spanish,french, english
I like much English, even if I don't speak it well. I would like learn french and spanish because I like these languages too.
I think that french is very easy for english speakers, because it seems the closest language to english.
But french and english are also, in a less extend, a bit similar to spanish.
But I think that french is much more similar to english. Sometimes Spanish is more similar to english than french is.
I think that english is the easiest romance language to learn. What do you think about it ?
Korean,
First of all, English isn't a Romance language (god knows why ;) ... )
I've heard many English people say that Spanish has a nice and easy grammer compared to French.
Also the number of people you can reach with Spanish is much bigger than that of French.
1) English is not a Romance language. It is a Germanic language, so it is related to German, Dutch and Yiddish. French and Spanish are Romance.
2) The closest language to English is not French, it is Frisian, a language spoken in Netherlands.
3) Probably the easiest Romance language to learn is Spanish, because of its pronounciation and syntax (and no 'en' or 'y' like in French, Catalan or Italian!). But that obviously depends on the point of view.
Sorry for my bad English!
English is a hybrid language which has borrowed a lot of words from French and Spanish, which is why you will see many cognates. I took both French and Spanish, and personally found Spanish easier for me, especially in pronunciation.
=>English is a hybrid language <=
No it's not a hybrid...
It's a Germanic language which consists of 80% non Germanic words :-)
Yeah, and in fact French looks more hybrid to me! (I'm not saying it is, it's my opinion!)
<<=>English is a hybrid language <=
No it's not a hybrid...
It's a Germanic language which consists of 80% non Germanic words :-) >>
I ... stand corrected (I guess!). However you'd like to put it, Sander!
A hybrid would mean that everything is equally devided which is not the case. The grammer is almost completely Germanic while the vocab. is nearly completely Romantic :-)
To me, "hybrid" just means a mixture of different things. The proportions do not have to be equal. But I will defer to your linguistic authority.
I said that about French because I had read before that the Franks affected enormously the Vulgar Latin spoken there. I mistook this as a hybrid.
" I said that about French because I had read before that the Franks affected enormously the Vulgar Latin spoken there. I mistook this as a hybrid. "
No this is deeply wrong. the linguisits estimate that only about 500 words are coming from frankish language in french. that is very few and limited to the 'farming' vocabulary.
There is not a bigger importance of germanic language in french than in Italian or Spanish.
The main difference between french and other latin languages is limited to the prononciation and the stronger transformation that the words have known during the centuries can give the impression that french seems different than the other latin languages but it is in no one case is an "hybrid" !
=>I said that about French because I had read before that the Franks affected enormously the Vulgar Latin spoken there. I mistook this as a hybrid. <=
The Franks, (the modern Dutch and Flemmings) has a very small influence on French.The made out about 9% of the population the controlled.
As for English's "hybridness", one thing one must still remember, as has been pointed out here repeatedly, is that everyday spoken vocabulary is far more Germanic in nature than one would think from the figures one may see about such-and-such portions of the *overall* vocabulary of English being from such-and-such sources. In particular, the actual frequency in general use of French words, and *in particular* Latin words, in English is much lower than the proportion of the general vocabulary that the comprise; this is most striking with Latin, where the frequency of Latin words in use in most usage is *far* lower than the proportion of overall vocabulary which is of Latin origin. On the other hand, the proportion of words used frequency-wise from Old Norse actually is *more* than the proportion of the of the vocabulary which is from Old Norse. Of course, yes, as has been demonstrated here in the past, one cannot really use English beyond very basic usage without avoiding Romance words altogether, as many words have had effectively lost their Germanic counterparts in English.
I am a bit surprised hearing that english and french are not romance languages, but i's true that they look a bit different from Spanish , Italian and portuguese.
I'm not specialist in languages, but for the little I know I have always thought Italian, spanish and portuguese are very similar, while english and french seem to be a bit appart.