Is English grammar harder than Dutch

Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 7:36 pm GMT
For a Dutchman speaking English is like speaking Italian for a Spanish speaker, I guess. Both languages belong to the same family and thus it's easy for them to speak English even without accent.
Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 7:58 pm GMT
Spanish speakers do have a spanish accent when they speak Italian
Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 8:02 pm GMT
Probably those who learnt Italian in a few days have it. If Spaniards learnt Italian since 4 years old like Dutch people do with English they probably would speak Italian better than many Italians in the South.
Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 8:10 pm GMT
A lot of people who speak other languages have accents. I just mention the Dutch because they "seem" to speak languages well and without a distracting accent (in English, anyway).

Well, it's quite difficult to explain this, but English and German people generally have a strong typical accent when they speak italian, as if they weren't able to reproduce properly the "clearness" of the italian phomenes. It seems to me that the Dutch can pronounce better and even imitate the italian intonation
Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 8:14 pm GMT
Most italians from the south can speak perfect italian. Your statement sounds racist and stupid. Spanish generally can't distinguish simple and double consonants, open and closed O and E and some sounds like dz or tz. If a spanish child come to Italy and attend an Italian school he/she can certainly lose his/her accent easily
guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 9:17 pm GMT
<<Most italians from the south can speak perfect italian. Your statement sounds racist and stupid. Spanish generally can't distinguish simple and double consonants, open and closed O and E and some sounds like dz or tz. If a spanish child come to Italy and attend an Italian school he/she can certainly lose his/her accent easily >>

Okay OKAY
We've been down this road a THOUSAND times...
Sheesh, can't you read? The thread says: "Is English grammar harder than Dutch"
Guest   Wed Dec 12, 2007 9:29 pm GMT
In the south they don't distinguish closed e/o and open e/o properly. I highly doubt that they speak proper Italian.
OïL   Wed Dec 12, 2007 11:01 pm GMT
"Let's not derail this thread with comparative phonology of Spanish and Italian, thanks."

— Oui!
Om de vraag te antwoorden / en réponse à la question:
Ja, de Nederlandse grammatica is een beetje eenvoudiger dan de Engelse.
Oui, la grammaire néerlandaise est un peu plus simple que l'anglaise.
Guest   Thu Dec 13, 2007 12:37 am GMT
Оh my god! I didn't know Dutch is different to German! I though it was one and the same.
furrykef   Thu Dec 13, 2007 1:40 am GMT
<< Both languages belong to the same family and thus it's easy for them to speak English even without accent. >>

Being related languages doesn't necessarily help. Being related means that the two languages came from the same ancestral language, not that they're similar. English is also related to Latin (since they're both Indo-European), but they're not similar at all. Of course, they did diverge much earlier, but that's not the only factor that comes into play. Sound shifts, the gain or loss of a case system, etc., can happen at any time. On the whole, English today isn't terribly similar to the English of 1000 years ago. So why should it be similar to German or Dutch, especially since those languages did not evolve in the same ways that English did during that time?

- Kef
Guest   Thu Dec 13, 2007 1:36 pm GMT
I've just read up on Dutch grammar on Wikipedia. I didn't realise that up until the last few hundred years it was still quite highly inflected, much more recently than when English was. It seems that a few centuries ago there was a drive to retain this morphological complexity and even to try to increase it in some cases. However in the last century, most traces of the case and declension system were abandoned.