This section contains a one pager of some languages. The goal is to show you the foundations of each language, the few things you need to know when you get started. Here’s a description of the different categories I’m using:
Group: Romance, Germanic, … Faster vocabulary acquisition when you already speak another language of your target language’s group.
- Germanic – English, German
- Romance – French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
Structure: SVO (subject-object-verb), SOV, … Order of the words in a basic sentence.
- SVO – Subject Verb Object – English and Romance languages are SVO.
- SOV – Subject Object Verb – German is SVO / SOV, or even SVOV / SOV.
- Messy – Finnish doesn’t have any particular order, and words can end up pretty much anywhere in a sentence.
Pronunciation: Phonetic language, intonation, problems, … Basic recommendations to get a slight accent instead of a heavy one.
- A phonetic language is the best gift of all for language learners: The way you write is the way you read. Text = audio. There are no traps. Spelling rules pronunciation. You can meet some exceptions (yeah, language learning you know, it wouldn’t be fun otherwise!), but letters have the same pronunciation 99% of the time with a phonetic language. Spanish, Italian and Finnish are phonetic languages. English, French and Portuguese are not.
- Tricky sounds – Example: guttural r in French, trilled r in Spanish, nasal vowels in Portuguese.
- Intonation – Tonal language? Regular stress patterns?
Gender: Do objects and/or nouns have a gender? If so, how many genders are there?
Cases: The language uses words (such as at, in, on, …) or declensions (like German, Russian, Finnish, …)?
Negation: How to express a negative sentence? Can we easily turn an affirmation into a negation?
Question: How to express a question? Can we easily turn an affirmation into a question?
Plural: Can you easily transform a singular noun in plural?
Miscellaneous: …
Links: Resources such as youtubers, singers, …