Know what I've also observed? Since spoken Spanish attributes more or less identical sounds to both "b" and "v", many people interchange these letters in written Spanish. I've seen plenty of educated native speakers, from both Spain and Latin America, slip up this way.
I think Frisian is the closest language to normal English, maybe that is why some Dutch people can learn it easily?
Asians would definitely disagree - for a native Chinese, Japanese, or Korean speaker, English is incredibly difficult.
i teach at a school that has, maybe, 300 Korean kids, some of whom are JOTB. the overwhelming percentage of those -- probably 30 kids -- don't have a clue as to English grammar. it's a total mystery to them. verb tenses are completely mangled. i have no idea how Korean does verb tenses, but there's not a lot of positive transfer between Korean and English.
I taught English to Koreans for two years (and am a decent, albeit not fluent, Korean speaker). Some things that might help you pin down the difficulties: -Sentence order in Korean is subject-object-verb, not subject-verb-object like in English. -You do not conjugate verbs in Korean, at least not within the same tense; thus "I write, you write, she writes, he writes" are all literally '(subject) write.' -One of the hardest things for a Korean is progressive tenses, as they don't really exist in Korean; "I go to school" and "I am going to school" are grammatically identical and depend on context. You probably hear a lot of 'I go' and 'I am go' when they mean 'I am going.' -Korean doesn't have any relative pronouns whatsoever, and personal pronouns are used sparingly, especially if you're being polite. -A lot of things that are adjectives in English are actually verbs in Korean. There are verbs, for example, that mean 'to be pretty' and 'to be tall.' -Modal verbs work completely differently in Korean and are probably the single biggest trouble spot with verbs for Koreans learning English after progressive tenses.
I can understand all western languages being hard to learn for Asians, just like Asian languages are hard to learn for westerners. But is English really more difficult for them than say French or German? I think what really helps the Dutch (and the Belgians) is that television isn't synchronised but subtitled over here and we do get a lot of foreign programmes. We subconsciously grow up learning what English (and French and German) ought to sound like.
It's weird though, I've met quite a few Dutch who have a horrible Dutch accent. They tend to be quite understandably, and their grammar and word knowledge is superb, but when it comes to accents the Dutch overestimate themselves. I think learning how to write English is totally different. What is even worse though is a Korean who knows decent english but then has to learn German and has to learn the pronounciation for all the vowels new basically. Incredibly tough.
It's the same way in Scandinavia. Finnish, for example, is difficult in its own right and completely unrelated to English, yet so many Finns speak wonderful English and all the ones I meet give a lot of credit to subtitled (instead of dubbed) American/British popular culture. And the trick is that so many young people are exposed to this popular culture regularly while concurrently studying English at school (beginning at a very young age, compared to when we start learning foreign languages in the US). It's like constant language practice beginning before age ten, in Finland at least.
You won't hear me say that the Dutch are good at English! They're much worse than they think and often v. cringeworthy. All I'm saying is that they don't find English particularly difficult to learn and the television thing is probably partly to thank for it.
Yes, because spelling doesn't match pronunciation in English and there are exceptions to every rule. Also, Japanese and Korean are closer to German or Dutch than they are to English in that they have a subject-object-verb sentence order and are agglutinative.
I took Chinese during my senior year in high school. I got serious, painful hand cramps from writing the characters...Ouch.
Definitely....Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai....It's so freaking damn hard trying to read and write these pictographic languages
Yeah, my father is Dutch and always read to me (in English) when I was young. I had to go to speech-therapy for years.
Fair enough. Too be honest, I don't mind accents. Nothing wrong with having people know where I come from. ( as long as it doesn't end like this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR0lWICH3rY"]YouTube - German Coast guard trainee[/ame]
It also happens with the S and C, and with S and Z. The other common thing is that a lot of people ignore the spelling accent completely. It happens a lot with monosyllabic words like tu, el, mi, si, mas, ext... that sometimes have an accent and sometimes don't depending on the context.
Are the CD packs actually any good for learning a language? I have always had very basic French but went to college one evening a week last year to try and get improve it. I seriously struggled though I do think that was a lot to do with being on the wrong course. If I wanted to learn Spanish from basic (and I mean the absolute beginnings) would a CD pack be a good place to start? I do around 90 minutes driving a day to work and back
It depends on what you call "marginally literate". Typically somebody w/ a 10th grade education in a Spanish-speaking country seizes to make those errors, outside of chronic bad spellers. These are examples from somebody for whom Spanish is an oral language. My "heritage learner" students no longer make that mistake after one semester of college Spanish. (High school students... different story but that's due to general study skills.)
I've never had a student come into a course better prepared than the average bloke b/c of CDs or tapes. I've never had a student in an advanced or even intermediate class who started out on CDs or tapes and swore by the method. I see them as being supplemental material only, not really a substitute for the rigorous academic undertaking that is learning another language. The best way to learn a language is to take minimum 1-2 semesters of college-level language and then live there. And if you take 2 full years of college-level language and then live in the country, you set yourself up for even higher performance in the target language.
I think with CDs and audio files you really will only benefit if you treat them with the same intensity you treat a class. They are good practice tools, but are very robotic. There are more multimedia driven computer files- such as the Rosetta Stone programs- that supposedly can be very helpful, and are more interactive so keeping focus is easier. Good discussion here, I lost track of this thread a couple of months ago I guess. I guess French, German, or Russian are the next languages that I could see myself feeling motivated to learn. It definitely seems the motivation is more important than pure linguistic similarity (at least between Indo-European languages) I took some Polish courses my last year of undergrad for some easy A's (because I speak Czech), it worked, although had I gone beyond the 102 level I would have done horrible as I never felt less motivated. After learning basics (particularly orthography which is the biggest difference) I just started plugging in Czech words. Also, I couldn't help but laugh when someone in the class read a passage entitled "szukam mojego piesa" in Polish that is (I am looking for my dog) in Czech the similarly pronounced "sukam meho pesa" means (I am f'ing my dog). Which I guess is another topic altogether, false friends particularly very embarrassing ones.