I wonder how most Europeans learn English faster and speak better than most Asians do?

Answer 1

That's quite simple to answer: all European languages share a similar grammar as well as parts of their vocabulary. The languages have been subject to mixing for thousands of years and much of the grammar as well as the vocabulary is derived from latin. So even if the languages sound very differently, they do have a lot in common.

Asian languages in contrast work very differently, starting with a completely different concept of an alphabet. They also have a very different concept of grammar.

That's why it's much easier for a European/American to learn any other originally European language than for an Asian. And it is also much harder for someone who speaks an originally European language to learn an Asian language than for an Asian.

Answer 2

I think it's because most European languages come from either the Germanic family or Latin, both of which contributed a lot of words to English, so there's kind of a common starting point where you can say, "Oh! I bet Good and Gut are the same word" and that kind of thing. There's a lot less similarity between English and Asian languages. They don't even have the same alphabet! So it's much harder to learn.

It works backward too, I think. It's generally easier for English-speakers to learn European languages.

Answer 3

Consider that most Europeans already speak a romance language, which is much closer gramatically to English and contains words in which they can recognize common roots. Also, many learn English when they are young, when it is much easier to pick up. The Asian languages are very different than the romance languages, so it is a little harder to grasp the grammatical concepts.

Answer 4

Most European languages are Indo-European languages. (There are some exceptions, such as Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, Basque, etc.) English is also an Indo-European language (but it's not a Romance language, it is a Germanic language). Therefore, speakers of Indo-European languages can learn English more easily than speakers of languages which are not related, such as East Asian languages.

Another reason is that European countries have long stressed the importance of learning foreign languages starting at a young ago, but Asia has only started this recently.

Answer 5

I think it depends on what country in Europe and what country in Asia, and depends on the person too.
I am an Asian, but my parents taught me English since elementary, so it's easy for me speak English and my husband, an English man, never have a hard time to understand my pronunciation. On the other hand, I have a German friend who have been learning English for, God knows how long, still her English sounds strange to other people.
So it's not because European are smarter than Asian, I think environment is also one of the factors.

Answer 6

well english is a european language. there are many very similar languages in europe, that have some of the same sound pronunciations, same bases for words, same basic grammatical structure etc.
asian languages have very little similarities with english. asian languages, like chinese, are tonal languages where the tone of each syllable can be independent of the other syllables in the word. chinese often have the exact same word, but based on the tone (pitch of the voice) it can mean different things. not to mention that mouth positioning and enunciation for words are completely different. its hard for an asian to learn a european language, just like its hard for europeans to learn an asian dialect.
hope that helps.

Answer 7

Because English is primarily constructed of Latinates (languages based on Latin), Old English, Old French, Greek, and Anglo Saxon. That means that English is in essence, a European language. That makes syntax(word order), phonology (sounds), and even lexicon (words themselves) easier to retain and understand. Chinese, however, derives from The Sino-Tibetan Language . This makes establishing patterns (a method used by most adult second language learners) impossible. Also, English has very different tongue, jaw, and mouth movements, which makes the pronunciation difficult for people who have never pronounced English sounds before... so it really has to do with familiarity of the language...even though we think Spanish or French is sooo different from English, we use lots of simiar words in our vocabulary daily!

Answer 8

because the asian way of thinking it's different from the western thinking.
there was a study which proofed that:
for example western people look at a picture in different way than the asians. they (western) look at the foreground while the others spend more time to study the background. there are other things too which the asians do in different ways. this could explain why is so hard for them to learn a western language.

Answer 9

Because English and most European languages derive from the romance languages (Latin). Spanish, French and Italian, for example, have far more in common with English than they do with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. And just compare alphabets (even that's Latin...alpha beta) from the two regions.

Answer 10

im from europe i learned english in about 2 months and i pretty much mastered the language but not all asians are so smart thats just a stereotype