I know the Philippines used to be a Spanish colony but didn't know Tagalog is close to Spanish? How close and is it due to a lot of loan words?
It is fairly close. When I moved here in America, I had to take Spanish classes. Reading it was a breeze. I can comfortably say that I can read almost all Spanish words and understand 10% of the phrases without using google translator. There are a lot of similar words as well like the Spanish numbers that we used in the Philippines on a day to day basis. Some words are almost alike too like Como esta and Kamusta.
One of my best friends I've known since middle school was a Japanese English Teacher and she's of Mexican descent. She said Japanese was fairly easy for her to learn given that she was mostly fluent in speaking Spanish. To her, the similarities between Spanish and Japanese annunciation was an easy transition.
I'm a native English speaker who picked up Spanish to a level slightly below proficient in high school fairly easily. I spent 10 weeks in China and wasn't even conversational in Mandarin (specifically the Shanghainese dialect) when I left.
The problems with learning German: 1) nobody speaks it in the US. You're never around it, which is different than Spanish or even to a lesser extent Mandarin or even Vietnamese in Houston. 2) Germans speak very good English. When you are in Germany and you try to speak German, they'll often respond in English because they see it as easier and their English is almost certainly better than your German. 3) Germans place a priority on 100% perfection - and are also one of the few cultures around the world where it's considered "helpful" rather than rude to correct somebody, so a lot of people get frustrated by the constant corrections...
I studied beginner's level Korean and it was ok for me. Speaking wise it is more like Japanese because Chinese got 4 tones in pronunciation. Writing is a whole different narrative, they got similar words. I think I would guess 1 Chinese word in every 5 or 6 words. Korean is unique because it has 3 or 4 standard verb forms. They use the most formal one and bow down before an elder or a boss. Ultra formal and polite Polite Regular Colloquial Both Japanese and Korean use Chinese characters and are similar in culture and some of the food. I would say out of those 3 Korean is the easiest one in written form. With strokes, half circles, circles, rectangulars whatnot....
Arabic is easier than people think. Once you master the sounds, and understand the structure of words, you can figure a lot out. That being said, it's the ONLY class I ever truly studied for on a daily basis.
The blurb about Korean is wrong. Written Korean is completely phonetic and do not rely on Chinese characters at all. Written Korean is actually considered one of the easiest to learn and scientifically solid written languages in the world because it's truly phonetic in that a word can only be written one way. I bet I could teach everyone here to be able to somewhat read and sound out Korean (but not understand anything) in a day.
Shanghainese dialect and Mandarin are different (mutually unintelligible) spoken languages (though they are relatively close compared to things like Cantonese or Hokkien).
I also mentioned that in another post.... Not sure, but I won't be surprised if Germans rank #1 in Continental Europe in terms of English proficiency. This is also due to the similarities of the languages, I think. I think German is very close to Dutch though. I know some German and can navigate Dutch websites with minimal help.
I think in South Korea they still use a few Chinese characters on a day-to-day basis. In North Korea they don't use any.
They use Chinese characters to describe roots of Korean words (like Latin for English) but written language is 100% Korean.
Easy to learn for 15th century Koreans that were writing using Chinese letters at the time; still vastly different from Germanic languages. Respect forms don't make words/sentences any harder. Its really just adding a few suffixes here and there. Either way. Pronunciation is a bigger hiccup for Americans than learning the phonetics are. As for Chinese characters, some old newspapers in Korea used to use Hanja, but that's pretty much gone now. Teaching of Hanja stopped in 1971.
Probably either the Germans or the Dutch. Not only are both languages similar but every Dutch person I've met seems to speak several other european languages with a reasonable degree of competency.
