9 ms·
I'm really surprised (bordering on shocked) that French and Spanish are rated the same. Not to dispute the experts, but me, Spanish seems much easier than Frenc
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
I'm really surprised (bordering on shocked) that French and Spanish are rated the same. Not to dispute the experts, but me, Spanish seems much easier than French. German also seems easier than French.
- reducesuffering 9y agoEnglish more closely resembles French than any other language I can think of. There’s a lot of overlap in the roots. Edit: I mean, French resembles English more than other languages.
- mc32 9y agoFrisian is a close relative to Eng, but obvs not widely spoken since proper Dutch replaced it completely in schools till recently, where now you can take some classes.
- dboreham 9y agoI'm a native English speaker (well...the Scottish version) and I have pretty strong French, however the place where I felt the people were speaking the closest thing to English I've heard was in The Netherlands.
- ajslater 9y agoScottish is incorrectly labeled on the map. Source: have scottish friends. At least I think they're my friends, hard to tell exactly at times.
- dboreham 9y agoHaha. Yeah everyone is a bit bilingual growing up in Scotland.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoDutch is indeed rather similar to English, especially old English. Especially if you, like me, are more sensitive to grammar than vocab when getting a feel for a language. But English vocab is very Frenchified. It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list. In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.
- sliverstorm 9y agoSupposedly (I don't know for sure) English inherited mostly Germanic grammar/structure-words, and French verbs & nouns. Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
- lottin 9y agoOld English was a Germanic language. Grammar-wise was a lot like modern German or Dutch. However, as English evolved, its grammar was greatly simplified, and nowadays only a few vestigial features of the original declension system remain.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoBut the declension system is not the whole grammar. So while articles don't change much under declension, words like "a" and "the" are familiar to Germans but not to ancient Romans (I don't know about the French). Also the relative order of adjectives and nouns is Germanic. Conjugations, while simplified, still retain much of the old structure, and the set of tenses understood in English is quite Germanic.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- efficax 9y agoFrench is basically the same as any romance language. It is a little trickier for native English speakers to pronounce than Spanish, but that is really the only difference. Its grammar is basically the same as Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, and it has regular spelling rules and consistent pronounciation rules for the most part. The nasal vowels are tricky for English speakers, but you get the hang of it pretty fast.
- joezydeco 9y agoSpanish has one advantage: nouns come with gender built in. You don't have to memorize it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- candeira 9y agoI'm teaching Spanish (my native language) to my daughters and my wife, and I disagree. There are many, many nouns that don't mark the gender except in the accompanying article or adjective.
- 3131s 9y agoAnd some that contradict the rule, i.e. 'agua' among other nouns in certain circumstances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes
- flatline 9y agoLots of little mnemonics, like man creates el problema, the woman la solution.
- chimeracoder 9y agoThose are both pretty easy, too, because they follow regular rules. "-ma" is always masculine. "-ión" is always feminine.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI think French is closer to English. It's also a little easier to pronounce for English Speakers. German is hard for them.
- dboreham 9y agoEnglish is really a kind of German, just with lots of French/Latin words merged in.
- davidw 9y agoEnglish and German started diverging 1000 years ago, and what they have in common are a smattering of words suited to village life back then. They're really quite different now.
- Udo_Schmitz 9y agoI grew up in northern Germany. Being able to understand Low German helped immensely with learning English.
- dragonwriter 9y agoWell, a Germanic language, but much closer to the other members of the Anglo-Frisian group than it is to German itself.
- simias 9y agoThat's downplaying it slightly. Here's what old english sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Even in the written form it's absolutely impossible for me to decipher, it might as well be a completely different language: >HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum, >þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, >hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon! The language evolved so drastically over the past thousand years that his germanic roots are buried pretty deep. Nowadays you're likely to find more cognates in a french text than in a german one. Meanwhile I can find french texts even older than Beowulf and still understand the general gist of it. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_Saint_Eulalia#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_Saint_Eulalia#Text . Even if you don't speak french comparing the original and modernized french version should be enough to convince you of the similarities: >Buona pulcella fut eulalia. (Bonne pucelle fut Eulalie.) >Bel auret corps bellezour anima (Beau avait le corps, belle l’âme.) >Voldrent la veintre li deo Inimi. (Voulurent la vaincre les ennemis de Dieu)
- dmoy 9y agoThe grammar in German is killer. Damn verbs at the end, it ain't right I tell ya. (German is the only other language I know)
- thewhitetulip 9y agoYes. I tried learning German for one year while taking breaks and I agree with this. Every single verb has a gender associated with it and to make matters worse, there are exceptions to every single rule! But since German and English are both derived from the same parent language, we can find some similarity. I am from India and ironically, I find learning Japanese easier than learning German/Spanish.
- bipson 9y agoHuh? Our verbs have no gender? Care to explain? What German does though, is a declination of verbs through all cases and times, often irregular, accompanied by gendering pronouns which seems to be the hardest part of German for learner's with native tongue that hasn't these features. The thing is, some think they got it after a few years, but we just let it slip, because it is not required, just feels wrong. We can tell, you've not grown up here.
- Tehnix 9y agoThey probably meant nouns with der/die/das. Probably the thing I hate most in any language, it just seems so incredibly stupid for no benefit (I obviously was not a fan of learning German in primary school). Same with french, but they take it a bit further.
- bipson 9y agoFYI that's the article, in particular "der/die/das" are the definite articles. "Incredibly stupid" sounds a little derogatory. They are not particularly necessary for understanding the language, the correct gender/article for certain nouns are even subject to heated debate between regional dialects, and I agree, if you are coming from a language without these rules it might be hard to grasp/integrate. Nevertheless, I would not go as far as to say they are incredibly stupid. Consider, English also has he/she, him/her, his/hers. You just got rid off the "the"s, AFAIK (or German is the only Germanic language that adopted it from Latin, but I am no linguist). But gender is the easier part, the cases make it difficult: Similar to the English "he/him", we have declination of articles: "einen/einem/eines". This seems terrible for English natives. Together with constructs of "den einen/dem einen/von einem/vom einen/zu einem/auf einen/auf einem", so you need to memorize ways of saying things and at the same time apply the case accordingly. It can make a huge difference in what you are trying to convey. "Von einem ..." is "... of one" (indefinite article), where "Vom einen ..." (Von dem einen) is "... of the one" (dem is the article, einen is actually a counting pronoun, not sure this is the right name).
- IncRnd 9y agoEnglish is a Germanic language. French and Spanish are both romance languages. A knower of one can quickly learn another.
- apolretom 9y agoFrench is harder to pronounce than Spanish, and the irregularity of French spelling makes it even harder. On the other hand, Spanish grammar is quite a bit more complicated than French grammar. In the long run, though, these little differences are insignificant compared to the truly time-consuming part of learning a language: the vocabulary. French and Spanish are about equal in the difficulty of learning vocab.
- cryptonector 9y agoFrench has more conjugations (mostly because it has more subjunctives) than Spanish. Spanish has something like 4k irregular verbs, though most of the irregularities are... regular (there are several common forms of irregularities), so it's not that bad. On the whole I think French is significantly harder to learn than Spanish. English, is very difficult, I think, though obviously not as difficult as, say, Finnish. Most languages have complexity somewhere. Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Japanese has Kanji (Chinese characters), two syllabic alphabets, romaji (Latin character set transliteration), and things like "counters" (alternate endings for counting words depending on what sort of thing you're counting -- there are over 1,000 different counters!). The complexity in English mostly lies in all the borrowed words and the rather loose rules around the language (like French, the rules have lots of exceptions, though in French the exceptions to the rules are almost infuriating in number), the rather not-very-phonetic prononciation, the lack of stress marks, the large variation in accents.
- ekianjo 9y agoi dOnt think there are 1000 counters in Japanese, you are clearly exaggerating. when you know about 20 of them its far sufficient for daily situations even if there are more. And romaji is not used much in Japan expect in print media just to look cool or something. Actual articles and posts never use romaji but instead a mix of kanji and kana mostly.
- cryptonector 9y agoWhen I lived in Japan I was told there are over 1,000 counters, and that one's mastery of them is part of how people determine one's level of literacy. Perhaps only about 20 get used all the time. And certainly you can get away with using only the default counter (but you'll sound illiterate). Romaji is also used on signs and other material aimed at foreigners -- Japanese people generally can read romaji because, after all, they are taught English in school. Romaji is not much of a cognitive burden, I agree, since it's very simple, goes along with English, and there's only one romanization.
- nerfhammer 9y agoSpanish may have less complicated grammar but the FSI may think French is easier for native English-speakers in particular because a huge amount of English words are French-derived. That gives you thousands of vocabulary words that you don't need to study very hard to understand. Recall that Normandy conquered England in 1066 and that is where Middle English came from.
- ekianjo 9y agoyou find pretty much the same words That you refer to in French and Spanish because they have both strong latin roots. that should not make a huge difference for an English speaker.
- lottin 9y agoBoth languages come from Latin, but Spanish comes from an older version of Latin and so some innovations that occurred later are not found in Spanish. As an example: "to arrive", "arriver" (French), "arrivare" (Italian), but "llegar" (Spanish).
- nerfhammer 9y agoAgreed, it's not a huge difference. There may be enough of a difference that the FSI may think that the slightly more similar vocabulary more or less makes up for French's slightly more complicated grammar such that it ranks French and Spanish as approximately equal in difficulty for English speakers.
- megaman22 9y agoFrench is easier for me, but I've spent my life adjoining French Canada and studying history from a decidely anglo-french angle.
- pmontra 9y agoI'm Italian and I can read both French and Spanish well. On the surface they look like Italian with different words and different pronunciation. However when I try to write them I appreciate the differences in how the sentences are built. One gets unnatural results trying to write French and Spanish as if they were Italian. English* is definitely* a different* language* even if some words are about the same. I marked* those words with an asterisk* . German is much more different* and difficult*. Computer language metaphor. If you know Ruby you can immediately understand Python but you discover you can't write Python as if it is Ruby. People would laugh at your scripts (and where are all those blocks? Easier the other way around.) You also think you can understand Elixir but this is not really the case. It is difficult to understand Erlang