It doesn’t always work the same both ways, but the US Foreign Service Insititute (the government agency that teaches languages to diplomatic workers) claims that the easiest languages for native english speakers to learn are the romance languages, nordic languages, and dutch.
German is category 2.
Reasons for this are that English has a huge amount of influence from romance languages (mostly French), so a large portion of the vocabulary is similar. It tends to be that the ‘small’ words are germanic, while the ‘meaty’ or ‘meaningful’ words are romance.
Also the modern grammar is generally more similar to romance languages than German, as German retains much more of the old germanic case system.
Thank you for the insight, but I indeed meant it in the other direction.
German might be harder to learn for an English speaker, but that does not mean that English is not easier for a German speaker than a Romance language speaker.
Another example of this phenomenon (one language being easier to learn from one language, but not in the other way): Romanian. Romanian is a Romance language but with a lot of Slavic influence, so for Romanian speakers it is easy to learn Spanish or Italian, but for Spanish or Italian speakers, it is harder to learn Romanian due to the additional Slavic aspects.
It doesn’t always work the same both ways, but the US Foreign Service Insititute (the government agency that teaches languages to diplomatic workers) claims that the easiest languages for native english speakers to learn are the romance languages, nordic languages, and dutch.
German is category 2.
Reasons for this are that English has a huge amount of influence from romance languages (mostly French), so a large portion of the vocabulary is similar. It tends to be that the ‘small’ words are germanic, while the ‘meaty’ or ‘meaningful’ words are romance.
Also the modern grammar is generally more similar to romance languages than German, as German retains much more of the old germanic case system.
Thank you for the insight, but I indeed meant it in the other direction.
German might be harder to learn for an English speaker, but that does not mean that English is not easier for a German speaker than a Romance language speaker.
Another example of this phenomenon (one language being easier to learn from one language, but not in the other way): Romanian. Romanian is a Romance language but with a lot of Slavic influence, so for Romanian speakers it is easy to learn Spanish or Italian, but for Spanish or Italian speakers, it is harder to learn Romanian due to the additional Slavic aspects.