Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Which language do you think is more difficult, English or Spanish?

Most native speakers of English don't realize that their language contains roughly twice as many words as most other languages. This not only makes English more difficult to learn but makes it more expressive and exact for transmitting an idea, emotion or thought precisely the way you wanted to.

Whether or not most native speakers actually use their language well is a totally different issue. We tend no to take advantage of the vast vocabulary at our disposal. It ranges from people's overuse of the word "got" to those who can't seem to produce a sentence without one of the many forms of the dreaded "F" word.

You should know that the average English speaker has in his personal vocabulary about 8,000 words, whereas the average speaker of the other European languages only have half as many in their personal vocabularies. That number is not the number of words in the language, but rather the number of words that a person tends to use and fully understands.

There is nothing to be done about this, it is simply a description of what linguists have found when analyzing the make up of these languages. The reason we have double of our counterparts is that English is really two languages in one.

Yes, English is approximately half Germanic and half Latin in composition. You can say the "main" idea or you can say the "principal" idea. The latter is from Latin and the former from Germanic.

So when people ridicule or criticise Americans for not speaking another language, just tell them that you are already practically bilingual. But please go out and learn a second language. It will enrich your life and help to change our image.

4 comments:

mmk said...

please email me child_of_light@light.com
Thanks

Anonymous said...

i would really want to learn more about the sign language.. could you send me and email at clemsongirl@me.com? It would help a ton! Thanks (:

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

What about Dutch. I speak fluent dutch, but I rather speak English. You can put more words in one sentence than in Dutch.

Are you suppose to say Supposably or Supposedly? Hey wait! isn't it "supposed to"?

ASL Basic Vocabulary

How to Become Fluent in ASL

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