Why is it easier for native English speakers to learn a Romance language than a Germanic language...?

Question

...English is a Germanic language, is it not? Has English adapted so much from the Romance languages, and who knows what else, that it has become a "bastard" language?

Similarly, is it easier for native Romantic speakers to learn another Romance language or English?

Answer 1

I speak German and French and found them both easy and difficult in different ways. German spelling is easy. German verb system is easy (very English-like. sing-sang-sung = singen-sang-gesung). German noun system and syntax (word order) is hard. French spelling is hard. Reading French aloud is hard due to silent letters. French verbal system is complex. French noun system and word order is fairly easy.

English is a Germanic language. Due to the exciting history of England (after the Celts), most of the 'endings' of English rubbed off. warning: over-simplified--this is the way I tell it to kids. That is, when a speaker of Anglo-Saxon meant a Dane (from one of the Viking/Danish/Norse invasions) the root word was often the same or similar, but the endings (case, gender, plural) were often different. So when they spoke to one another, evenutally the endings were simply left off (that is a kind of pigeon-creole-language thing happened). This happend differently in different parts of England, and different dialects developed in different areas. (Adapted from The Story of English)

Then William the Conqueror brought over Norman French with his conquest, and French became the prestige language and many, many, many French words entered English at that time.
Then there were the scholars of the 1600-1700s who created/borrowed many words directly from Latin. This is why English has so many 'triplets'--a Latin root, a Germanic root and a French root. kingly (Germanic), royal (French from roi), regal (from Latin rex-regis)

Okay, long answer to a short question, sorry. Short answer: if you're really interested in learning the language it's not that hard, and worth the trouble. If you're being forced to learn it, they're all hard!

Answer 2

When I've studied Romance languages, it just seemed that there was a similarity between many of the words and ours, or at least that they were easy to figure out. Not so with German, although English is supposed to be a Germanic language.

I'd think it would be much easier for a speaker of one Romance language to learn another one than to learn English, because the Romance languages are all quite similar to each other.

Answer 3

It is true that English is a Germanic langauge; however it has a lot in common with Romance languages because both the Germanic language family and the Romance family are part of the Indo-European language family. English descended from both German and French, so you will find both Germanic-like and Romance-like grammar in English. In that sense, English is "adapted" from a Romance language, but at a much more fundamental level than your question implies. (And who says adaptation is bad, anyway?)

Your question implies that you believe that the similarities and/or differences between a person's native language and the target language make that language easier or not easier to learn. I am not sure that this is true. Nevertheless, Romance languages have a number of grammatical features that are "easier" than German, such as fewer grammatical genders and less case marking.

Answer 4

I'm a native Italian speaker, and I found learning English or even German as easy as learning French and Spanish.

The advantage I had with Spanish and partly French too, was that if I didn't know some words, I could try and guess because they are more similar to each other.

The problem with German is that there's no fixed criteria to establish if a noun is masculine, feminine or neutral (unlike English, where all inanimated objects are neutral). Plus, articles, adjectives and nouns have declinations. In relative clauses the verb goes in the end. Some verbs have prefixes that separate, others don't. I think that makes German a little hard to learn for everybody.

Answer 5

About 75% of English words comes from Latin or Greek and therefore have similar cognates in other Romance languages and English has pretty much been Romanized (or bastardized) away from the Germanic origins of Old and Middle English.

As a comparison, you can look up the lyrics for songs as Nena's 99 Luftballons vs. say Celine Dion's Je Danse Dans Ma Tete and count how many words you might recognize vs. how many you have no idea (assuming you don't know German or French). Some German words are exactly the same in English, e.g. alarm, General, Captain Kirk (hehee) but most of the rest is unintelligible, meanwhile, a lot of the French words just look like misspelled English words. Of course I'm cheating a little bit because I'm using French as the representative Romance language.

Answer 6

first, please operationalize your term "sound like." Are you talking mostly about the phonemics of vowels, consonants, sentence intonation? Do you want to think about the etymologies of words? Although there is a strong influence from Middle French into Middle English, the qualities of the pronunciations vary drastically. For example the nasal vowels that are so prevalent in French are totally predictable (and thus non-distinctive --i.e., no words in English are minimal pairs based on nasality in English. Of course it is easier to get the meaning of written English based on the loans from Latin/French. No, I doubt that non-English speakers with some knowledge of a Romance or Germanic language hear English as a sort of cross between the two or just a Germanic language that borrows heavily from the other?

Answer 7

To answer both of your questions about which language would be easier for a native English speaker and a native Romantic speaker, it would be a romance language for the simple reason that there are fewer variables phonetically. Both Germanic and Romantic languages have differing grammatical structure forms, but Romantic languages do not add the difficulty of phonetic variables.

Answer 8

I'm English but live in Germany & speak good German. I have also learnt some Spanish.

I think there are many similar words in English - Spanish & English - German. However, I really think Spanish the easier language to learn because it hasn't got so many pronunciation & grammatical rules as German has. Germans speak the words in a sentence in a different order to the English, they have masculine, feminine & neutral objects & they stipulate the different cases (nominative / accusative / dative) - just for starters!!!

Answer 9

A historical explanation.

English was a germanic language almost in it's entirety until the battle of Hastings. ENgland was occupied by Norman French, and basically the people were screwed if they didn't learn the norman's language and they wanted to advance or even avoid persecution. Basically the germanic english mixed with the romance norman language which was closer to latin than modern french.

Answer 10

I took one year of German and three years of Spanish in school. They both seemed equal in difficulty to me at first, but Spanish seemed easier to practice due to living in the Southwestern United States. I also went on to serve as a missionary in Puerto Rico. I'm still interested in learning more German, but I do not have nearly as many opportunities to practice it as I do Spanish. I have heard many native Spanish speakers or Portuguese speakers say it is very easy to pick up on the other language, as well as Italian, etc. because the grammar structure is similar, as well as quite a bit of the vocabulary. I suspect Portuguese speakers have an easier time with Spanish than Spanish with Portuguese, but I am not positive.

Answer 11

I had a much easier time with German than I did Spanish or French, but it might have just been me. From what I understand, English is the hardest language to learn, because it's so different from any other (which, if you've studied any other language, you can tell). The easiest langauges are Asian; Indonesian, Maylay, etc. There are no tenses, it's all inferred. A bunch of other crazy things...