I changed my language focus

[yick]

I was living in the UK and wanted to live abroad, I read a book in the library called 'Teaching English Abroad' by Susan Griffith and I found out about this career path that I didn't know that existed until then, so I enquired at a few universities about doing an English (lit) degree and they told me I would be better off doing linguistics - I didn't want to do a lit degree but at the time, I didn't know the difference, I just thought English was English!

It's a similarish story to you, once I found out there were opportunities in teaching English abroad then that is what I wanted to do, I would have done it a lot earlier if I had knew about it but that was before the internet and that kind of info was hard to come by except for books like the one Susan Griffith wrote.

I went to teach in South Korea - a few months before graduating - I wrote to some recruiters on Dave's ESL and
the quickest response I got from an enquiry was from a Korean recruiter and they replied back within ten minutes which impressed me - I wasn't interested in Asia until then - I was leaning towards Russia/Latin America and Spain but once I worked out the salary and benefits - I thought it was a good deal - I didn't make it back to Russia and have been in East Asia ever since (apart from two years in Saudi Arabia). My degree turned out to be a good choice but I am aware if I had to go back to the UK and enter the workforce with it - it wouldn't be so useful (nor my CV - thankfully, I am never going back so it is a moot point but relevant in regards actual usefulness).

NB: I also did a masters degree in the same subject a few years later.

My Linguistics degree was stand-alone, not part of an English program. There were some classes that gave credit for both English and Linguistics-- History of the English Language, Dialectology, and Old English. I took two of those, but I studied a couple of dead languages for Linguistics credit, Historical Linguistics, and Morphology. back then, they would put grad students in the same classes with the undergrads and give them extra papers to write. An advisor gave me a paper showing
that I could get Linguistics credit for taking an ESL teaching class. Since I was thinking of teaching abroad, I took that class. Then I was told I could not get credit. I had to dig up the paper and write a request to get it. Credit had been approved for grad students and the paper I had hadn't been approved, but they did a one-off approval for me.

I don't think Dave's ESL Cafe was up when I got my job in South Korea, either. It was up a couple of years later when I got a job in Indonesia.

How did you start teaching abroad before graduating? What year did you start teaching ESL?

2007

I only started applying for jobs before graduation, I never actually taught until I landed in Korea. (Changwon)

[Lucas88]

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.

[publicduende]

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.

I didn't really learn Spanish until I married my ex-wife from Medellin. And yes, Spanish is the closest, of the major world languages, to Italian. If I were the Italian culture minister, I would make Spanish classes compulsory from junior high. The gap is so small, any Italian can learn it just by taking school classes for a few years and maybe practicing a bit in Spain, or Latin America.

About Serbo-Croatian, it's a Slavic language, not so easy to learn. Most young Serbians and Croatian have a pretty good level of spoken English, though. If @Tsar's idea is to use SC to maximise his dating prospects, by showing respect towards the new host culture, I would say "go for it". If it's only to be intelligible with young people down there, I would say, "don't bother".

By the way, Serbians have a reputation for being some or Europe's smartest people. Nikola Tesla had Serbian blood (even though he was born in what is now part of Croatia). Nole Djokovic speaks 11 languages fluently. The bar is set quite high, to woo a Serbian hottie.

[galii]

@publicduende

By the way, Serbians have a reputation for being some or Europe's smartest people.

That is what I thought too apparently it is not true. Though maybe the smart one left the country like Tesla did.

It is 89
Germany is 100

[Lucas88]

About Serbo-Croatian, it's a Slavic language, not so easy to learn. Most young Serbians and Croatian have a pretty good level of spoken English, though. If @Tsar's idea is to use SC to maximise his dating prospects, by showing respect towards the new host culture, I would say "go for it". If it's only to be intelligible with young people down there, I would say, "don't bother".

By the way, Serbians have a reputation for being some or Europe's smartest people. Nikola Tesla had Serbian blood (even though he was born in what is now part of Croatia). Nole Djokovic speaks 11 languages fluently. The bar is set quite high, to woo a Serbian hottie.

Tsar told me quite recently that he is considering permanent relocation to Serbia or Bosnia. If he does indeed purchase property in one of those countries and makes it his primary home, then Serbo-Croatian would be the logical option. He would have use for the language for everyday life and a decent level would allow him to integrate into the culture much more than being a monolingual Anglophone ever would. Of course, I would only recommend for him to learn the language if he were sure that he wanted to permanently relocate there.

Serbo-Croatian is more difficult than Romance and Germanic languages but, as far as the Slavic languages go, I perceive that it's more on the easy side. To me it looks more simple and more manageable than the likes of Polish, Czech and Russian. I'd even say that it's somewhat easier than Bulgarian too since, even though Bulgarian doesn't use noun cases, it has a much more complex verb system than other Slavic languages, uses postfixed definite articles, has erratic stress patterns, is written exclusively with the Cyrillic script, and is pronounced unclearly. Serbo-Croatian on the other hand is extremely easy to pronounce, almost 100% phonetic, clearly articulated, and has somewhat simpler grammar than most of its Slavic siblings. From my experience with it, I'd describe it as an "easy hard language".

I'm sure that most people would be impressed by an American who speaks a Slavic language.

Hyper-polyglots like Nikola Tesla and Djoković are rare exceptions, not the norm. Most people are too lazy to become polyglots or otherwise don't have any inclination to do so and instead choose to learn only the prevalent lingua franca. For most people, playing videogames and scouring the internet for porn are far more appealing activities than learning obscure or even useful-but-not-lingua-franca-status languages.