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After some thought, I think Japanese speakers would have the easiest time learning English compared to the other languages above given equal instruction and exposure because despite the fact that the phonology and grammar of Japanese is very different from English and would be quite challenging for a Japanese speaker, Japanese has literally thousands of English loan words that the other languages above lack to a large extent. This would be a huge advantage to learning and remembering vocabulary.
After some thought, I think Japanese speakers would have the easiest time learning English compared to the other languages above given equal instruction and exposure because despite the fact that the phonology and grammar of Japanese is very different from English and would be quite challenging for a Japanese speaker, Japanese has literally thousands of English loan words that the other languages above lack to a large extent. This would be a huge advantage to learning and remembering vocabulary.
You don't think Finnish have English loan words? I don't think this is a factor. Finnish has literally tens of thousands of Germanic loan words, but it doesn't mean that learning Swedish or German is a piece of cake.
Of course it's Finnish.
English is gonna help you the most in Finland out of the four options, BY FAR.
But why is that?
I speak/read Japanese moderately well so I'm very familiar with the ways in which it differs from English. And I know it is certainly true that Japanese has thousands of English loan-words, even if their meanings have often been slightly changed.
I know a bit about the grammar and phonology of Finnish and Turkish, but very little about Swahili. I do know that all four languages are equally non-Indo-European and unrelated to English. I've been thinking about this question since yesterday and without doing more research, I have no idea which to pick. So I'm curious about your reasons.
I speak/read Japanese moderately well so I'm very familiar with the ways in which it differs from English. And I know it is certainly true that Japanese has thousands of English loan-words, even if their meanings have often been slightly changed.
I know a bit about the grammar and phonology of Finnish and Turkish, but very little about Swahili. I do know that all four languages are equally non-Indo-European and unrelated to English. I've been thinking about this question since yesterday and without doing more research, I have no idea which to pick. So I'm curious about your reasons.
It's not a linguistic issue, but a cultural and geographical one. Finland is one of the Nordics, which are also known as the five countries that speak the most perfect English outside the Anglophone. Japan is in East Asia, a region where most people speak horrendous English.
Japanese has thousands of English loan-words for sure, but the pronunciation of Katakana sounds very far from English.
You don't think Finnish have English loan words? I don't think this is a factor. Finnish has literally tens of thousands of Germanic loan words, but it doesn't mean that learning Swedish or German is a piece of cake.
I think it does help at least in learning the vocabulary but obviously not learning other parts of the language like grammar and phonology. For example if someone is a native Swahili speaker and they were learning Arabic, it would help a lot with vocabulary since Swahili has many Arabic loan words compared with a native Japanese speaker learning Swahili.
It's not a linguistic issue, but a cultural and geographical one. Finland is one of the Nordics, which are also known as the five countries that speak the most perfect English outside the Anglophone. Japan is in East Asia, a region where most people speak horrendous English.
Japanese has thousands of English loan-words for sure, but the pronunciation of Katakana sounds very far from English.
In a general sense you are correct as Finns have a lot more exposure to the English language from a very young age than the other groups which helps tremendously with their learning but in my example, I said assuming that each native language speaker has the same amount of exposure and instruction as the others.
Yes, I am interested in the linguistic side only. Of course if it is a question of cultural exposure, Finnish clearly has an edge. No need to roll eyes.
But assuming a native speaker of each of those four languages, raised as monoglot with no exposure to English...? (other than loan-words which have become assimiliated to the native language).
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