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Hi,

i've read that once you've mastered German. It becomes quite easy to pick up Danish and Norweigan.

And the same with French and Italian.

Easier than if you were just starting from scratch.
Because they are similar.

I'd like to learn 4 or 5 languages. So which would be the best one to learn first in order to make the other languages easier............?


Does that even make sense? Sorry, it's late. Hopefully you can grasp the idea of what i mean.

2007-07-29 14:23:04 · 5 answers · asked by .. 2 in Society & Culture Languages

5 answers

I'd say you can start with Spanish (since it's becoming an important language), for example, then move to Portuguese (these two languages are very similar). Then you could try Italian, Romanian and finally French (not necessarily in that order, it's just an example)
These are all Romance languages.

2007-07-29 16:00:11 · answer #1 · answered by lost in space 6 · 0 0

Yes, what you are describing is what we called Language Families. In Europe there are 3 Primary families, and then a lot of smaller ones. And those 3 families are part of a larger one called Indo-European.

Now which Mother language to start from would depend on what langauges you would like a head start in. If you want to start with a Germanic language, German or Icelandic are some of the hardest in that family, and would thusly have the most benefit for learning others in the family. I thought German would be a bit more than Icelandic, since Iceland has retained traits more from the middle ages.

Romance languages, which have 5 majors languages, and a lot of sublanguages, dialects, and local languages, have a root of Latin. The 5 major Romance languages are Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. However, Romanian is the closest Grammatically to Latin. The phonetics and vocabulary of Latin has most affected Italian. There are other languages in this family too, but those are the major 5.

The other major European family is Slavic. But because of the Soviet Union, Russian has become the lingua franca of Eastern Europe. I would say use Russian as the root for the family. Other languages include Polish, Ukranian, Czech, Slovak, and Bulgarian. Now Bulgarian has slightly different Grammar than it's cousins as well.
Now some of these languages use the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Latin one. Other's do use our alphabet, such as Polish and Czech.

Another family in Western Europe is Celtic, which has Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic in it's family.

So decide which you want, and learn one of those.

2007-07-29 22:21:58 · answer #2 · answered by Timothy 4 · 0 0

Any second language makes learning a third easier because you acquire a feel for the differences that other languages might have and gain an understanding that many languages construct the same thoughts differently. Esperanto is the logical choice as the second language because it demonstrates linguistic principles better than most, but more importantly, you can learn Esperanto in months instead of years for any other tongue. 16 gramatical rules, no exceptions.

Contrary to what you might hear, Esperanto has a thriving culture established. My kids and I use it every day, to speak with people all over the world. Music, literature (original and translated), etc.

Good luck!

Ĝis!

2007-07-30 05:42:14 · answer #3 · answered by Jagg 5 · 0 1

German will indeed make it easier for you to learn Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. They all have a lot of Low German (Plattdeutsch) vocabulary in them dating from the time when the German Hanseatic League dominated northern Europe economically (c. 1250 - 1650 A.D.).

On the other hand, French will be a little less helpful in learning Italian. Spanish would be better.

Even though French and Italian are derived from basically the same form of Vulgar Latin, spoken in the Roman Empire of the 4th century A.D., French has diverged quite a bit from Italian over the centuries.

Because French developed in areas close to the Celtic and Germanic frontiers of western Europe, it has a larger number of Celtic and Germanic loan words than Italian does. For example chêne "oak tree" from Gallic *cassania as opposed to Italian quercia which is derived from the original Latin QUERCUS, or reynard "fox" from the Frankish name Raignhard as oppossed to Italian volpe from Latin VULPIS.

Unlike Italian, French is full of clitic forms and in this respect bears more resemblance to languages like Catalán, Romanian and Albanian.

French is also "oxytonic" meaning that the stress usually falls on the last syllable. This feature makes French a little more like Albanian, Greek and Hebrew than Italian.

In my opinion, Spanish and Esperanto are both good languages to start out with if you want to learn other foreign languages. A lot of people put both languages down but I think they're wrong in underestimating their usefulness as a portal to learning other languages.

2007-07-30 01:57:15 · answer #4 · answered by Brennus 6 · 0 1

since most of this languages and words of such languages find their origin from latin, so it just follows that it will be easier to learn most of the world languages by learning latin.

2007-07-29 21:26:29 · answer #5 · answered by livinhapi 6 · 0 2

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