I find it that the Germanic Languages are harder to learn even though I know English. While the Romance Languages are 100X easier.
2007-01-17 20:39:13 · 7 answers · asked by ? 2 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
well all the romance languages are kinda similar.....i find that if you know Spanish its pretty simple to learn Italian, where-as the germanic languages are much harder and are all so very different
2007-01-17 20:48:33 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
I think the Germanic languages are much more diverse.
There are three main groups that I like to call the English group, German group and the Scandinavian group. These languages grew apart 2500 years ago so it is natural that they differ so much.
The roman languages are more alike because they diverged from Latin much later in history. So knowing one romance language will be a great help in learning another romance language.
I myself am a native dutch speaker (from the German group) and I speak English and (a bit of) French. Because of this I can understand some Spanish, Italian, and German.
Of course these two families are not the only languages.
2007-01-18 05:00:25 · answer #2 · answered by anton3s 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
well..english is very different from the rest of the Germanic languages.. until 1066 English or Anglo-Saxon sounded a lot more like other Germanic languages but so much changed with the Normans coming in and adding French and Latin vocabulary.. The Romance languages are very similar, more so than the Germanic languages, being all based on Latin.
2007-01-18 05:00:11 · answer #3 · answered by Baba Konsa 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Well, I have been learning both Spanish and German languages and I find both the languages have their own flavour. There are specific criteria on which you can compare the languages. Although we concern here our discussion to be between Germanic group of languages and Romance Languages.
Romance languages are too haevy when we compare the tense part. Because their tense part is very intricately designed and you have to be very careful about that. Whereas the German language (I think the Germanic group also) concerns less about the tense part and it deals heavily with the "subject", "object" and that too in direct and indirect form.
And they depend heavily upon the proper declination of their articles. And not only that; the categorisation of nouns according to masculine, feminine or neutral is highly irregular. Whereas in spanish, without a few exceptions we can almost always say the gender of a noun from its ending.
And both in Spanish and German, there are specific verb endings. That is, you can decide, whether a word is verb or not from its ending.
But in english there is almost no rule to judge whether a word is verb or not by seeing its ending.
2007-01-18 06:40:19 · answer #4 · answered by Max P 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I have a lot of difficulties to learn Spanish though I'm a French speaker. The structures of the sentences are completely different. It's easier for me to learn German, as I also speak Dutch. German and Dutch are very similar.
2007-01-18 04:55:21 · answer #5 · answered by Nathalie D 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I don't know, I think it's something very personal. For instance, my mother tongue is Italian, and yet, when I was attending my third year at high school I had to take French, and I sucked terribly at it. On the contrary, I have no problem with English, which, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful languages of the world, and I found German not so hard to learn. It depends on your skills, no matter what your mother tongue is.
2007-01-18 13:31:36 · answer #6 · answered by saavik73 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
German is much easier,you are just stupid.
2007-01-18 07:33:18 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 2⤋