European languages

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faryan

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Is it possible to consider English language as a base of easy learning in developing other European languages?
 

5jj

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Is it possible to consider English language as a base of easy learning in developing other European languages?
I don't really understand your question.

If you mean "Is learning English a good preparation for learning other languages", then my answer is both 'no' and 'yes'

No: For somebody who does not know any European Indo-European language, but wants to learn one, then it is better to start with the one they want to learn. There is no point in learning English first if they really want to learn French.

Yes: If speakers of a language other than a European Indo-European language already know one European Indo-European language (including English), then they may find learning a second one easier.

European Indo-European languages include all European languages except Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Maltese.
 

Tdol

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A lot of English words come from French- you'll be able to recognise them, but knowing English won't help you string a French sentence together.

However, there are some skills that would be directly transferable, like the writing system. I had my first Tagalog lesson yesterday and it took me about a minute to learn their alphabet- just some sounds, which letters aren't used and a slightly different order. It's nothing to do with English itself, but learning one Roman alphabet writing system makes learning another much easier.
 

birdeen's call

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Some languages can help to learn some other languages but this happens when the languages are similar. English is an odd language -- it's not very similar to any other. If you're good at Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian or Polish, you will find it easy to learn Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian or Czech respectively. English doesn't have anything as close to it.

However, learning any European Indo-European language will give you a better start to (preposition chosen based on a quick glimpse at google results and intuition) learning another one. There's a large number of words common to all of them and even more common to some. We have all taken a lot from Latin and Greek, and then from Italian, French and English.

Also, English is quite helpful in learning other Germanic languages. No one had to tell me what "Hilfe" meant in German when I saw it for the first time because I knew the English word.
 

Tdol

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As a mongrel language, we have a bit of many, but have mixed them all into something else.
 
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