Learn How To Speak Portuguese
Relative Problems When Folks Understand Spanish
English speakers, like Chinese speakers, have difficulties when it comes to learning another language. This is because they have a language which is adequate for all their needs, and are surrounded by people who speak the same language as they do. As a general rule Chinese and English speakers tend to speak their own language louder when they are not understood. However, if a person knows Chinese and English he may decide to spanish for fun too. He will then know the three most used languages in the world.
Spanish is one of a family known as the Romance languages. Other Romance tongues are French, Portuguese and Italian. They are all descended from Latin which is a highly inflected language, and are inflected themselves. English is also inflected and influenced by Latin but it is a Germanic language. By using a languages course it could be quite easy to learn a new language that is relatively close to your own.
Inflections are small additions that change the meaning of words and the rules about how they are used. For example the letters ‘ed’ make a regular verb past tense. Spanish also has inflections and so the English learner should find it a little easier to understand than the Chinese speaker who is not familiar with the concept of tense.
Because English is also an inflected language this would not be such a problem for an English speaker but the Chinese speaker would have more difficulty. Mandarin is a tonal language and meaning is conveyed by one of four tones applied to the ways in which words are pronounced. These are sometimes called tonal inflections but they are different to the grammatical inflections of romance languages. The Chinese learner would be at some disadvantage.
Both English and Spanish include many words that are derived from Latin. The English speaking learner will enjoy recognizing these words and the similarities between some English and Spanish words. The Chinese learner will not enjoy the Latin influence. Though Marco Polo did get to China and stayed there, he did not seem to have any permanent influence on the language that he found.
Since infancy the Chinese learner’s vocal apparatus will have been making sounds at the front of the mouth that are quite different to any sounds made in Spanish. This will make it difficult for him to make the sounds that are familiar to Spanish speaking people.
The verb ‘to be’ is used in both English and Spanish, but in the latter there are actually two forms of this verb. The verb ‘estar’ is used for more temporary states and ‘ser’ tends to be used for more permanent things. This will be something that might confuse the English learner. To the Chinese learner the whole problem of the verb ‘be’ will be seen in a different light. He will not be inclined to inflect any verbs but will tend to use them in a static way. In English he will tend to say: ‘I go shop’ and not ‘I’m going shopping’.
The Chinese learner will have mastered a complicated system of characters in order to write in his own language. The alphabet used by Spanish and English alike will be foreign to him, and he will have to start from scratch, learning a new system from the ground up. The English learner will escape this whole exercise and simply modify some aspects of what he learned in his early years at school.
The point of such comparisons is to suggest how much easier it should be for an English speaker to learn spanish online. The native language of the English learner and the target language have so much in common that learning should be just fun with use of vocabulary audio. However, given the intellectual gymnastics that all Chinese people go though to learn how to read and write their own language they may confidently be expected to do well.
The Travel Linguist – Brazilian Portuguese 101
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