I’m Norwegian, so I guess I’m biased - but it does seem easier than German. We just have less grammar: No dative case, far fewer things are case inflected, and we’ve even polished away the subject/verb matching: In Norwegian, unlike both English and German, I are and you are and we all are.
The two points where I’d say Norwegian is “harder” than English is that we (like German) have grammatical genders (effectively just two, though; the feminine is disappearing), and there’s a tonal element to the pronunciation that’s a bit hard to get right, even more so because it’s completely different between the dialects.
Hah, thanks. Now take into account that, for example, the Japanese applications frequently don’t distinguish between plural and singular, and imagine how that works out when translating into English.
Still, at least I work in an office with a bunch of Japanese patent attorneys who draft the Japanese applications and who have a direct line to the inventors, so I don’t have to work completely in the dark.
I presume you find it curious that English speakers can learn French more easily than German?
Keep in mind that English has about 50% Romance vocabulary; almost all of it is either Norman or later and a good chunk of the orthography has been preserved. The grammar is different but the words are easy enough to match up.
Whereas our Germanic base had a couple of centuries of insular divergence and then another couple of centuries of getting pidginised by the Vikings… and only then did the Normans show up!
English is a weird mixture of Germanic and Romance (thanks, William the Conqueror!). In fact, less than 25% of the current English vocabulary is Germanic. For an idea of how English would look without the French influence, take a look at Poul Anderson’s famous Uncleftish Beholding.
Given that English has basically stolen all the good bits from every language on Earth (pace Pratchett) it’s easy to see why simply talking slowly and loudly is so effective.
Kinda explains why the spelling is so totally weird, too.
I never know what these charts mean. 88 weeks to “master” a language? Does that mean 88 weeks of sitting in a class for a couple hours a day? 88 weeks of being out and about in a country where the language is spoken?
I’m several years into my Korean studies, and I think I probably speak like a 5-year-old. 50% of that is because Korean is so different from English, and 50% is because I stopped working at it a long time ago. (And even when I was working at it, it was just me and a private tutor once a week. Now it’s mostly texting with Korean friends.)
I presume you find it curious that English speakers can learn French more easily than German?
Yes. I had both English and later French at school, and I didn’t do a proper analysis, but from gut feeling, I found all aspects of English “closer to home”, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
Keep in mind that English has about 50% Romance vocabulary.
I hear that a lot lately, and I wonder if it is, at least in part, just a fad of opinion. For instance, German has adopted quite a few French bits, too, it does not exist in a vacuum. I did not do any kind of proper research on that, but neither did author of bits like “Uncleftish Beholding”, for instance, which seem to drive the point to the extreme, with a bit of comedic intent.
This should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. Danish is so much harder than its other seemingly identical neighbours. All about pronounciation. The only English speakers I know who really speak Danish are ones who have Danish partners. Even then it takes years.
I’ve neutralized champions of communism. I’ve spent the past three years… learning Finnish! Which would come in handy here in Virginia, and I’m never ever sick at sea. So I wanna know why… I’m not gonna be your Helsinki station chief.
It is interesting that the Foreign Office have been plagued by the same question by so many native English speakers who have had enough, that they have produced a handy diagram.
I am guessing the figures are based on people being sent on a course, perhaps by their employer. “We’re sending you to the Helsinki branch. You will need to pick up the language. The language school says this ought to take N months…” There is no proper double-blind experiment, and the people are probably self selected to have sales or management type jobs, where they have to meet people.
This is probably why they can’t come up with the same rankings for Breton or Welsh or Cornish. In Georgian times, someone in the foreign office may have said “The Cornish have the edge on us in beam engines. We want you to go down to Tavistock, and disappear into the engineering community. We are sending you on a crash course in Modern Cornish, and Q will issue you with an exploding pasty…” But, if people also speak English where you are going, a technical discussion may be better in English.
