international relations affect almost every other part of the job market. Speaking English is seen as a great asset.

I have traveled throughout Western Europe, though, and have met many speakers of Romantic languages who admitted that they found English a far more difficult language to learn than another Romance language (say, French to Italian), and German almost impossible. It's something about the hard consonants, I think. A large number (maybe even a majority?) of Germans speak English, but that has to do in part with their educational system.

[Nava]

Originally Posted by kmshrader

I have traveled throughout Western Europe, though, and have met many speakers of Romantic languages who admitted that they found English a far more difficult language to learn than another Romance language (say, French to Italian), and German almost impossible. It's something about the hard consonants, I think. A large number (maybe even a majority?) of Germans speak English, but that has to do in part with their educational system.

The consonants? Oh, no. For English, it's the large amount of vowels and the being two different languages. Knowing how to write something in English doesn't tell you how to say it; knowing how to say it doesn't tell you how to write it. The consonants, we don't care about: after all, if we say "zee" or "de" instead of "the", it's not a problem, people still understand. But it's a constant guessing game both on the vowels and on which consonants to pronounce.

For German, their CH is our J, no problem, but the teachers I've had insisted on "German grammar is SO hard" when we already knew it by heart, and didn't give us enough of a vocabulary. The courses are mostly designed to not take advantage of students' prior knowledge, which is a very wrong approach when the students are already tri-plus-lingual. I can read German out loud without mangling it (German coworkers have confirmed that my pronunciation is fine, the reactions I get sometimes are due to the other person not expecting me to speak German - I've seen the same with my Romanian coworker's Spanish), I can pass any grammar-based test, but I don't understand what I'm reading.

[kmshrader]

Originally Posted by Nava

The consonants? Oh, no. It's the large amount of vowels and the being two different languages. Knowing how to write something in English doesn't tell you how to say it; knowing how to say it doesn't tell you how to write it. The consonants, we don't care about: after all, if we say "zee" or "de" instead of "the", it's not a problem, people still understand. But it's a constant guessing game both on the vowels and on which consonants to pronounce.

Okay, that makes sense. What's the issue with German, then? I've never encountered a more phonetic language. There are maybe twenty different vowel or consonant combinations besides the standard letters of the alphabet, and they each make the same sound every single time. Wouldn't that be really easy, then?

[Nava]

Simulposted the bit on German

[2square4u]

Originally Posted by John Mace

Then you forgot the Celtic languages (Irish, Breton, etc.), Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

AFAIK, Latvian and Lithuanian are both Balto-slavic languages. Finnish and Estonian are Finno-Ugric. Just like Sami is.

Originally Posted by mister nyx

The idea that all European languages are Romance or Germanic is ridiculous.

I was a bit surprised at that oversimplification myself. When I was in school, we learned that the most European languages are either Germanic (e.g. German, Scandinavian, Dutch), Romance (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian), Slavic (e.g. Russian, Polish) or Finno-Ugric (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and Sami). Then there were the more obscure ones, like Basque and the Celtic languages.

[Floater]

Originally Posted by 2square4u

Then there were the more obscure ones, like Basque and the Celtic languages.

Even though Celtic languages are nowadays only spoken in some outlying pockets they were once spread over large parts of Europe.

[nashiitashii]

Originally Posted by Nava

For German, their CH is our J, no problem, but the teachers I've had insisted on "German grammar is SO hard" when we already knew it by heart, and didn't give us enough of a vocabulary. The courses are mostly designed to not take advantage of students' prior knowledge, which is a very wrong approach when the students are already tri-plus-lingual. I can read German out loud without mangling it (German coworkers have confirmed that my pronunciation is fine, the reactions I get sometimes are due to the other person not expecting me to speak German - I've seen the same with my Romanian coworker's Spanish), I can pass any grammar-based test, but I don't understand what I'm reading.

German grammar has a pretty consistent pattern to it-- every sentence requires some of the basic information right up at the front, but it can get confusing for those who haven't encountered the "let's throw all the other verbs at the back of the sentence" bit or the "declining nouns help us understand how they're functioning in relation to the rest of the words in the sentence" bit that makes the word order a little more flexible in German. I could see how native speakers of Romance languages would find it to be a little more difficult, as there's more room for word order creativity, but the payoff for that is having to learn how to figure out context via properly conjugating verbs and declining nouns.

Originally Posted by kmshrader

Okay, that makes sense. What's the issue with German, then? I've never encountered a more phonetic language. There are maybe twenty different vowel or consonant combinations besides the standard letters of the alphabet, and they each make the same sound every single time. Wouldn't that be really easy, then?

I took German at high school and college level, so I have a very basic understanding of conversational Hochdeutsch. What appears to make it difficult for many English speakers is the types of dipthongs one finds in German that is a bit more "subtle" than English; a slight change to the sound of a word can mean the difference between saying the weather is humid and saying the weather is homosexual. For English speakers who are not used to listening for these nuances, unused to gendering their nouns (and there's three of them in German), and baffled by the concept of throwing verbs toward the polar ends of the sentence, it can be a little overwhelming. One thing that is helpful is that it is very similar grammatically to English if you happen to be somewhat eloquent in your use of English and are familiar with older uses of Modern English where we used more creative word order in a manner similar to German.

I was also fairly lucky when I took German that I had already had exposure to both French (via high school classes) and Icelandic (via being a passive bilingual at the time). I picked up on the grammar pretty quickly and the crossover vocabulary from both languages was helpful; the only problem I had in acquiring vocabulary is that words in Icelandic are often so similar to words in German that I'd occasionally confuse which language I was trying to parse as I was writing or attempting to speak.

[Johanna]

Once you've learned about 10 languages from different families, the rest become way easier to study after that. The reason is the underlying deep structure and processes of phonological changes that are shared in common by all human spoken languages. When you've become familiar with such universal patterns repeating over and over everywhere you look, your mind recognizes them so much more quickly. Study of historical and comparative linguistics will augment this learning process considerably.

Incidentally, other European languages of non-Indo-European families that no one has mentioned yet include
Finnic: Ingrian, Karelian, Komi, Mari, Mordvin, and Veps;
Mongolic: Kalmyk;
North Caucasian: Adyge, Andi, Avar, Chechen, Dargin, Ingush, Kabardian, Lak, and Lezgian;
Turkic: Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Kazakh, Kumyk, Nogai, Tatar, and Turkish.

Except for Gagauz (Romania), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), and Turkish (Turkey), all of the above are spoken in the European part of Russia. Russia also has Iranian languages including Ossetic and Tat.

[Nava]

Originally Posted by nashiitashii

German grammar has a pretty consistent pattern to it-- every sentence requires some of the basic information right up at the front, but it can get confusing for those who haven't encountered the "let's throw all the other verbs at the back of the sentence" bit or the "declining nouns help us understand how they're functioning in relation to the rest of the words in the sentence" bit that makes the word order a little more flexible in German. I could see how native speakers of Romance languages would find it to be a little more difficult, as there's more room for word order creativity, but the payoff for that is having to learn how to figure out context via properly conjugating verbs and declining nouns.

One of the things I'm saying is that the grammar was very much not difficult. We already were familiar with declension from Latin (and Basque, in my case: I don't speak Basque but I know how to form its genitive); with different word orders from Latin and English; with similar-yet-unequal prepositions from every language we spoke or had previously studied... All of us had a minumum of 10 years of English or French, at least one year of Latin; we were bilingual or at least one-and-a-half-lingual Spanish/Catalan. But the courses were not designed to take advantage of this, and the native teachers usually were native but were not teachers.

The teachers kept harping on dativ and akusativ. We know that, now teach us how to say "green beans"! "Salad" (not just "tomato"), "grated cheese" (not just "cheese"), "melted cheese" (see before), different kinds of meat (not just "meat"), und so weise.

[Dr. Drake]

What makes a language easy or difficult to learn comes down to a few factors:

1) How close it is to a language you speak in grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and other linguistic factors. English, Dutch, and Icelandic are all Germanic languages, but English and Dutch are closer to each other than either is to Icelandic. These are things that can be objectively measured. I've heard that Italian is the easiest Romance language for English speakers because the sounds of Italian are easier than the sounds of French, Romanian, or Portuguese, while the grammar and vocabulary are a little closer to English than those of Spanish.

2) How much exposure you have to a language. English is omnipresent in Western Europe, even if you aren't studying it, so you get some exposure, both oral and written. That's less true outside of Europe, especially outside of tourist areas and certain domains like international business.

3) The teachers and textbooks and other resources you have. Not all "learn English" books are created equal. I have no problem believing that Arabic and Chinese textbook writers use different strategies with different concentrations.

[John Mace]

Originally Posted by 2square4u

AFAIK, Latvian and Lithuanian are both Balto-slavic languages.

"Balto-Slavic" is not "Slavic".

Finnish and Estonian are Finno-Ugric. Just like Sami is.

Correct. But he still missed them.

[Anne Neville]

If you're learning a new language, your age would make a difference, too. Of course, really young kids have the easiest time of it. I think I was better at picking up new sounds in French when I was in middle school than I am at it in Hebrew now. One big difference is, I'm more than 20 years older now. I've heard plenty of stories about families moving to a country that speaks a different language, and the kids end up with less of an accent than the adults once they learn the new language.

When I converted to Judaism (starting around age 24), I tried to learn Hebrew, or at least the ability to sound out Hebrew words. The "ch" sound was really hard for me. Not too surprising, since it doesn't occur in my dialect of English. 13 years later, I think I get it right or almost right about 75% of the time when I try to say it.

I wonder, if you learn a second language early (say, early elementary school), does that make it easier to pick up a third language later in life? Most of us in the US do not learn a second language before middle school, and I wonder if this handicaps us later on.

[Nawth Chucka]

nm

[nashiitashii]

Originally Posted by Nava

the courses were not designed to take advantage of this, and the native teachers usually were native but were not teachers.

Yeah, that'll do it. I can tell you that, as a native speaker of English but not an ESOL teacher, I would be a terrible English language instructor.

[Johanna]

People who learned a language as a second language very often become the best teachers of that second language. Its native speakers never needed to reflect much on how it works; since they grew up with it, it just is that way; they probably don't even know how. But a scholar who makes it a field of study, especially as a second language, has to learn all about how it works, and is better equipped to explain it to other students. Knowing which parts might be harder for them and need good explanations, for example.

For another example, no grammars of the Arabic language were written until the Persians began studying it in depth during the early Islamic period. All the earliest grammars were written by Persians who learned it as a second language. The Arabs themselves never felt they needed grammars to speak their own mother tongue.

[bump]

Originally Posted by Capt Kirk

I believe that English is easier to learn for Western Europeans because English is in some ways an amalgam of Germanic and Romance Languages. There are words,concepts and structures you already know and most schools in Western Europe have been teaching English since WWII if not before. Plus got to Europe and turn on a TV, American programs everywhere. Watching Malcolm in the Middle dubbed in German was a riot.

I don't know if amalgam is the right term; English isn't like some sort of weird Old English / French / Old Norse creole, but instead a firmly West Germanic language with a ridiculous number of Norman French and Old Norse loanwords and phrases.

From what I understand, as a native English speaker, Dutch would probably be the easiest language for me to learn, being the closest modern relative.

[John Mace]

Originally Posted by bump

I don't know if amalgam is the right term; English isn't like some sort of weird Old English / French / Old Norse creole, but instead a firmly West Germanic language with a ridiculous number of Norman French and Old Norse loanwords and phrases.

Amalgam isn't a technical term, like creole, and linguists have concluded that English is not a creole. I think "amalgam" is a good lay descriptor.

From what I understand, as a native English speaker, Dutch would probably be the easiest language for me to learn, being the closest modern relative.

Dutch is the language most closely related, historically, but we've borrowed so many French/Romance language terms that it's hard to say which would be easier to learn.

The Germanic words in English tend to be the everyday sort of words (hand, man, and), but a lot of those words, like "and", aren't the ones that convey the most information in a given sentence. Often, it's the romance derived words that pack the punch.

[robert_columbia]

Originally Posted by mister nyx

. . . Albanian, Greek, the Baltic languages, Maltese, the Saami languages. (Aside from the aforementioned languages you apparently weren't aware of.)

The idea that all European languages are Romance or Germanic is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the idea that English is somehow some special kind of offspring of the Germanic and Romance languages, rather than (as those boring ol' textbooks all say) just a regular old Germanic language.

Yes. In addition to the Germanic and Romance languages, you have the Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech), Celtic languages (e.g. Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic), the Greek language. There are also Indo-European languages not from Europe, such as Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Farsi), and many of the languages of India.

In a real sense, English is closer historically to Hindi and Urdu than it is to Finnish, which isn't even an Indo-European language at all. If you look at the basic structure of the language you can see similarities, even if you don't speak the language. Take a look at a phonetic transcription of Hindi and see that it sounds vaguely European, even if you can't understand it. Now look at Finnish, which, to my Indo-European accustomed taste, looks completely bizarre.