Can Europeans Speak More Languages than North Americans?

[lplkassm]

I tend to be able to write language faster than I can speak it too... I used to be the other way around when I started learning french, but with German, I can write better than I can speak.

I actually like the 'harsh' tone of German... coming from basically exclusively English, I like the little things... like the fact German has no 'w' sound: it's 'v'. Also, I really enjoy the fact that you can almost arbitrarily stick nouns and describing words together. That makes things more succinct.

For those who don't know German, basically, in German, instead of saying, for instance, 'paper plate', like in English, it's actually 'paperplate'. No space. And, you can basically do that with as many describing words as you like... it could be a squareyellowpaperplate, for all anyone cares. That's neat to me, something fun about the language

The only thing I mind about the harshness of the tone is that it gets difficult sometimes for me to pronounce certain words. Like I am having a difficult time learning the words for all the fruits. This is most likely due to the fact that I honestly struggle with the harshness of the tone and the lack of 'guff' I place into the pronouncing of the word.

All in all its been a great learning process that I wouldn't trade for anything. The harder the language is to learn the more I appreciate it. The languages that I can learn rather quickly (i.e. other Romance Languages) I tend to still appreciate, but not as much as the ones that take me time to master (so to speak).

The next language that I hope to learn is a language in Africa. I haven't chosen a specific language, but somewhere in that general area. That or attempt to learn Latin (and the old-style Latin).

Sorry for the long post lol. I just love linguistics way too much apparently.

 

[Tee Hee Hee]

The next language that I hope to learn is a language in Africa. I haven't chosen a specific language, but somewhere in that general area.

How much of a challenge would you like and how are you studying/learning these languages? Though classes or self-taught?

I'd advise either Zulu or Xhosa, maybe Afrikaans if you want something more based on European languages (its a mish-mass of german, dutch and english)

 

[lplkassm]

How much of a challenge would you like and how are you studying/learning these languages? Though classes or self-taught?

I'd advise either Zulu or Xhosa, maybe Afrikaans if you want something more based on European languages (its a mish-mass of german, dutch and english)

I do this through my own spare time. I'm the kind of person that likes to be self-taught than going to school and being lectured by some person.

BTW, thanks for the choices provided. Zulu was my first choice, but I am not too sure about Afrikaans because of the 'mish-mass' you pointed out :facewall:

Once again I feel so nerdy entering this thread in this section of the forums lol

 

[Mr.SaJoRa]

I actually like the 'harsh' tone of German... coming from basically exclusively English, I like the little things... like the fact German has no 'w' sound: it's 'v'.

the ?w?sound is your ?v?. but our ?v?sound is like the ?f?sound.

 

[SuperShoot]

I'm from Europe, and can speak: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish (not 100 % correctly tho), English and Spanish and I ofc know some words from many other languages aswell, but I don't count that as I know the language

 

[xplag]

Just to point out (I didn't read through some of the pages, so someone may have said the same thing) that this poll is going to be skewed because of the number of North Americans (mostly from the US) that are in eGO versus those from Europe.

I do think that Europeans can speak more languages than those in the Americas (North and South) just because they are exposed to a greater variety of languages. If you think about it, Europe is about two fifths the size of North America with more than double the population, and each country in Europe is roughly the size of a large US state. So with that close proximity for that many people, you're bound to get lots of diversity in language.

 

[MoSTaR #GH]

From Europe, speak English, Bosnian, and French

 

[Dreadmaker]

The only thing I mind about the harshness of the tone is that it gets difficult sometimes for me to pronounce certain words. Like I am having a difficult time learning the words for all the fruits. This is most likely due to the fact that I honestly struggle with the harshness of the tone and the lack of 'guff' I place into the pronouncing of the word.

All in all its been a great learning process that I wouldn't trade for anything. The harder the language is to learn the more I appreciate it. The languages that I can learn rather quickly (i.e. other Romance Languages) I tend to still appreciate, but not as much as the ones that take me time to master (so to speak).

The next language that I hope to learn is a language in Africa. I haven't chosen a specific language, but somewhere in that general area. That or attempt to learn Latin (and the old-style Latin).

Sorry for the long post lol. I just love linguistics way too much apparently.

Yeah, it's not just you. I only recently started on the train of learning languages, but I love. My best friend is currently learning Dutch, to speak with some of his family, and I'm learning German for mostly academic reasons; we're about the same right now in terms of learning level, so we can compare. Better yet, dutch and German are actually close enough that they can be mutually intelligible, so we've had conversations.

Also, I'm not sure about German, but I know he had a friend a long time ago that knew Afrikaans, and he could understand him fine; Dutch and German and Afrikaans are quite similar.

 

[lplkassm]

Yeah, it's not just you. I only recently started on the train of learning languages, but I love. My best friend is currently learning Dutch, to speak with some of his family, and I'm learning German for mostly academic reasons; we're about the same right now in terms of learning level, so we can compare. Better yet, dutch and German are actually close enough that they can be mutually intelligible, so we've had conversations.

Also, I'm not sure about German, but I know he had a friend a long time ago that knew Afrikaans, and he could understand him fine; Dutch and German and Afrikaans are quite similar.

After thinking it over I am rather tempted to learn Afrikaans. Let the learning begin soon. I still need to finish learning German first before I decide to jump into learning another language.

Independent study is awesome

 

[inquisition]

I'm not even european .. But I can tell you they are far more educated than us North americans.. Please remember you had universities before america was even conquered... Plus how many Europeans don't we see on our servers speaking english in difference to how many americans you see on German servers speaking german.

 

[BlackBird.]

American has way more votes and Europe has more 3+ language votes Europe ftw

 

[Rambo(DK)]

Danish English Azeri ( comes from azerbaijan) turki and turkman I think its call.. russiaen learning spanish!

 

[spark]

Only English for me

 

[The Apeking]

Ya I knew that, but I think how I wrote my sentence it made it seem like they were linked.

The reason learning German at the moment is difficult is because it's not a Romance Language, thus I am QQ'in heavily each time I learn something new in the language.

For some reason though I pick-up the writing style of the language a lot faster than the actual speaking of it. Right now I can write in German as well as I can write in English, but speaking it is a whole other story :glare:

Why does German have to be so harsh (by that I mean the overall tone).

I hope to complete German soon and either move on to Italian, or Latin.

Well you (and all the others learning German) basically chose the hardest language to learn (when it comes to languages with Latin letters), compared to German English is like the easiest language there is.

English has no "Kasus" (maybe except for the "s" used to show the genitive) and declining and conjugating is a LOT easier than in German (we have so many special words, substantives as well as adjectives and verbs that it's pretty much impossible to learn them all when German isn't your mother tongue and 95% of the Germans themselves do mistakes).

And of course our way of talking is totally different from English or French, since we speak more "choppy".


Anyways, I speak German (since it's my mother tongue has you may have thought already) and English, I'm also able to read Latin fairly well (Germany is also the last country where we can already learn Latin in school and not only in university) and I could speak it but neither me nor someone else does that.

Besides I actually think it's a HUGE advantage for us Germans that we can learn Latin so early, even though German isn't a Romanic language you can use most of the Latin words in German (if you change them, though you can use a lot just how they are used in Latin) or many other languages like Italian (well, guess why), French, Spanish and of course English.

IMO Latin is the closest to a thing like a "basic" language to learn other languages (especially the ones I named above) and it's also not nearly as hard to learn as German. If English would have a difficulty level of maybe 3 I'd say German is a 9 to 9,5 and Latin about a 6-7.

Well, good ol' lingua latina.




Edit: lol, this took me like 35 minutes to write, I guess it's more an mini essay than a post

 

[Dreadmaker]

I have to disagree with you, Apeking. There have been a lot of studies out that say English is much harder to learn than most 'popular' languages. We have a lot of very weird things; namely, our structure varies pretty distinctly from many other languages, and although it's not as difficult, and really more of a fluency thing, we use contractions, and not many other languages do it.

German's structure is relatively similar to English; it just so happens that it's preferential, depending on the circumstance, for the verb to end the sentence.

Plus, English has a huge lexicon; it's larger than most languages because it inherits words from everywhere, and tends to make them up, as well. We also have pitfalls too, like homonyms that even native speakers often mess up: their/there/they're, your/you're. I understand German has some of these too (as well as contextual words, like 'wei?'. meaning 'white' in noun form and 'to know' in verb form), but I feel as though English's are more painful.

I'm in the process of learning German right now, and though I'm certainly not fluent yet, the journey so far has been fun and relatively painless. I'm not having a hard time with it at all.

 

[The Apeking]

I have to disagree with you, Apeking. There have been a lot of studies out that say English is much harder to learn than most 'popular' languages. We have a lot of very weird things; namely, our structure varies pretty distinctly from many other languages, and although it's not as difficult, and really more of a fluency thing, we use contractions, and not many other languages do it.

German's structure is relatively similar to English; it just so happens that it's preferential, depending on the circumstance, for the verb to end the sentence.

Plus, English has a huge lexicon; it's larger than most languages because it inherits words from everywhere, and tends to make them up, as well. We also have pitfalls too, like homonyms that even native speakers often mess up: their/there/they're, your/you're. I understand German has some of these too (as well as contextual words, like 'wei?'. meaning 'white' in noun form and 'to know' in verb form), but I feel as though English's are more painful.

I'm in the process of learning German right now, and though I'm certainly not fluent yet, the journey so far has been fun and relatively painless. I'm not having a hard time with it at all.

Hm, I'm surprised that you are able to learn German well (though I don't know how advanced you're, if you're just starting with "Wie geht es dir? Mir geht es gut." I wouldn't think you could really tell yet) but for me things like ?,?,? and ? (letters that aren't used in English), articles (German has like 25 or so conversions from the basic "der, die, das" while English only has "the" and some other substitutions), personal and possessive pronouns, nominalisated verbs and adjectives and the already mentioned declensions and conjugations make German harder than English.

By the way, I wouldn't say, that a wider variety of words is something that makes a language more difficult to learn, I mean, we all have a mother tongue and we sure don't know all the words of our languages.

 

[Dreadmaker]

Hm, I'm surprised that you are able to learn German well (though I don't know how advanced you're, if you're just starting with "Wie geht es dir? Mir geht es gut." I wouldn't think you could really tell yet) but for me things like ?,?,? and ? (letters that aren't used in English), articles (German has like 25 or so conversions from the basic "der, die, das" while English only has "the" and some other substitutions), personal and possessive pronouns, nominalisated verbs and adjectives and the already mentioned declensions and conjugations make German harder than English.

By the way, I wouldn't say, that a wider variety of words is something that makes a language more difficult to learn, I mean, we all have a mother tongue and we sure don't know all the words of our languages.

I'm well past basic introductions and such; I'm dealing with things like past and present tenses at the moment, and so far, while it certainly isn't mindless or anything, I don't find that I'm having too much difficulty. I find it to be a fun language to learn, and not particularly difficult at the moment.

Also, the only letter that we don't have is ?, which equates to 'ss'. The other letters aren't letters; they're accents that subtly change the sound of the letter. Most languages have that, and because I'm Canadian and have basic french (which has accents that German doesn't have) I'm used to the idea of figuring out what those sounds are. I don't find that particularly difficult at all. In fact, I find the use of accents neat; in some cases, such as the word "Bruder", it's neat that it's the placement of the umlaut on the u that determines whether it's plural or not.

But yeah; not very hard for me so far; it's really enjoyable, in fact

 

[The Apeking]

I'm well past basic introductions and such; I'm dealing with things like past and present tenses at the moment, and so far, while it certainly isn't mindless or anything, I don't find that I'm having too much difficulty. I find it to be a fun language to learn, and not particularly difficult at the moment.

Also, the only letter that we don't have is ?, which equates to 'ss'. The other letters aren't letters; they're accents that subtly change the sound of the letter. Most languages have that, and because I'm Canadian and have basic french (which has accents that German doesn't have) I'm used to the idea of figuring out what those sounds are. I don't find that particularly difficult at all. In fact, I find the use of accents neat; in some cases, such as the word "Bruder", it's neat that it's the placement of the umlaut on the u that determines whether it's plural or not.

But yeah; not very hard for me so far; it's really enjoyable, in fact

Interesting, could you tell me how long you've been learning German and when you started?

The main problem is, that you can't really master German, I don't mean that you can't learn every word, that is the case for every language, but it's basically impossible to learn all the Grammar, stylistic things, "Kommatierung" (placing commas) etc.

If you should ever be able to use the correct genetive case all the time (spoken and written) I'll salute you and will congratulate you that you gained an ability that about 98% of the Germans (and maybe even more other German speaking people, like the Swiss) don't have.

By the way, it's really nice to hear that you enjoy learning German, hopefully you'll keep that up.

 

[Full Grizzly]

I'm from Holland but I speak Dutch ( the language that is spoken in Holland) German, English and French ( a bit )

Btw Apeking, your Engish is perfect.

 

[Naku_vamp]

Personally i think Europe does just because they have more of a need to because Europe as a whole is about the same size as the United States but the United States primarily speaks English where as in the same amount of land mass you have a bunch of different countries all speaking their own languages and usually sharing English as a way to communicate with each other in different regions.

Lets just say you were born in Germany but hen got a job in France so you would probably know German from growing up in Germany, learned French from moving there, and probably already know English because most European countries teach it as a required class as well as it is also used between Europeans if one doesn't know the others native tongue


Where as Americans have little reason to know anything but English, maybe a little Spanish if you live near the southern boarder and Mexicans have no reason to learn anything but Spanish unless they plan on going to america and Canadians use English and depending on the regions French so yeah

My vote is Europe just because there is more reason to know multiple languages