What Makes One Language Harder or Simpler Than Another?

What makes one language harder or simpler to be taught than another? Unfortunately, there isn't a one easy answer. There are some languages which have a number of traits that make them comparatively troublesome to learn. But it relies upon a lot more on what languages you already know, particularly your native language, the one (or ones) you grew up speaking.

Your native language The language you have been surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for these lucky enough to develop up speaking more than one language) is the most influential factor on how you be taught other languages. Languages that share among the qualities and traits of your native English can be simpler to learn. Languages which have very little in frequent with your native English will probably be much harder. Most languages will fall someplace within the middle.

This goes each ways. Although it is a stretch to say that English is harder than Chinese, it is safe to say the native Chinese speaker probably has practically as hard a time to be taught English because the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. In case you are learning Chinese right now, that's probably little consolation to you.

Related languages Learning a language closely associated to your native language, or another that you just already speak, is way simpler than learning a very alien one. Related languages share many characteristics and this tends to make them simpler to study as there are less new ideas to deal with.

Since English is a Germanic language, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are all intently associated and thus, simpler to learn than an unrelated tongue. Another languages associated in some way to English are Spanish, Italian and French, the more distant Irish and Welsh and even Russian, Greek, Hindi and Urdu, Farsi (of Iran) and Pashto (of Afghanistan).

English shares no ancestry with languages like Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, all languages considered hard by English standards.

Comparable grammar One of those characteristics that are often shared between associated languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully much like English which makes learning it much easier than say German, which has a notoriously more complicated word order and verb conjugation. Though each languages are related to English, German kept it's more advanced grammar, the place English and Swedish have largely dropped it.

The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a number of other languages) are famous for sharing many characteristics. It is not shocking since all of them advanced from Latin. It is rather common for someone who learns one of these languages to go on and study one or others. They are so comparable at times that it seems which you can be taught the others at a reduced value in effort.

Commonalities in grammar don't just occur in associated languages. Very different ones can share similar qualities as well. English and Chinese even have relatedities of their grammar, which partly makes up for among the different difficulties with Chinese.

Cognates and borrowed vocabulary. This is one of those traits that make the Romance languages so similar. And in this, in addition they share with English. The Romance languages all have the vast majority of their vocabulary from Latin. English has borrowed much of its vocabulary directly from Latin and what it did not get there, it just borrowed from French. There is a gigantic amount of French vocabulary in English. One other reason that Spanish, French and Italian are

considered easier than different languages.

There are always borrowings of vocabulary between languages, and not always between associated languages. There's a surprising amount of English vocabulary in Japanese. It's a little disguised by Japanese pronunciation, however it's to discover it.

Sounds Obviously, languages sound different. Although all humans use basically the identical sounds, there always appears to be some sounds in other languages that we just do not have in our native language. Some are strange or difficult to articulate. Some will be quite subtle. A Spanish 'o' will not be precisely the identical as an English 'o.' And then there are some vowel sounds in French, for instance, that just do not exist in English. While a French 'r' could be very completely different from English, a Chinese 'r' is

truly very similar.

It will probably take a while to get comfortable with these new sounds, although I think that faking it is acceptable until you will get a greater handle on them. Many individuals do not put sufficient effort into this facet of learning and this makes some languages seem harder to be taught than they should be.

Tones A few languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This may be very subtle and troublesome for someone who has never used tones before. This is among the most important reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.

Chinese isn't the only language to use tones, and not all of them are from exotic far-off lands. Swedish makes use of tones, although it just isn't almost as advanced or troublesome as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that can only really be discovered by listening to native speakers.

By the way, there are examples of tone use in English however they are very few, often used only in specific situations, and are not part of the pronunciation of particular person words. For example, in American English it's frequent to boost the tone of our voice on the finish of a question. It isn't quite the same thing, but for those who think about it that way, it might make a tone language a little less intimidating.

The writing system Some languages use a unique script or writing system and this can have a major impact on whether or not a language is hard to study or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but additionally embody a few other symbols not in English to signify sounds specific to that language (think of the 'o' with a line by it in Norwegian, or the 'n' with a little squiggly over it in Spanish). These are usually not troublesome to learn.

However some languages go farther and have a distinct alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and most of the other Slavic languages of Japanese Europe all use a unique script. This adds to the complicatedity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are additionally written from proper to left, additional adding difficulty.

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