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I wonder how the native language correlates with proper English as a learned language. All of the Scandinavians I spoke about had a wonderful pronunciation of

I wonder how the native language correlates with proper English as a learned language. All of the Scandinavians I spoke about had a wonderful pronunciation of English. They may have had an accent, but the English words were not distorted by their language, and not was the grammar. On contrast, French often speak what I call a "lazy English". We tend to pronounce words as if they were in French and the structure of the sentence is very similar to French. This really looks like the Latin translations we did at school: translate the sentence word by word and stick the beth eat the end :) It may be that the Scandinavian languages are more "compatible" with English (wildly guessing, with a lot of hand waving :))

vogon_laureate 3y ago
It makes sense when you think about how much of English history is influenced by the presence of Danish raiders and kingdoms. I live near a place called Dane Hill for example. In the Northern dialects and Scotland there are even more influences. For example in Scots dialect a kirk is a church, etc. I’ve read that there are at least 900 English words that come from Danish and several hundred more that are suspected to be.[1] Datter, arm, hus in Danish is daughter, arm and house in English, etc. it’s also why we have often two words with the same meaning (ie. anger and wrath or ill and sick). [1]: http://www.englishproject.org/resources/english-language-and-danish-language