Tsar wrote: ↑October 9th, 2021, 1:56 am
So I decided to start learning Dutch and German, and I actually understand a lot of it including the grammar. Frisian isn't really useful, just like Latin isn't really useful anymore. It might be an interesting and unique language but if it's not a national language, not used in business, and not used for getting girls then there's not any point to learn something that can't be used in reality.
The Romance languages are always said to be the easiest to learn but that's untrue because English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language.
I was thinking that how could English speakers have an easy time learning Romance languages when English has Germanic Roots but Romance languages have Latin roots. Italian, Spanish, and French have similar grammar rules because they have roots in Latin. English, Frisian, Dutch, and German have roots in Old German.
I would ideally like to learn Italian on my own but it's too overwhelming trying to learn the grammar without any guidance in real life.
I also decided to find an app that has Croatian and it's more challenging than the Germanic languages but not as challenging grammatically compared to the Romance languages. Still, it's not going to be easy because the app what's people to pay if they want more than one lesson a day. But I'm definitely more motivated with Dutch and German because I understand the grammar and the words are much easier to understand compared to other languages.
I figured Croatian is useful enough because it's a national language of Bosnia and I might end up there eventually since I could afford to buy a property there sooner than the EU and if I can get a property in Bosnia, it would allow me to stay in Europe and Bosnian girls are one of the most attractive ethnic groups in continental Europe.
I just recently found this thread of yours searching through the self-improvement section and had a quick read through the comments.
The Romance and Germanic languages have a similar percentage of shared cognates with English and so in theory the vocabulary of a language from either of these language families shouldn't be much more difficult to learn than those from the other. I've read that Spanish, Portuguese and Italian all have a degree of lexical transparency of around 30% with English and so do the likes of German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. French has a slightly higher degree of lexical transparency with English at around 40%. This is due to the direct influence that French has historically had on English. Lexically Germanic languages shouldn't be any more challenging than Romance languages for a native English speaker.
Some might argue that educated terms in Germanic languages are less transparent than their equivalents in Romance languages and are therefore more difficult to learn, but the truth is that educated terms in Germanic languages are often made up of two or more simple Germanic roots and their meaning becomes clear once the learner has acquired some basic vocabulary. For example, "independent" is
indépendent in French and
independiente in Spanish and is therefore obvious, while the equivalent in Swedish
självständig literally means "self-standing" (
själv - self;
stånd - stand;
-ig - -ish/-ic) and is therefore simple and intuitive for any native Germanic speaker. While learning another Germanic language, you can take advantage of many cognate calque formations like this one.
Where Romance languages tend to be more difficult is the grammar. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian have a much more complex verb system than any of the Germanic languages with various subjunctives, aspect paradigms and fusional constructions for things like the future and conditional. Germanic languages like German, Dutch and Swedish on the other hand have relatively simple verb systems and function more similarly to English. Germanic verbs are considerably easier to learn.
German is the exception. The language has three genders and various case inflections for articles, adjectives and nouns (accusative, genitive and dative) and is therefore a bit harder to learn than other Germanic languages as well as the Romance languages. In fact, German even has its own category in the Foreign Service Institute's rating of language difficulty, being of level 2 difficulty instead of level 1.
As for which language would be best for you to learn, I think that
@publicduende has the right idea. If you are still unsure about which part of the world you would like to relocate to, I would suggest that you learn an important and widely spoken language like Spanish. Spanish has over 400,000 native speakers and is spoken in many countries throughout the Americas in addition to Spain in Europe and Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Many of those countries are brilliant places to visit and have awesome culture and extremely attractive women.
You also mentioned that you were interested in possibly relocating to Serbia or Bosnia. In that case, you could study Serbo-Croatian. SC is spoken throughout Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro and is really the same language given different names for political reasons. If you learn Serbian, you can use it in Bosnia or Croatia without problems. In fact, the national varieties are said to differ less among themselves than British English vs. American English. But we are told that they are separate languages because today few people are enthusiastic about the idea of Yugoslavia.
Serbo-Croatian is somewhat like Russian except easier. It uses both Latin and Cyrillic scripts (but you can already read Cyrillic anyway), the pronunciation is easier with fewer consonant clusters and much less palatalization, the stress accent is more regular and predictable, and the case system seems more simple to me than other Slavic languages. The verb system is quite easy too. Six personal conjugations in the present tense, past tense formed with the "-l participle" and future tense formed with the auxiliary verb
ću,
ćeš,
će, etc. plus the infinitive. For grammatical difficulty, expect nouns and adjectives on par with German albeit with greater regularity and verbs about as complex as those of Italian in the present tense but much easier in all other tenses and constructions.
I can recommend you some really good materials for learning both Spanish and Serbo-Croatian.