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I assume learning a language which is similar to the way English is structured, would be easier?
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Frisian (specifically West Frisian) and Scots are considered the closest related to English, but I can safely say Scots has closer structure to English. After that Afrikaans, then Dutch.
Scots is very similar to English. Here's a video.
West Frisian is pretty close to Old English in terms of grammar, but it also sounds a lot like English. Here's a video. West Frisian starts at about 4:55.
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hge. pnsc gailf lops?
fnienves. isnvidjnv sivnsinvs yeah
I had a phlegm attack.
Wow! I guess I never properly heard any Frisian, just read a bit (which I can understand fairly well) but this was gibberish to me. I understood a few words, even though I know Dutch, German and English fluently, all of which should be supposedly super close. I have an easier time understanding Danish, tbh.
I'd give Swedish a go, everyone says Dutch is closest, but really only in terms of vocabulary, not grammar. Swedish is really quite similar to English grammatically, also try Norwegian or Danish... also don't try Finnish or Icelandic
IMO the biggest barrier to learning a Scandinavian language or Dutch is the difficulty in practising.
Unless you work with small kids or the elderly, you are unlikely to encounter many situations where your newly learnt language skills are a more logical way to communicate than English. When I lived in the Netherlands it was incredibly hard to insist on speaking in my shitty dutch when we both knew that the other person would undoubtedly speak excellent English. Dutch and - as far as I know - scandies are rightly proud of their language skills and will also welcome the chance to talk to you in English.
The same is not true for French. If you go to France without any French, a lot of the time you will be pointing and miming to communicate.
Edit - can't type on my phone.
I feel like I always read about the two types of French: Those that insist on speaking in French only and those who walk away in disgust.
Japanese version
If you were visiting Holand would it be helpful to focus on learning to read Dutch?
Edit: typo
Yes.
Well maybe.
Not if you are just going to Amsterdam to see Anne Frank's house, smoke a load of weed and then get hit by bicycles. All the signposts will be in English as well and everyone is a tourist in the city centre anyway.
But if you really want to get into the country then you should at least be able to read some of it. I really tried hard with the language while I was there (for two years) and can read fairly fluently, especially things like menus and signs and so on, but I still sound like a three year old child when I speak - my word order is always wrong and I don't know the proper past tenses for things for example.
Thank you. That is extremely helpful. I would be visiting family there and in the Flemish areas of Belgium.
I spent some time in the Netherlands. The Dutch are absolutely wonderful people but every time I attempted to speak Dutch, they automatically switched to English.
My Dutch friend say that almost everyone under 40 speaks fluent English, especially in larger towns and cities. She had a couple of Brits and an Aussie that worked in her office. They had lived in the Netherlands for years and never learned Dutch.
I just spent a couple weeks in the Netherlands and would have found it helpful to understand the pronunciation of Dutch words.
When I visited Amsterdam almost all of the older people (think 50+) couldn't speak English. Either it was a coincidence that they were pretending to not be able to or they genuinely couldn't. This doesn't include people who worked in bars, shops and other tourist-type places of course who almost always speak good English out of necessity, I'm referring to people I would ask for directions in the street and things like that. There were also several younger people I encountered who spoke sketchy English though most of them were comfortably conversational.
That's such a strange thing to hear. I've been living in Amsterdam for 5 years now and I maybe met a handful of Dutch people that didn't speak at least conversational level English. Usually, remarkably fluent, even 50+.
I think that this is a question of expectations - people won't speak perfect English, so it might come across as sketchy, but actually they speak the language well enough to explain to you where the bus is leaving from or how late their shop will be open that evening.
I'm sure it has been posted before, but this map is fairly spot on as far as my experience goes.
I haven't traveled enough around Europe to know but I think some parts would be much more informative if countries were split up into regions. For example with most of the Mediterranean countries the % of English speakers would be much higher in coastal regions, in Eastern Europe would be around the major cities, etc you get the idea.
Why the Iceland hate? I get the Finnish part, Saami languages are confusing as hell.
When we're talking about languages that are easy for English speakers to learn, we tend to avoid languages with case systems. Icelandic is an awesome language, but for someone not familiar with learning 4 cases it could seem challenging.
Then why not include German in that list?
German is a little easier than Icelandic, in the sense that it's really only articles where you have to worry about the case, in Icelandic every noun has 4 cases and there's a good number of irregular ones. But then again, those German plurals aren't too fun.
Articles and adjectives, but yeah, I guess I see your point.
I've Icelandic is considerably different from the other Scandinavian languages as it employs more characters and is derived more closely from Old Norse, whereas Modern Swedish, Danish and Finnish have a lot more in common with German. Now I haven't studied Icelandic yet, so this is just what I've heard!
I guess you meant Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
You're right Icelandic is different because it's hasn't changed as much from Old Norse (that's why natives can read the old sagas) as the other Scandinavian languages but that doesn't mean it's more difficult
It is considerably different, but still decently intelligable until you get to complicated words and ideas. Faroese is freaking weird though.
Norwegian or Danish would be your best bet. Their vocabulary is more similar to german, but their grammar is easily relatable for an english speaker. It's not terribly complex and generally follows a SVO sentence structure. It will be immediately familiar to you. The only reason I've not said Swedish is because spelling is a bit more complicated. - I speak English, German, French, Norwegian, and Danish. Good luck!
Scots. But some would consider it a dialect.
It would be easier, but learning something like Dutch (or Frisian), which is the next closest, still wouldn't be "easy". English is kind of an offshoot, influenced grammatically and lexically by hundreds of years of colonialism. I mean, learning Dutch, French or Spanish would be just about the same when it comes to difficulty.
Came here to say that!
The question that you asked is actually remarkably difficult to answer. It really depends on what you mean by grammar. If you're talking just about vocabulary (what we in linguistics would call "lexical similarity"), the answer is not too hard: one of Frisian, Dutch, or French would be the closest (I'm excluding Scots, as it isn't clear that it should be called a separate language). Having studied both Dutch and French, for basic terms, I would say Dutch is a closer match. However, for anything more advanced (high-register speech), French is probably closer. I've heard Frisian is even more similar to English than Dutch, but I've never attempted to learn it, so I can't really say.
Now - if you're talking about grammatical structure (or "syntactic similarity"), that is a much harder problem. It's not really easy to compare two languages, and after doing a brief search, I was unable to find anyone that had attempted to compute a similarity measure between many languages (if anyone knows of such an attempt I would be very interested to read about it). There are certainly grammatical features of languages, and I suppose you could compare them just by counting the number of similar features, but even comparing one feature would itself be difficult, and there may be many ways to rank their importance.
Practically speaking though, there are both significant similarities between French and English and between Dutch and English. There are also significant differences. Overall, I find the grammar of Dutch to be somewhat easier, mostly because the verb conjugations are more like English, and there seems to be less irregularity. Funnily enough, though, the grammar that I found easiest to grasp, and by far the most regular was that of Japanese, though clearly there was a lot more vocabulary to learn, and a lot more work to learn to read and write anything interesting. That being said, nether my Dutch or my Japanese are very advanced, so it might just be that I never encountered the really weird stuff.
Now that I've said all that - my best advice is to forget it, and learn the language that you are most interested in, because if you're not interested, you simply aren't going to put in the practice. Oh - and pick a language that you can practice regularly, preferably with native speakers. I loved my time learning Dutch and Japanese, but outside of classes it was difficult to find opportunities to practice. However, now that I live in a French speaking area, my abilities in that language have jumped dramatically, mostly due to exposure.
Grammatical category:
Interesting: Transitivity ^(grammar) | ^Plural | ^Mirative
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I don't speak it, but Dutch has often been touted as the closest major language to English. West Frisian is even closer.
I'd suggest a romance language like French or Spanish, though, as they open the doors to many other tongues and they aren't that far off.
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Anglo-Saxon did not originate in France at all. Both the Angles and the Saxons were Germanic tribes, who spoke a West Germanic dialect, which merged to become Anglo-Saxon
It probably didn't originate in France, but you should know that French has the biggest influence from German languages in the romance languages. The Francs (who gave their name to the language) were a German tribe. We could say that modern French is a mix between vulgar Latin and some Germanic languages. This partly explains why it is so much different from other romance languages.
Anglo-Saxon is a Germanic language.
The normans were viking exports, weren't they? Must brush up on my Asterix ...
Also the Norman language didn't influence the grammar of English at all
That is sarcasm right? 1066, remember? The Normans literally had more indirect influence over present-day English vocabulary than any other language.
Vocabulary is not grammar, though.
I said grammar not vocabulary.
I think that your best bet would be French. Basic English vocabulary, including all of the 100 most common words, has its origin in Germanic/West Frisian, but word order is closer to French.
This is particularly true if you use what I would call RP or Queen's English as your base line, and phrase yourself quite formally. French was used as the language of the elite in the UK for centuries and it affected how those people expressed themselves in English, which was often in fact their second language.
As a side note, I have learnt both French and Dutch and I am going to tell you straight up now that if you are looking for one to learn, French is by far easier, for a whole host of reasons.
I agree. I'm a french-speaking belgian living in UK and, as such, I learnt Dutch for a long time. Dutch is really close to German. When it comes to grammar structure, English is much closer to French than Dutch.
For instance, the place of verbs in the sentence:
I have gone to Belgium. Je suis alle en Belgique. (I'm on a qwerty keyboard, sorry for the missing accent.) Ik ben naar Belgie gegaan. Ich bin nach Belgien gegehen.
Or
In June it is nice. En juin, c'est sympa. In juni is het leuk. Im Juni ist es schoen.
(Hopefully, the translations are correct but the important thing is the order anyway.)
If I may correct that it would be "Ich bin nach Belgien gegangen". :)
However, it surprised me on how I was able to understand the Dutch sentence without any knowledge about that language.
I've always made the case that if you can speak hyper correct fancy English, you already know how to phrase advanced sentences in French.
basic: the country I'm going to -> fancy: the country to which I am going -> french: le pays auquel je vais
basic: I woulda done something if I woulda been there -> fancy: I would have done something if I had been there -> J'aurais fait quelque chose si j'avais été là
basic: it is imperative that he does his homework -> fancy: it is imperative that he DO his homework -> french: Il est impératif qu'il FASSE ses devoirs
and so on and so forth.
Indeed. That applies to all Romance languages. When I started getting more American English interaction through the internet, I was dumbfounded by how badly sentences were structured. I was used to using the fancy way because that is the closest to Portuguese: The country to which I am going: "O país ao qual eu vou/irei" or "O país onde vou/irei", if you want brevity.
Danish is surprisingly similar, but the pronunciation side of things will make you cry.
As I understand, the only pronunciation rule in Danish is:
"Danish is Norwegian but with a piece of bread in your mouth"
Check out this factual documentary about Danish. 4:16mins
i can't breathe
Frisian as a language is extremely close to English gramatically, but there is more than just the grammar to consider. In order to speak freely, you need lots of vocabulary, so that can be just as important as the grammar if not more important. For example, Esperanto is considered one of the easiest languages to learn, but that is because of its regularity and European-derrived vocabulary, not grammatical similarity. So, if you want to learn an easier language, looking at the grammar probably isn't the best way to choose. A romance language like Italian or Spanish is often considered easier than a more closely related Germanic language (or Esperanto is probably the easiest if you're open to a constructed language). Good luck!
I would look into German. I am a native German speaker and I thought English was incredibly easy to learn, because of the similarities. However, I think German is harder to learn for foreigners than English. Give it a go though!
A => does not imply <=>
How should I know? I just shared on how I think it is.
edit: not sure why I am downvoted :|
I'm having this experience casually learning German. All my prior experience was with Romance languages and their structure which took some effort to understand. But I'm realizing how easy German syntax and grammar are to me, as a native English speaker it is a pleasant surprise. It's more "intuitive" to me than I ever expected.
I also have some trouble with Romance languages (i.e. French). It takes me ages to form a simply senteces in my head or understand them.
I took German in high school. While it was the only non-English language I studied, I was surprised how much 'sense' it made. Yes, verbs go into odd places and all that, and gender matters, but it's not fraught with exceptions and exceptions-to-the-exceptions the way other languages seem to be (it seems).
I am currently having the experiecene with exceptions with French. It drives me crazy sometimes.
norwegian probably
Funnily enough, you might find certain languages that are not structured like English easier than those that are. English shares lots of vocab with the Latin languages, although the actual structures of the languages are further apart than, say, English and Dutch (or Swedish, Norwegian, etc).
French and Norwegain. Norwegian especially.