Thursday 26 August 2010

Part 3: What Easy New Language to Learn? Italian? Spanish? Think farther...

Welcome to the third and final instalment of "What Easy New Language to Learn..." of course 'easiness' is shaped by subjectiveness and personal influences, a language learned through pleasure in contrast to a language forced upon you, will be learned quicker, regardless of any innate 'difficulties' or 'easy' features that may be bound within the language itself.

The third and final language we will look at today... is a language that ranks equal in its primary country to another 10 languages... Afrikaans. Of course, Afrikaans is spoke also in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. It has 6.45 million native speakers, but up to 12-16 million people worldwide have some knowledge of the language.

Alike Norwegian, which featured in Part 1, Afrikaans is a West Germanic language and therefore a member of the Indo-European language family.

Essentially, Afrikaans is the African version of Dutch, in fact until the early 20th century, Afrikaans was still considered a dialect of Dutch. Despite similarity however, Afrikaans poses far fewer problems when trying to acquire proficiency. Hence, Afrikaans' approval and Dutch's disapproval as one of the the three languages contained in this series of posts.

What makes Afrikaans 'easy' to learn??


Afrikaans, unlike Dutch, and similarly to Norwegian has NO verb conjugation by person. 


Alike English, Afrikaans has NO grammatical gender. Words are neither female, male, neuter etc.


Afrikaans DON'T express the Perfect or Pluperfect tenses... 
In simple terms...


Ek het gebreek, can mean either 'I broke' or 'I have broken!'


To make an object plural, Afrikaans generally employs the ending -e or -s
ex. land (land) -> lande (lands)
artikel -> arikels


Afrikaans has a word order similar to Dutch, which isn't too far removed from English, but isn't that straightforward either. 


Potential Hurdles


The letter 'G' in Afrikaans, is pronounced with a strong guttural sound akin to the 'ch' found in the Scottish word 'Loch' or the fourth letter of the Welsh alphabet, found in words such as 'Chwarae' (to Play.)


Although learned fairly easily, this may pose problems for some with oral comprehension. 


Adjectives change a little before the noun... although this is found with many Indo-European languages. 


IT MAY BE HARDER TO FIND SPEAKERS' OF AFRIKAANS BY LISTENING IN,  IN A LANGUAGE THAT HAS 11 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES, THAN SAY TO FIND A NORWEGIAN SPEAKER IN NORWAY. 

1 comment:

  1. Interesting information! I had no idea that Afrikaans was a Germanic language. I'm now much more interested in it!

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