In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue?

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DJRANZ
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In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? -
24 February 2008, at 18:45
I am just curious when I ask this but in your opinion, do you think an English-speaker would have trouble learning your language? 

Myself, I speak English and a considerable amount of Spanish (not fluent but can communicate with someone in it to some extent).  I am also trying to learn Dutch and Japanese.

I have heard that some English speakers have no problems at all when learning Dutch or German.
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VitaminDLW
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Posts: 652
# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 24 February 2008, at 21:09
well ductch and german are in the same language family as as English (germanic in orgin).

Alot of american's tend to inadvertently learn spanish depending on what region the country you live in.  Also 3 years of it I high school help
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Marjan
TrancePodium Staff
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# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 26 February 2008, at 14:17
I know people whose native language is English that speak Macedonian pretty well. Not sure how hard it was for them to learn it, but I don't think it should be harder than a Macedonian learning English.
Nick Andrei
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# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 1 March 2008, at 16:55
English speakers generally do not have any problems learning ours (Tagalog). Although at first, they do speak in terms of choppy grammer and have pronounciations.

It's seems odd that I seem to notice that Tagalog and German share a lot of similarities in terms of pronunciation. The most obvious one would be to pronounce the letters as is (except in German, d sounds more like a t, etc). Secondly, our grammar is also quite loose.

But my Japanese teacher (for my course on foreign language) told us that Tagalog, even for us speakers is not being fully-explored and that it is one of the more complicated languages. I guess since I'm always speaking it, I did not find it very complicated, but a more sensitive look at its differences from other languages lead me to the conclusion that, yes, it is quite complicated.

But English-speakers who are very interested should not have a hard time. German-speaking people, well, I have an Austrian professor who learned to speak it very well, he even got the manner of expressions right.
# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 1 March 2008, at 21:24
i think english-speakers pick up cantonese quite quickly. it's not a hard language to learn considering most of the sentence structures would be the same and not flipped backwards like japanese or korean would be. then again, i shouldn't be talking because i'm not even close to be fluent in cantonese. it's not my fault that i'm a banana.
Marjan
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# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 3 March 2008, at 16:10
Originally posted by Nick

It's seems odd that I seem to notice that Tagalog and German share a lot of similarities in terms of pronunciation. The most obvious one would be to pronounce the letters as is (except in German, d sounds more like a t, etc). Secondly, our grammar is also quite loose.


In Macedonian, as in most of the Slavic languages, every letter is pronounced exactly the same no matter if it stands alone or in a word.

A is always pronounced A, no matter where it is, so reading is pretty simple.
Nick Andrei
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Posts: 1200
# Re: In your opinion, would it be hard for an English speaker to learn your tongue? - 4 March 2008, at 03:43
Hmm... seems like I won't have trouble living there in Europe for a while... :D I mean, in Germany, I won't, but I guess the rest of it would be quite nice too. :)