Would you like to beсome a polyglot? Begin with the languages which are similar to ours.
You are lucky: you have a rich selection.
Similarity of Indo-European Languages
Each language is related to a so-called family. English is considered to be a «member» of West Germanic group. It is natural the language ties with all its kin, such as:
- German;
- Dutch;
- Danish;
- Frisian;
- Africaans;
- Norwegian;
- Swedish.
Scandinavian is familiar to us with pronunciation.
Lee Nelson, English speaker since early childhood, says:
To people who have no knowledge at all of English, the language sounds most like Swedish or Norwegian
Germanic family is a branch of a larger Indo-European one. English is very close to:
- French, Italian (Italic);
- Welsh (Celtic).
English is spoken widely across European countries. If you give preference to French or German, you will not suffer from shortage of practice.
A good news for young people who are going to become physician or philologist: English structure of vocabulary is linked with Latin.
You can pay attention to Slavic group, but bear in mind: Russian, Belarus, Ukrainian, Polish are inflective. All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, having more than five cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives.
An expert opinion in addition to our information: Rocket Languages (the company produces online learning courses) calls three easiest languages for English speakers to learn — Spanish, Portuguese, French.
Is it difficult to make choice?
Learn a dialect for a start. Scots is pretty easy to understand.