It is common knowledge that English originated in Northern Europe and settled down in England before spreading to the U.S. For some reason, however, most Americans believe that all other European languages are extremely different from English and too hard to learn — an assumption that simply is not true. What many people are not aware of is that English is part of the Germanic language family and is very similar to many European languages. Some of these related European languages are Scots, German, Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Afrikaans. Historically, English has also been greatly influenced by romance languages such as French which makes learning other romance languages much easier.
Germanic Languages
Many people think of Afrikaans as an exotic language of South Africa, but it is actually one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn. It has similar pronunciation and phonetics and very simple grammar. There are no verb conjugations, genders, or pronouns which means once you know the basic vocabulary Afrikaans is very easy to speak. Although Danish is said to be the most difficult Scandinavian language to master, its grammar- which is very similar to English- makes it easy for English speakers to learn. It has only nine verb forms, which is three less than English. Norwegian is similar to Danish but is much easier to pronounce for English speakers, has no conjugations according to numbers or people, and has simple past and passive tenses, unlike English. Yet another Germanic language, Swedish, may be more difficult to pronounce than other languages listed above, but its vocabulary and syntax (Subject-Verb-Object word order in sentences) make it very similar to English.
Romance Languages
Americans think of French as the language of love, but few know that English has more vocabulary in common with French than any other language. French is difficult in the fact that it has 17 verb forms- rather than the 12 in English- and uses genders, but almost 1/3 of all English words are basically mispronounced French so it isn’t difficult to learn a large amount of French vocabulary. Similar to French, Italian is another romance language that is easy for English speakers to learn. Italian has fewer verbs than Spanish and French, and is pronounced like it is spelled, unlike many French words. Portuguese is also an easy Romance language for English speakers to learn as it has few prepositions and any question in Portuguese can be asked by simple intonation. Romanian is considered the most difficult of the Romance languages, but that doesn’t mean that it is difficult to master. Romanian is the closest language to Latin that is still spoken, with 80% of it still being Latin-based. Last but not least is Spanish, which is similar to Italian in that it is pronounced the way it is written. It also has fewer vowel pronunciations than English and is definitely the most practical romance language for Americans to learn.
Do you speak one of the languages from this list? How has speaking a second language benefited you?
