# a similar language vs. a different language



## tim fullbright

Is it easier for a spanish speaker to learn italian than to learn english? Or
for a portuguese speaker to learn french than to learn german?

Do you think learning a similar language is easier because there is a lot
of overlap in grammar and vocabulary? Or do these similarities in grammar
and vocabulary actually make the task harder?

What are your experiences?


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## marinax

i have studied french, portuguese and english; and i have to say that the first two were easier because of its similarities to spanish.


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## JPVillanueva

Yo he estudiado frances, y ahora estoy estudiando ingles, creo que el frances es mas facil, seguramente porque sea mas parecido al español que el ingles.


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## tigger_uhuhu

Definitivamente creo que aprender un idioma que tenga parecido al idioma natal es mucho más fácil.
Estudié italiano (aunque ya olvidé todo  ) y fue más fácil que aprender ingles el cual no logro meterme en la cabeza


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## Roi Marphille

tim fullbright said:
			
		

> Is it easier for a spanish speaker to learn italian than to learn english? Or
> for a portuguese speaker to learn french than to learn german?
> 
> Do you think learning a similar language is easier because there is a lot
> of overlap in grammar and vocabulary? Or do these similarities in grammar
> and vocabulary actually make the task harder?
> 
> What are your experiences?


You have a good point but I think that it is easier to learn a similar language. At least to start speaking it and understand it. Of course that the risk to make some mistakes for similarity or false friend stuff may be higher...I guess. 
What it is more difficult if to study *another* similar language because then we may mix them all! puzzling....


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## cherine

I agree with Roi and the others. It's much easier to learn a similar language than another one totally different, even with the risk of similarities and false friends.
I already speak French, and when i started taking spanish classes it was quite easy for me, because of those similarities.
And I also agree with what he says about the "other similar" language, for I have a couple of friends with in the class who speak french and italian, and they sometimes get the THREE languages mixed up in their head   But with a bit of effort they manage to keep speaking one language at a time


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## BasedowLives

I don't know.
norwegian is seeming easier than spanish but i think it could be due to 2 reasons

1: it has some of the same concepts. simple conjugations are easier than in spanish. jeg har, du har as opposed to yo tengo, tu tienes. (although definate article placements make my head hurt "laereren") and some of the words are very similar to english kan=can møte=meet

2: i've already studied spanish for almost 7 years. so it could be that i kind of know how to approach learning another language.

edit:  i just realized in my french class last semester i breezed through it with an A (granted it is VERY novice material) but i am confident i did better in it because of my experience with spanish and the similarities in vocab and grammar.


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## Outsider

It's very hard to be objective about this kind of question. I've learned English and French formally. I began having French classes first, but I've spent more years studying and practicing English since then.
Although I'd had some contact with both languages before, through television and music, mostly, I had been more exposed to English, and I had even started to speak a little English with some native speakers I knew. 
So, to me, the biggest difference was always that I had a head start in English, even though French is definitely closer to my own language. Perhaps a few French syntactic constructions and phrases came more naturally to me than the English ones, but that is all.


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## gisele73

I have a totally different opinion on this. I am a native Spanish speaker, therefore one may think it would be easy to learn Italian, but I must admitt I found it more difficult than English, well there are other factors involved as well, such as age. I started learning English (very basic) at the age of 4, so the younger you are when learning a language, the better.

And Italian, well, I started learning it when I was around 26 or 27, for a little over a year, for the only reason I had always loved that language. To my surprise I found less similar words than I expected, I mean compared to Spanish. There are of course several words that can be similar, but in many cases they can have a totally different meaning, which can be rather confusing, for example "burro" means "butter" in Italian and "donkey" in Spanish, or "largo" that means "wide" in Italian and "long" in Spanish...and on top of that, some of the similar words, are not written exactly the same, so that led to the fact that I started misspelling some words in Spanish!

And Italian grammar is not easy, well, I guess languages that have Latin as root have a much richer "grammar" (and more difficult probably) than English.

A friend of my father told him once that he thought Italian would be very easy to learn, but when he started taking lessons he didn't find it that easy and started learning French instead.

For me is easier to learn a language that is less similar to Spanish, as long as it has the same, or almost the same, alphabet. Norwegian, the language I started learning when I moved here almost 3 years ago, is not an easy one, even if it has the same alphabet, it has 9 vowels instead of the 5 we are used to. It's not easy to learn, but here I am, fighting with it sometimes


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## Ilmo

I feel that the most important detail that makes a language easy or difficult to learn is its pronunciation. I remember that I wondered, when beginning to learn English, how on earth the English children can learn to read, as there are no "permanent rules" how to pronounce the words or syllables and where to put the accent. The Swedish was my first foreign language and I experienced difficulties trying to pronounce its vowel "u", but otherwise it was easy, as also the German. But I still remember answering teacher's question by pronouncing the word "furniture", syllable by syllable like a Spaniard would do. In Russian there are several different kinds of "s" that were almost imposible to learn. But the Spanish is for us very easy, especially when pronounced in the American way, and I guess that also the Italian would be easy. The great advantage of the Spanish is that the accent is always marked and that there are almost no exception of the pronouncement rules. Otherwise, there are no similarities between Spanish and Finnish, though we, too, conjugate the verbs in six personal forms in every tense.
But did you know, there is no future in Finnish!


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## jess oh seven

grammatically and vocabulary-wise it's easier, i think. i've studied Spanish for eight years and have only done Portuguese for about 1.5 and Catalan for a few months... loads of vocabulary and grammar overlaps, which is great when i'm reading but not when i'm speaking as everything just comes out in Spanish... trying to stray from Spanish pronunciation is a little tricky too but it'll be alright over time.


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## Roi Marphille

jess oh seven said:
			
		

> grammatically and vocabulary-wise it's easier, i think. i've studied Spanish for eight years and have only done Portuguese for about 1.5 and Catalan for a few months... loads of vocabulary and grammar overlaps, which is great when i'm reading but not when i'm speaking as everything just comes out in Spanish... trying to stray from Spanish pronunciation is a little tricky too but it'll be alright over time.


indeed reading is easier when you know some similar languages. 

You know Italian has 86% grammar similarities with Catalan. Portuguese and Castilian have 85%. (according a web page I seen somewhere, I'll check the link)
I speak both CAT and CAST perfectly and I can make myself understandable in Portuguese but when I try to speak Italian by guessings (because I haven't studied it)..I _*get mixed up*_ with Portuguese. You know, this kind of stuff like to say "Eu" i/o "Io" for "I" and alike. 
Reading Italian is _quite_ easy for a Catalan speaker.


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## gisele73

Roi Marphille said:
			
		

> indeed reading is easier when you know some similar languages.
> 
> You know Italian has 86% grammar similarities with Catalan. Portuguese and Castilian have 85%. (according a web page I seen somewhere, I'll check the link)
> I speak both CAT and CAST perfectly and I can make myself understandable in Portuguese but when I try to speak Italian by guessings (because I haven't studied it)..I _*get mixed up*_ with Portuguese. You know, this kind of stuff like to say "Eu" i/o "Io" for "I" and alike.
> Reading Italian is _quite_ easy for a Catalan speaker.


 
Hi,

I didn't know that Italian's and Catalan's grammar was that similar, well I really don't know how similiar Catalan and Spanish are either.

What I noticed after learning Italian was that I started to understand a lot more Portuguese than before, especially when reading. I don't speak it though.

Cheers .)


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## Mutichou

I'm French, and I speak English better than Spanish. Grammar, vocabulary, conjugations in Spanish are similar to French, but English grammar is easier.
And it's the second year I'm studying Spanish, whereas I have been learning English for at least six years.


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## Roi Marphille

gisele73 said:
			
		

> Hi,
> 
> I didn't know that Italian's and Catalan's grammar was that similar, well I really don't know how similiar Catalan and Spanish are either.
> 
> What I noticed after learning Italian was that I started to understand a lot more Portuguese than before, especially when reading. I don't speak it though.
> 
> Cheers .)


yep, Catalan is probably (one of) the best "bridge-languages" (Romance)


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## peubanni

Well... Similar languages are difinitely easier -- It's obvious that for an English speaker Mandarin is far more difficult than French & Catalan. But better not learning together at the same time.My mother tongue is Japanese, which has nothing in common with most of the language on the planet (even from Korean and Mandarin it's impossibly different). 

I didn't know a word of English until 12, have just started to dig into other European language & Mandarin, and so far Japanese is the only language I can be comfortable with.Back in the US, I was in the ESL class where I studied English together with kids from Puerto Rico, Germany, Mexico, etc, and I was the slowest in the class: it seemed particularly hard for me to break language barriers, thanks to my stupid mother tongue which is too simply constructured, having only 5 vowels & no conjugation, shiiiit!!

Okay, maybe I'm just about sounding hysterical now, but it is true that when I first started to learn Dutch and Spanish after more than 10 years of struggle with English, I marvelled to see how easily I can go &quot;one step further&quot; from English. My Spanish is still at a rudimentary level, Dutch even worse, but thank god, those languages didn't appear as strikingly painful as English nor Mandarin, which has almost nothing in common with Japanese except some of their 漢字 characters. 

I would ascribe the reason to my experience in learning English, having more or less understood the notion of articles, tenses, cases, and so forth. And alphabets. Maybe you have umlauts, tildes and accent circonflexes, but sharing the same characters is a great help, even though pronunciation may vary (I gave up Russian in a week).

But then, after I got a bit greedy and embarked upon German and French, it got all confusing. A little bit of each is coming up randomly, fusing and intervening each other, even eroding my English. Por ejemplo, thanks so much for votre courriel ich habe mich sehr gefreut aber no he entendido nada, dankje (this is a very bad example...) At this point I figured out that I'd better set aside Dutch and French for a while and concentrate on German and Spanish first.

P.S.
According to this articule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages), French and Portuguese differ by 13%, whereas French-Spanish it's 24%. It didn't tell about Catalan, but I'm sure it sits somewhere between them.


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## Outsider

peubanni said:
			
		

> P.S. According to this articule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages), French and Portuguese differ by 13%, whereas French-Spanish it's 24%. It didn't tell about Catalan, but I'm sure it sits somewhere between them.


Looking at the Wikipedia's entry, the comparison Mr. Pei made was not between pairs of Romance languages, but between each language and Latin.


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## Roi Marphille

Roi Marphille said:
			
		

> indeed reading is easier when you know some similar languages.
> 
> You know Italian has 86% grammar similarities with Catalan. Portuguese and Castilian have 85%. (according a web page I seen somewhere, I'll check the link)


Hi, I found the link. It's a great web! biggest data about languages!!!. Check below link if you please. It's actually 87% lexical similarities between Standard Catalan and Italian, and 85% with Castilian and Portuguese. 

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=cat


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## banni

I know some Spanish and most of them can understand French but not speaking <in other side, most of French can speak well Spanish >. I havent got much discussions with English about French but i know it's hard to pronounce French.

I want to ask who you think easier to study French: Spanish or English. I'm not sure about grammar but pronunce would be the most difficult thing in French, vocabularies are quite similar among three...


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## la reine victoria

Hi Banni,

As an English person I had no problems learning French, and I'm told my pronunciation is very good.

I've never had lessons in Spanish conversation, but I can understand it quite well when I read it.  I think this is because I studied Latin.


LRV


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## macta123

Yes, Very well. In India  Malayalam and Tamil are quite similar. I know Malayalam very well and Tamil is also understandable. Both are dravidian languages and that works. Even Kannada and Telgu are Dravidian but they use more hard or even gluttaral sounds ( like G ; H ; Ch) more than we use them.

 I can understand most of the Hindi dialects though they have some difference.


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## nichec

My French teacher in La Sorbonne told me once that it's easier to teach students whose mother language is a Latine one, and then students who know English, and then students whose mother language is an Asian one. So I guess it's easier to learn a language that's similar to the ones you've already known.


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## Lusitania

Well, I was more exposed to English, French and Spanish than to Italian.

I learnt English at school since I was 5. I have some americans and French in my family and when I started to learn french, I was around 10 it was not that dificult to learn/understand it.

As a child I also watched the same programmes as the spanish children. Listening to people speaking spanish is almost the same for me as portuguese. However, I have dificulties in writing without making mistakes in French or Spanish.

Regarding the Italian, I can read and understand it quite well but I have some trouble in understand it and I can't write it. I will learn it just as soon as I can write spanish and french without any mistakes.

I agree that similar languages are more dificult to learn as you can mix them up when you are talking.


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## Lugubert

I would never try learning Danish or Norwegian. They are too close to Swedish; the three rather are dialects of one "Scandinavian".

English and German came easy to me in school. French was more difficult. Knowing these languages, I went from zero to working conversation in two months in Amsterdam at the age of 24.

This either disproves that learning like a child is impossible if older than 16, or proves that I mature slowly.

The interesting thing was that I in the beginning found it hard to separate Dutch from German. This was remedied when a Czech girl arrived at the department. She spoke no English, but fluent German, so as often as possible, I offered to act as an interpreter. When daily using both Dutch and German, my progress was rapid.


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