Language

[willedoo]

This chart was a bit of a surprise to me. It lists French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Dutch as category 1 languages, meaning the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. German, Austrian and Swiss are category 2. I would have thought German would be in category 1. 

 

[onetrack]

I was surprised to find that Romanian is a language closely related to Italian. I find them all hard to learn.

[Marty_d]

Italian and French are very similar.  Lot of shared words.  (Mind you, French and English are similar in some respects - most English words ending in "ion" are the same in French.)

[facthunter]

Eengleesh is probably zee most deefeecult.   Nev

[Marty_d]

Probably good historical reasons for that.  When you think of the Romans, Celts, Saxons, Normans, Norsemen, Welsh, and everyone else who's had a crack at the little island, it's no wonder it's a hodge podge of language.  Yes there's been some intermixing with the others too over the centuries, but for example French hasn't really changed that much in the last 400 years, whereas if you went to converse with Shakespeare it's likely you'd have trouble understanding each other.

[onetrack]

And at the end of the day - English stands out as the primary language of Science, Technology, Engineering and Construction. Many specific terms in these fields are English terms only, and have been specifically formed in English.

If you can't read or speak or understand English, you'll struggle to reach any recognised level in the aforementioned fields.

 

A friend of a niece in the U.K. was Italian and she would do translation work for technical manuals, such as converting Rolls Royce manuals into Italian.

She would often run into problems translating specific technical English terms for some parts into Italian, as there was no equivalent term in Italian.

 

Edited March 13 by onetrack

[facthunter]

A lot of the FIAT manuals I had were in Italian. .  Nev

[facthunter]

I was a teacher at the time and I had about 4 Italian kids on one class, so had plenty of help. Nev