I don’t know German and French, but I took a Spanish class and can honestly say if you give me an English word I’ve never seen and a Spanish word that I’ve never seen, I’m much more confident I’ll be able to pronounce the Spanish word correctly before the English one.
This is because with Spanish, letters have set rules on how they are pronounced, which helps prevent what we see in this video when it comes to certain English words.
The difficulty of Spanish over English, imo, comes from how many plurals there are and how their verbs will change based off your plural (ex, yo hablo “I talk”, tu hablas “you talk”, él/ella habla “he/she talks”, hablamos “we talk”, ellos hablan “they talk”) which to me was very complicated.
Are German and French the same as Spanish? Where the rules for pronunciation are more concise? Or is it like English where trying to pronounce a new word can be difficult? Did you find English to be more complicated than German and French in certain aspects? Or if you learned German and/or French before English, do you think that helped make it easier to learn English as a third language? Whereas it may have been more difficult to learn as a second language.
I know that I kind of just hit you with an essay, but I just love to learn and you seem like you’ve got a lot of first hand knowledge to share here.
Edit: from “soy” to “yo.” Thank you to the Redditor that corrected me.
I think learning German and than Latin (Roman) played an extended role in my ability to understand grammar and Languages in general as an abstract concept.
Maybe listening to rap music, as a kid, was also an accelerator in developing English language skills. They don’t teach you colloquialisms and idioms in school. But that’s exactly what defines a living and spoken language.
Learning French is a bitch. The language sounds beautiful, but the grammar is so unforgiving, declination and conjugation completely transforming nouns and verbs, and the pronounciation itself is difficult. Add words like de/de la/du or a/au/aux/a la and frustration for teens is guaranteed.
I’ve never learned Spanish because where I grew up there were no Spaniards or Latin people. I grew up around Turkish, Asian and sub Saharan African immigrants/refugees.
So, I can’t really compare any of it to Spanish.
But learning German and French is more difficult than learning English imho. And those languages are supposedly easy to learn in comparison to learning Chinese or Korean or Farsi.
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u/CallMePepper7 1d ago edited 22h ago
I don’t know German and French, but I took a Spanish class and can honestly say if you give me an English word I’ve never seen and a Spanish word that I’ve never seen, I’m much more confident I’ll be able to pronounce the Spanish word correctly before the English one.
This is because with Spanish, letters have set rules on how they are pronounced, which helps prevent what we see in this video when it comes to certain English words. The difficulty of Spanish over English, imo, comes from how many plurals there are and how their verbs will change based off your plural (ex, yo hablo “I talk”, tu hablas “you talk”, él/ella habla “he/she talks”, hablamos “we talk”, ellos hablan “they talk”) which to me was very complicated.
Are German and French the same as Spanish? Where the rules for pronunciation are more concise? Or is it like English where trying to pronounce a new word can be difficult? Did you find English to be more complicated than German and French in certain aspects? Or if you learned German and/or French before English, do you think that helped make it easier to learn English as a third language? Whereas it may have been more difficult to learn as a second language.
I know that I kind of just hit you with an essay, but I just love to learn and you seem like you’ve got a lot of first hand knowledge to share here.
Edit: from “soy” to “yo.” Thank you to the Redditor that corrected me.