I’ve taken a lot of Spanish, tiny bit of French, 6 semesters of Arabic.
The Spanish was by far the easiest. The shared vocabulary and ease of finding people to practice with make it pretty easy to grasp. French was not necessarily more difficult to learn, just had trouble practicing/remembering it. Arabic is not actually miserably hard - it is at least phonetic. I was literate (could easily sound out the words from a printed page, and on a good day even write out a few words) within a few months. However I was lousy at listening to tapes and conversing. My conversational skills are exactly nil, beyond giving greetings. However I had zero motivation and “self-lead” courses are always a disaster for me…
You’re making my point. Why’d it “morph into something else?” Because it is too complicated, and the “simplification came about” for that reason. True enough, it didn’t evolve into Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese and Romanian overnight; AFAIK, linguists aren’t really sure when to posit that Italian “broke off”, since it appears to have happened before the spread of the printing press. Before the printing press, books were so expensive that they were never written in “man on the street” languages such as Italian. As such, there’s no accurate written record of the “first” Italian.
I reiterate: Latin died because it was too complicated. Latin scholars dream of a renaissance of the language, constantly inventing new Latin terms for modern terms so as to be prepared for when it once again shines. But they’re just fooling themselves.
FWIW, what happened to Latin is what always happens to a language with time: it evolved into something simpler. Many people think that languages get more complicated with age, since words are constantly being added. Wrong. Languages get simpler with time because the grammar rules and sentence structure are bastardized for simplicity by the population at large, despite the desperate attempts by the intellegentsia to keep the language “pure.” It happened to Arabic (try finding someone driving a cab in the Arab world who understands Arabic), Turkish (Kemal Attaturk put his foot down and that was that), Korean (gave up non-alphabetic writing), etc. Exception: Chinese. Their insular culture kept the language considerably more pure.
How is Latin more “complicated” than other languages?
There is absolutely no evidence that natural languages are becoming simpler over time. If you think you have any evidence supporting that position I would be interested in seeing it.
Dutch is pretty easy if you only want to read. The Scandanavian languages are pretty easy too. Frisian has been mentioned, but there are scarcely no materials on it, and it looks a lot like dutch to me anyway.
Couldn’t let this go by. If you see an Irish word written, you know exactly how it’s pronounced. The orthography is quite regular. There’s a fair amount of shared Indo-European basic vocabulary, as well (one, two, three; aon, dó, trí…).
Your post is so full of shit I don’t even know where to begin.
Like kellner, I would be interested in seeing any evidence you have that languages invariably simplify their grammar. The existence of the modern Slavic languages sure seems to contradict that – their grammar is just as complex now as it was back in the days of Владимиръ and Ольга.
As for your rather unique theories on the Romance languages, read this and this at least, before you talk any further, to give yourself at least a passing familiarity with the evolution of Latin into the Romance languages.
I’ll second that - I can translate from German to English with no problem whatsoever, but from English to German - ouch!
I do very well in conversational German (I can speak quickly and slip by some of the finer grammatical endings), but when it comes to writing German, I over-think it. My German friends get pissed off, "Why would you write it like that? You never speak that badly?!)
Einer? Einem? Eines? Einen? Eine? oder Ein?..ach du Scheisse, mein Kopf tut weh.
But actual German vocabulary isn’t all that bad once you learn the basics - most German words are simply a lot of little words slapped together.
And then you get into High German, or local dialect, or Swiss German, or Saxon…and you might as well start all over again. Luckily, most people who speak German did at least learn “high German” in school and can understand you - the problem is understanding them.
Nor is there any evidence that any existing language is simpler than any other. No matter what the native language is, babies always learn to talk at roughly the age, after allowing for individual differences in intelligence, ability to hear, motor skills controlling voice production, and so on. Languages lose inflectional complexity but gain other forms of complexity in the process, which sometimes themselves become inflections or extensions to other words. For example, the Wikipedia article on Vulgar Latin has this explanation about the rise of the “-ment” adverbial ending seen in Romance languages today:
And even though English has lost most of its verb inflections, the rise of the progressive construction “to be ____ing”, re-introduces an element of verb complexity, because of the irregularity of the verb be.
My theory is, that languages don’t lose complexity over time; they just shift it around from one set of features to another.
IANALinguist by any means, but certainly some languages must be simpler than others. If not, doesn’t this imply that for a native speaker of just one language, that all other languages but would be equally easy/difficult to learn?
Not at all. Generally, the languages more closely related to the learner’s original language, or more similar to it structurally, will be easier to pick up.
In other words, we have to distinguish between “objectively complex” and “hard for an English speaker to learn”. They’re not the same thing by any means.
From what have seen of pidgin, and I believe it is accepted as a real language and the official language of Nugini (pronounced New Guinea) it looks like an easy language to learn.
Words that seem strange make sense when you say them aloud.
Whatever you do, stay away from Finnish. Unlike any other language anywhere (except Estonian) it has a lot going for it: totally phonetic, no genders, no articles, emphasis always on the first syllable, but about fifteen cases, and the prepositions are on the ends of the words they describe (talossa: in the house; talosta: from the house; taloon: into the house, and so on)
I can’t listen to it any more without listening to the context, but I have heard people say it sounds like Japanese spoken by an Italian.
I’m a native English speaker. I’ve studied French, Spanish and Hebrew. The only reason I know Hebrew at all is because I learned it as a young child. I studied it in college later and realized just how difficult it is. I found Spanish by far the easiest of the languages to pick up. The grammar, spelling and sentence structure are similar to English. Plus it’s very beautiful.
IMO if you really want to learn a language conversationally you have to find someone to converse with. One of my friends is a native Spanish speaker so she helped me practice. Another is Israeli and she’s definitely helped me with Hebrew.
A friend is an Italian teacher. He tells me that spoken Italian is like opera.
I would definitely say Spanish. It has an analytic structure like English, doesn’t have the case system like German (which is a stumbling block for many an English speaker), only has two genders (as opposed to German’s three), has more familiar sounds, etc… You’re going to have to take my word for it, but years ago I read a study claiming that Spanish and Italian were the easiest languages for a native English speaker to pick up. Word order is also much more intuitive in Spanish than German for an English speaker. Frankly, I’m quite surprised that so many people have suggested German as an easy language for an English speaker to pick up. I’m not saying it’s terribly hard – ich spreche ein bisschen Deutch – but pretty much all the Romance languages, from French to Spanish to Romanian – I would rank as much more natural for an English speaker.
Of the Slavic languages, Bulgarian may be the easiest to learn. No case system, unlike a language like, say, Polish which has seven cases and five genders. Verbs are a bit of a bitch, though, as verb forms can convey information that is not present in English verb forms.
There’s languages at least, if not more, complex and byzantine than Latin that survive to this day. Take any of the Slavic or Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian. I’ve read it claimed that Hungarian is the most difficult Latin-letter language for an English speaker to pick up) languages to start with. For a native speaker, these languages are not difficult at all. You grow up and learn the rules whether you like it or not. I grew up speaking Polish; I had no idea there even was a case system or gender or anything of the sort until I started reading books on language and realized that words do, in fact, change depending on what role they perform in a sentence. Most speakers get along quite fine in complex, synthetic languages without knowing the hows and whys of their grammar.
Depending on how you define “tense” (whether in a grammatical sense or a strict linguistic sense), English has 12 grammatical tenses: past, present, future and all three have simple, progressive/continuous, perfect, perfect progressive/continuous varieties.
Yeah, 14 is a lot of tenses (many languages get by with just a handful), but only two more than English.
I don’t know if this can really be answered. I pick up grammar and a language’s rhythm very easily, but I’m not very good at learning the vocabulary. Many other people are very good at learning new words but not at slotting them into a grammatical framework. Etc.
I cannot speak for Japanese (I am surprised to learn it is considerd easy, but I defer to those who know).
But my mother tongue is French, with English a close second, and German is a language in which I acquired some fluency as an adult. I love all three languages so please, do not be insulted by anything I have to say.
The OP was originally asking what would be easiest for an Anglophone to learn, so I will confine myself to that.
Do not jump to the conclusion that German is easier than French for an Anglophone because English is a “Germanic” language. That can be very misleading. Here’s why.
- Similarity of vocabulary. It is true that many English words are from the German. It is obviously easier for an Anglo to guess the meaning of “Haus” or “Hand” (all German nouns take a capital) than “maison” or “main”. But remember that English is nearly a Romance language when you consider all the Latinate words it contains. And the more educated a person is in English, the greater the proportion of Latinate vocabulary.
If you saw a building called “Rathaus” in Germany would you know what it is?
If you saw a building called “Édifice municipal” in France would you know what it is?
Which word is easier for you, as an Anglo, to understand: “gouvernement” or “Regierung”?
Or would you correctly guess that the German verb “enliefern” means to deliver goods? When you think about it the German word is obviously related to the English “deliver” but would you have guessed it easily? Or would the French verb “livrer” have been easier to guess?
- Spelling: German is actually much easier to spell. Spanish is really, really easy, German is very easy. English spelling, as you know, is a bloody mess. Anglophones are the only people I know of who use a Latin alphabet but still have to make their kids take spelling several hours a week for eight years to produce students who can just barely spell when they get to high school.
You can bet that Spanish and German kids don’t need to waste all that time.
What about French spelling? It is not as regular as Spanish and German, but it is a lot more regular than anglophones imagine. What you have to realize is that it has its own rules different from English. It does contain a lot of silent letters, but they tend to be silent in a consistent manner. For example, I know that “mot” is pronounced “MOE”, and “note” is pronounced “NUT”. Why? Because the final “t” in a French word is always silent unless it is followed by a vowel. So once you learen the different rules, French is easier to read and write than you imagine. But NOT as easy as German.
- Grammar structure: I honestly believe French grammar is simpler. German is an ancient language formed at the same time as Latin and ancient Greek.
French is a relatively recent language, like English, formed only about 1000-1200 years ago.
German has a structure like Latin. Instead of masculine and feminine nouns, it has masculine, feminine and neuter. So you have three forms of the adjective to learn.
But what makes German a real challenge is that it has declensions like Latin.
Let me give you an anglo-friendly example. In English, you say “Who saw you?”, but “Whom did you see?” In other words, when “who” is the object of the verb, you change the ending by adding “m”.
In German, you have to learn to modify the article and the adjective before each noun (but not the noun)depending on its function in the sentence.
“der guter Mann” = the good man came into the room (subject)
“den guten Mann” = I saw the good man (direct object)
“dem gutem Mann” = I gave it to the good man (indirect object).
German has four cases in the singular and four cases in the plural, and different endings for masculine, feminine and neuter.
So that is a huge compluication that does not exist in French.
So my conslusion? They are both wonderful languages that are a lot of fun to learn, and a lot of fun to speak. But don’t jump to conclusions about German being simple for an anglophone.
Uh huh. Speaking of which… .
I remember my sister and I giggling like crazy when we saw all the street signs in Germany which said “einfahrt”…