Actually I’ve heard the exact opposite. Since English and German are so closely related when native speakers of one are learning the other they notice the similarities and subconsciously attempt to place the rules of their native language onto the language they’re learning, which just winds up making the process much more difficult.
If a person is learning a language from a completely different family of languages then they are far less likely to notice similarities between that one and their native tongue and are less likely to attempt to impose rules that don’t exist or exist differently on to that language.
In other words it’s easier to learn a completely different language because the mind is a blank slate, as opposed to learning a similar language where the mind is covered with scribbling. Or something like that.
Of course I’m dimly recalling this from a linguistics class I took years ago so it’s a definite possibility that I’m wrong. Anybody with definitive proof on this one way or the other?
Sorry, haven´t got a cite either - just speaking from personal experience and observations.
I agree with you that with similar languages, you tend to make mistakes because you assume the word/grammatical construction is transferrable or do it without thinking (the English/German pair isn´t as bad as, say, Italian and Spanish, or (even worse) Spanish and Catalan, because they´re really close).
However, while you tend to make typical mistakes that identify you as a native of the other language, you actually get the basic hang of it pretty quickly.
My private theory is that it´s easier to learn a language if you have metal “hooks” you can hang the words or grammar on, so to speak, instead of starting with a tabula rasa. I think the human mind always tries to relate new information to what´s already there, only small children learn a language without wondering “how do I say this in the other language?”. An adult is used to a language and will try to compare or find equivalences.
Take an example - if you´re an English native speaker, the concept of “cases” as in German or Latin is at first hard to grasp. But if you´ve had Latin in school, you´ll be happy to find German only has 4 instead of 6 of them… and a German native speaker won´t have any problem at all with the basic concept of cases. (The problems start, and I agree with you on that, where there are subtle differences.) And of course, similar origins help a lot in terms of vocabulary (there´s much more words with similar meanings than “false friends”).
But let´s take Finnish as a totally different language. I speak it as a native language, so I find it extremely logical with wonderful ways of expression. But I´ve seen many German and other speakers of Indogermanic languages have extreme difficulties with getting a basic grasp of the language. Not because it´s more difficult than German (well, not IMO ), but because it works in a totally different way. You don´t have prepositions. You have, but often don´t use, possessive pronouns. It´s all simply added as a string of suffixes to the end of the noun. Once you´ve wrapped your brain around that, it becomes a very logical and not-all-that-difficult language. But it´s exactly this step that seems to be extremely hard to take. And as long as your mind is totally occupied with getting the grammar right, its hard to speak properly (had that problem myself with Russian, even though it´s Indogermanic). Once you´ve got that - hey, it suddenly works, plus you´ve learned a new way to view the world. But in terms of easiness, I´d stick with a related language.
NinjaChick - loan words exist in virtually every language (Icelandic being a notable exception) and do count as part of the vocabulary. Some are assimilated (eg. assimilare, Latin), some are used in the same form (eg. Zeitgeist, German), and some undergo a slight change of meaning (eg. powwow, Narraganset or Massachuset - it now can also mean a social get-together or a discussion) or a narrowing of meaning (Angst in German means fear in general, while in English it´s used only in the psychological context).
It´s hard to draw a line here - basically, if you excluded all words of non-English origin, you´d be left with a vocabulary of zero. I mean, Old English originated from West Germanic, and after that you´ve got influences from North Germanic (Old Norse), and the Romance languages… English only is what it is today because of the influences from other languages - and this holds true for other languages as well. All languages live and evolve, and what´s now distinguishable as a loan word may not seem so in a few centuries.
Sorry to ramble, folks… I tend to expound my theories at great length… hope I´m not boring anyone
That may be the case with, say, Spanish and Portugese, but not English and German. German, although in the same language family as English, is not THAT close. An Italian-only speaker can get a Spanish or Portugese newspaper and at least get the gist. An English-only speaker wont have a clue with a German paper.
Of course learning German isnt like learning Finnish, but you dont mix 'em up, either. You make a valid point, but Im not sure if a language exists that would pose that problem for an English speaker (unless you count dialects like Jamaican).
Any debate on the “most difficult” or “easiest” language is pointless, since difficulty or ease in learning a language varies depending on the native tongue of the student. In other words, a native speaker of Italian will find Spanish, on the whole, much easier to learn than, say, Mandarin, as Spanish and Italian are related languages both descended from Latin.
English is often touted as the “hardest” language, but that’s nonsense. It does have a large vocabulary thanks to lots of French, Latin, and Greek loanwords, but few of those words are used in everyday conversation. For example, Neil Armstrong’s famous moonlanding speech – “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind” – is entirely Anglo-Saxon in origin except for one word: “giant”. As far as grammar goes, English is not too tough – adjectives do not vary, there are no cases or genders, only two tenses. About the hardest phenome is the dental frictative in “thin” and “this”, which doesn’t appear in many other languages, but which can be mastered with time and effort. What drives most non-native speakers crazy is the antiquated spelling, which was frozen several hundreds years ago and which no one has bothered to update since. As a consequence, any resemblance between how a word is pronounced and the letters used in that word is purely coincidental. So native English speakers, don’t go getting swollen with pride over mastering such a “difficult” language.
English definitely is, however, one of the most useful languages, behind only Chinese, though Spanish is threatening their dominance. Other languages that are or are becoming useful include:
Arabic – immensely important in the Muslim and Middle-Eastern world.
French – not as dominant as it once was, but still spoken by many millions in Europe, Canada and North Africa.
Kiswahili – probably the most important of the native African languages.
Hindi – probably the most important of the native Indian languages.
Russian – opens the door to Russia and, to a limited extent, the rest of the former USSR.
As for which of these languages will prove the hardest, that depends on your native language. A native English speaker will probably find French and Russian easier than Arabic; a native Punjabi speaker will undoubtably find Hindi to be simpler than Kiswahili.
Does anyone know how English and Chinese compare(numbers wise) when you include people who speak either as a second language? I question whether Chinese is really more useful to know than English on a global scale.
I think English is more useful than Chinese globally. Take this as an example: When an airline pilot from Mumbai flies into Bangkok, what language does he use to talk to ATC? A very limited dialect of English, standardized into a lingua franca for all international airline pilots, everywhere (despite Quebecois rumblings to the contrary ;)). What language are 99.9% of all computer languages emulating? English. Even Lua (Google it), developed by a Brazilian team speaking Brazilian Portuguese, emulates English (do … end, if, etc.). Most tellingly, there are more English students in China than there are people in the United States (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, Bill Bryson, 1990).
Quite frankly, what relevance does Chinese have outside of China and East Asia?
5-HT: According to Ethnologue, there are 508,000,000 first-and-second language speakers of English in the world as of 1999. There are 1,052,000,000 first-and-second language speakers of Mandarin Chinese in the world as of 1999. Compare this to Spanish’s 417,000,000 first-and-second language speakers.
Derleth: Perhaps I should have been more clear in my post, but yes, I was speaking of Mandarin. I’ll leave the importance of China alone – that’s a topic for another thread. But being able to speak to 1,052,000,000 people sounds quite important to me.
Derleth: But all those people are not in the same country. Ethnologue gives 867,200,000 speakers in mainland China, leaving 184,800,000 outside of China who can converse in Mandarin. I concede that English is more globally important, but Mandarin is nothing to sneeze at.
Well, I don’t know about English linguistics, but during my university days, I majored in Japanese Linguistics. I probably wrote one of the most boring topic disertations of all time, but is actually kind of funny…
It was based on the number of times Japanese speakers use the word “un” or “hai” or other “aizuchi” ( confirmation ) when speaking on the telephone and listening to someone. I don" remember the exact detail, but in listening mode, the average Japanese speaker /listener says “aizuchi” every 11 seconds. I listened to hours and hours of Japanese telephone conversations.
I do not know if this information is useful to anyone, but next tim e you listen to someone speaking Japanese on the telephone, check to see how many times they are saying these kinds of confirmation utterances and words. It is amazingly high! Someties there are 100s of aizuchi in a single call. They also get faster when the listener wants to get off the phone or is initiating an end to the call by saying things like “hai hai hai hai…haaaaaaaai…haihai! click” This is how most calls end.
Eh, I don’t think he said that. His thesis, and mine as well, is that because the vast majority of all speakers of Chinese languages (Mandarin being the one used as an example in this thread) live in East Asia, the languages have less importance globally, that is, outside East Asia.
Derleth: I concured earlier with you when I said English with more important globally than the Chinese languages. I am not doubting that. Mandarin is, however, still an important language, especially for anyone with business or cultural interests in East Asia.
), but because it works in a totally different way. You don´t have prepositions. You have, but often don´t use, possessive pronouns. It´s all simply added as a string of suffixes to the end of the noun. Once you´ve wrapped your brain around that, it becomes a very logical and not-all-that-difficult language. But it´s exactly this step that seems to be extremely hard to take. And as long as your mind is totally occupied with getting the grammar right, its hard to speak properly (had that problem myself with Russian, even though it´s Indogermanic). Once you´ve got that - hey, it suddenly works, plus you´ve learned a new way to view the world. But in terms of easiness, I´d stick with a related language.