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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
More “common ground” exists, due to many English speakers being familiar with adages and concepts from the Old Testament.
More Hebrew words have entered the English language – for the same reason as above.
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.
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.
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)
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
AFAIK, Latvian and Lithuanian are both Balto-slavic languages. Finnish and Estonian are Finno-Ugric. Just like Sami is.
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.
