<p>English is a Germanic language, but it also has a lot of French influence. This is because of the Norman (French speakers) invasion of Saxony in 1066.</p>
<p>"The picture changed some time after 1066, when the Normans -- French speakers -- invaded England. For a few centuries, the peasants continued to speak a Germanic English while the nobles spoke French (a Romance language, derived from Latin). Over time, though, the two vocabularies began to merge; and where Old English speakers and French speakers had only one word each for something, speakers of the new blended English often had two, one based on the Germanic original long used by the peasantry, another based on the French import that had currency in the court. (Later still, a great many words entered the language directly from Latin without stopping along the way at French, and sometimes we have near synonyms from all three origins: kingly [from Germanic konig], royal [from Latin by way of French roy], and regal [directly from Latin rex, regis].)"</p>
<p>I'm in my first semester of Mandarin Chinese right now. The class isn't hard, but I know I will have to do a lot of preparation outside of class if I want to make significant progress in the language. I am going to China this summer to take classes at a foreign university; learning first hand should definitely help. Pimsleur is also helping a lot.</p>
<p>I took French in high school and I thought it was really easy. The conjugations made sense and the exceptions were easy to remember. The vocabulary also has a lot in common with English vocabulary. It's fading fast, though. I don't think I will need to use it in the future.</p>
<p>I did 2 years of Latin and 3 of French in highschool, and am in my 4th semester of Italian here at college. I've planned it so I'm doing another 6 Italian classes before I graduate.</p>
<p>Next fall I want to start another language for my own personal benefit/gpa boost a bit. I'm choosing between Russian, Korean and Arabic. When it comes to languages I'm a grammar guru, but I've always been bad at vocab. Right now I'm leaning toward Korean...</p>
<p>I was sifting through some threads and I came across this one. SOrry if you guys hate me for bringing back a dead thread. Of all the langauges I've learned, I'll rank them from hardest to easiet (from a native English-speaker's POV):</p>
<p>korean and spanish is EASY. now, chinese, arabic, greek, latin, french: these are DIFFICULT languages. latin and chinese is especially FAMOUS for being really difficult. but i disagree with this notion. i think greek is more difficult than latin, arabic more difficult than chinese. </p>
<p>french is DEFINITELY more difficult than spanish. compared to french, spanish is a breeze.</p>
<p>english is NOT germanic because of..
it has TOO MANY latin and french words
english people themselves are related to latin race
england was roman colony</p>
<p>sauronvoldemort, you also mean to say that Arabic, spoken in northern Africa, MUST be a romance langauges because it was part of the Roman Empire?</p>
<p>I also agree that Spanish is easy, but Korean doesn't fall into the same category. As a Korean-American, I still find it difficult to figure out some of the kinks.</p>
<p>You said that Korean has 1,000 hanja. While I've heard about hanja and seen them in historical dramas and on calanders, I have yet to see them mixed in with Korean writing. Ceartainly not in any newspapers I've seen. If I had seen them, I would remember because I would probably have put my hands on my head and started screaming, "They're all interconnected! And look I know what this means...or...aghhh! I should know this character!"</p>
<p>Anyway, I want to learn hangul so that I can brag that I'm rudimentarily familar with the writing systems of CCJK, Simp. Chinese, Trad. Chinese, Japanese and Korean.</p>
<p>i refuse to believe that english is germanic. it's just me. i never considered english language, people and culture as germanic, but as latin-related. </p>
<p>as for the difficulty of those asian languages, i don't reckon much of them. ancient languages like greek is much more harder. i think the coincidence of english becoming the lingua franca of the present age a great misfortune. we have to learn latin, greek or arabic to get access to the VAST books and sources (and translations destroy about half of the charm inherent in those colossus works of the celebrated ancient authors). lucky be to u who reads arabic, for thou will read thy entire lifetime!</p>
<p>i plan to learn at least one of the the ancient languages (greek, latin, aramaic (ancestor of arabic and hebrew), arabic). i can't hardly dare to call myself a student of letters and science without a decent knowledge of any of those above liste. yes, knowledge of french allows me to call myself art historian, but i never really liked french.</p>
<p>sauronvoldemort, just because a lot of the words come from somewhere doesn't make it more or less related. Example: Urdu and Farsi have a lot of Arabic words, but both are Indo European languages, while Arabic is Semitic. The difference is the origin, and the grammar - how you actually put the words together.</p>
<p>And if one looks at English, its clear that it came from the language of the Anglo-Saxons, slowly lost its case system, and then incorporated a lot of French and Latin words.</p>
<p>By the way, do you think its any coincidence that the Dutch, Germans, Norweigans, Swedish, Islanders, and Danes pick up English better than the French, Spanish and Italians? The latter three might be able to pick up words better, but the Germanics know how to put them together better, which is what communication is all about.</p>
<p>And culturally, it's a tough call, but why are the English and other Germanic speakers (besides the Swiss and Austrians) Protestant, and the Romance speakers Catholic, and we name our days of the week after norse gods like Fria (Friday), Odin (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday) and Tyr (Tuesday) instead of Mars, Jove, etc?</p>
<p>Today I bought a bunch of manga in Japanese and a pocket dictionary and a kanji dictionary. And I remain stumped. For one thing, kanji dictionaries are very difficult to use? How can I remain illiterate with all of these tools at my disposal? </p>
<p>I'm trying to decode Shakugan no Shana: Light Novel 14. It's next to impossible...annoying how the things you want to read, you can't read. And the only thing you have a shot at are kids stories which you're not interested in....</p>
<p>Comment: English is an EXTREMELY difficult language to learn. English, in all respect, is a completely mixed up language. It follows different types of rules for grammer, vocabulary, etc. Now, I'm a native English speaker but it's deff not an "extremely easy" language to learn. It's deff one of the hardest ones out there. There are so many words that no other language uses that are, in essence, pointless as well as multiple grammer rules that are totally different.</p>
<p>I want to learn either Mandarin or Arabic in college, but i'm not sure which one yet. I think Chinese would be harder for because of the tones, but I think it might benefit me for in the future. Arabic would be helpful too, but do you think one will be better to have in the future?</p>
<p>It's better to learn Arabic than Chinese. You will never become great at either because of difficulty and your age, so you need to think comparatively. Fluent Mandarin speakers are a dime a dozen in most top universities, and will always have you beat if you try to enter a sector where knowing Mandarin is useful, but what about Arabic speakers? There aren't many.</p>
<p>How hard would it be to learn Arabic in your opinion. I've had some success with languages in the past, but they were all European, so I'm wondering how successful I will be with it. I'm not too worried though because like you said, there simply are not many out there, so even if I'm not as good as I would like to be (i.e. perfect), I will not have the competition that I would with many other languages</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's better to learn Arabic than Chinese. You will never become great at either because of difficulty and your age, so you need to think comparatively. Fluent Mandarin speakers are a dime a dozen in most top universities, and will always have you beat if you try to enter a sector where knowing Mandarin is useful, but what about Arabic speakers? There aren't many.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree, yet also disagree. You can say that Chinese is a dime a dozen, and that's true, but when you're going into a field that depends on languages, Chinese is more important than Arabic. The reason that Arabic is so popular now, is because not many people speak it. So, yes, both are very important, but going into Arabic kind of limits your field, while the Chinese sector is growing rather fast. (from a business standpoint) I think I'm getting the correct point across?</p>
<p>I think that I'd rate English as a harder language to learn because of so many exceptions. I grew up learning Chinese, and had to pick up English later on, and because I did it really young, I had an advantage of not having to actually memorize, and I could just use my English.</p>
<p>If I had to rate Asian languages, I'd say Chinese and Japanese are about the hardest, with Korean coming very close.</p>
<p>arabic and hebrew belong to Afro-Asiatic (or Afrasian) language family originating from Ethiopia. i used to think that they were indo-european.</p>
<p>also, i read somewhere that japanese is as different from chinese as from english. and also considering the fact that it has very little relationship with korean, i would classify japanese as "isolated" (as well as korean). i do not believe that korean and japanese belong to Altaic-Uralic language family. nor do i believe that korean is "japonic" since most of modern japanese people came from korea during the one of those Central Asian invasions (sort of like Anglo-Saxons invading Britain. we don't call german Anglo-Saxonic)</p>
<p>Basque, Etruscan, Estonian (Baltic) and Tartar is some non-indo-european languages spoken in the continent of europe.</p>
<p>the most dispersed language families ranking:
Indo-European
Afro-Asiatic (Afrasian)
Altaic (from south america to Hungary and Turkey)</p>
<p>I think Chinese is definitely harder than Japanese since the characters are much more complicated. When Japanese created their own characters they really took bits from most languages ie Chinese and English (this is what I heard at least) And compared with English, I'm really glad My first language is Chinese, since English really is quite an easy language!</p>
<p>Chinese is complicated in that you have to learn all the different characters, but once you leaned the common ones, there will be virtually no vocab which you'll not be able to figure out by guessing, because most vocabs are actually "semi-phrases" in Chinese. (ex. glow=發光 where 發=give out & 光=light) I can type faster in English though...that's for sure.</p>
