What Makes One Language Harder or Easier Than One other?

What makes one language harder or easier to be taught than one other? Sadly, there isn't any one simple answer. There are some languages which have a number of characteristics that make them comparatively troublesome to learn. However it depends 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 were surrounded with as you grew up (or languages, for these lucky sufficient to grow up speaking more than one language) is the most influential factor on the way you learn different languages. Languages that share a few of the qualities and traits of your native English might be simpler to learn. Languages which have very little in widespread with your native English might be much harder. Most languages will fall somewhere in the middle.

This goes both 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 almost as hard a time to study English as the native English speaker has when learning Chinese. If you are studying Chinese proper now, that is probably little comfort to you.

Associated languages Learning a language intently related to your native language, or one other that you just already speak, is much easier than learning a totally alien one. Related languages share many traits and this tends to make them easier to be taught 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, easier to learn than an unrelated tongue. Some other 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.

Similar grammar A type of characteristics that are often shared between related languages. In Swedish, word order and verb conjugation is mercifully just like English which makes learning it much simpler than say German, which has a notoriously more advanced word order and verb conjugation. Although both 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 different languages) are well-known for sharing many characteristics. It's not surprising since they all evolved from Latin. It is rather common for someone who learns certainly one of these languages to go on and study one or others. They're so similar at occasions that it seems which you could learn the others at a reduced cost in effort.

Commonalities in grammar do not just occur in associated languages. Very totally different ones can share related qualities as well. English and Chinese actually have relatedities in their grammar, which partly makes up for some of the different difficulties with Chinese.

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

considered simpler than other languages.

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

Sounds Obviously, languages sound different. Though 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 tough to articulate. Some will be quite subtle. A Spanish 'o' isn't exactly the identical as an English 'o.' After which there are some vowel sounds in French, for instance, that just do not exist in English. While a French 'r' could be very different from English, a Chinese 'r' is

actually very similar.

It may possibly take some time to get comfortable with these new sounds, though I think that faking it is settle forable until you will get a greater deal with on them. Many people don't put enough effort into this aspect of learning and this makes some languages appear harder to be taught than they should be.

Tones A couple of languages use tones, a rising or falling pitch when a word is pronounced. This can be very subtle and troublesome for somebody who has never used tones before. This is among the essential reasons Chinese is hard for native English speakers.

Chinese isn't the only language to use tones, and not all of them are from unique far-off lands. Swedish uses tones, though it shouldn't be practically as complicated or difficult as Chinese tones. This is the kind of thing that may only really be discovered by listening to native speakers.

By the way, there are examples of tone use in English however they are only a few, normally used only in particular situations, and aren't part of the pronunciation of individual words. For instance, in American English it's frequent to raise the tone of our voice at the end of a question. It isn't quite the identical thing, but should you think about it that way, it may make a tone language a little less intimidating.

The writing system Some languages use a special script or writing system and this can have a major impact on whether a language is hard to study or not. Many European languages use the same script as English but also include just a few different symbols not in English to characterize sounds particular 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 typically not tough to learn.

However some languages go farther and have a unique alphabet altogether. Greek, Hindi, Russian and many of the different Slavic languages of Japanese Europe all use a different script. This adds to the complexity when learning a language. Some languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are also written from right to left, additional adding difficulty.

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