My Xbox Repair Guide

Taxi drivers in Beijing would have difficulty if they were asked to learn Spanish. Their method is to speak Chinese louder when people do not understand them. Chinese speakers and English speakers have such difficulty because they have strong and widely used languages which are adequate for all their linguistic needs. They cannot easily understand the need to learn another language. However, if they spanish workbooks they will have access to the three most widely used languages on the planet.

Spanish is one of a family of languages that are descended from Latin and known as romance languages. French, Italian and Portuguese are also romance languages. English has also been heavily influenced by Latin but belongs to the Germanic family. But both are inflected languages. By using a languages courses 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.

Whereas the English learner would bring some understanding of inflection to the task, the Chinese learner would be in less familiar territory. Chinese is a tonal language and the meaning of words is determined by up, down, neutral, flat or tones. The absence of these tones might seem strange to a Chinese learner as would be the presence of the Latinate inflections.

An English person learning any romance language would soon recognize many words that are derived from Latin. They permeate the languages and contribute their own connotations. This will not be the case for the Chinese learner.

His vocal apparatus will have been making sounds quite foreign since infancy. Many sounds are made at the front of the mouth, using the lips. Consequently, pronunciation will be a problem for the Chinese speaker but easier for the English person. However, both learners may have difficulties with following the speed at which people talk.

Verbs are complicated problems when learning any new language. In English the verb, ‘to be’ is difficult for foreign learners and in Spanish it may be a problem for some English learners. They may have to get used to the idea that there are two forms of the verb in Spanish, ‘estar’ and ‘ser’. This might confuse the English learner temporarily, but the Chinese learner will have even more difficulty because he has been used to using static verb forms.

Writing in Spanish and English uses the same alphabet and basic techniques. Once a certain number of words have been learnt and knowledge has been gained about how to use accents, the English learner should find it quite easy to write in Spanish. However, the Chinese learner will have to start from scratch learning a whole new alphabet that is very different to his native system of characters.

The point of such comparisons is to suggest how much easier it should be for an English speaker to learning 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.

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