Languages english speakers can understanding

This site uses cookies to deliver website functionality and analytics. If you would like to know more about the types of cookies we serve and how to change your cookie settings, please read our Cookie Notice. By clicking the "I accept" button, you consent to the use of these cookies. English has achieved prime status by becoming the most widely spoken language in the world — if one disregards proficiency — ahead of Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is spoken in countries , while Arabic is spoken in 60, French in 51, Chinese in 33, and Spanish in From one small island, English has gone on to acquire lingua franca status in international business, worldwide diplomacy, and science.

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Content:

• Teaching Non-Native English Speaking Students
• 6 Surprisingly Easy Second Languages for Native English Speakers
• English language
• Learning Polish as a Native English Speaker
• What NOT To Do When You Don’t Understand English Speakers
• Examining the influence of native and non-native English-speaking teachers on Korean EFL writing
• The Small Island Where 500 People Speak Nine Different Languages
• Viewpoint: The Silencing of ESL Speakers

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Teaching Non-Native English Speaking Students

Life, But Better - Other. Facebook Twitter Email. Teen aims to close the gender gap in aviation with a globe-circling mission. Millions of people know Dubrovnik by another name. Ride on the world's last year-round passenger hovercraft. Lake Powell's water crisis reveals more of one of Arizona's most spectacular canyons. Ready to vacation again? This TikTok travel guru has tips.

Why tea is good for you and how to make the perfect cup. The world's largest collection of Jim Henson creations lives here. CNN — Many of us have entertained the idea of expanding our horizons. Learning a foreign language is an obvious option. It's one that I would personally endorse: My individual circumstances were such that, by the age of 12, I could speak German, Greek and English, so languages became my passion and my hobby. My advice is that you should learn a language because you're also interested in the culture and the country.

If you like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, learn Russian. If you're going to live in Bangkok, learn Thai. If your partner is Mexican, learn Spanish. And remember: Although you can get by as a tourist in, possibly, weeks, mastering a language is a long-term commitment taking years, not months. Language and diplomacy. After World War II, the United States expanded its influence around the world by training its embassy staff in the local languages of the countries they were in.

Thankfully for language learners today, the US Foreign Service Institute's language books and tapes can be found online. These are the best free courses available, though you can still detect a touch of the Cold War in the syllabus "Where is the state clothing shop? Best of all, the FSI has done us a great service by classifying languages in degrees of difficulty for English speakers. Here are a few examples, ranked in order of the number of hours it takes the average learner to master them from lowest to highest:.

Easiest about hours of study. After just hours of study, you'll have no trouble fitting in on the streets of Paris. Along with Dutch and Norwegian, the popular Latin languages -- Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese -- require about hours of study to achieve "general professional proficiency" in speaking and reading. Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.

They share many words with English, but it's that common vocabulary that creates "false friends" -- words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly as meanings have drifted with time. While French and Italian are pretty standardized, you must choose whether to learn Latin American Spanish or "castellano," which is spoken in Spain; they differ as much as US English and British English.

The choice is even more striking with Portuguese; long ago I opted for Brazilian and to this day I still can't properly understand speakers from Portugal. German hours. Interested in reading Karl May's "Wild West" series in its original language? You'll need to spend hours mastering German first. One of my German teachers used to joke that it takes you a year to say, "I'm traveling on the bus," but once you're on that bus, it's plain sailing. With nouns that are masculine, feminine and neutral, verbs that conjugate heavily and an extremely strict syntax, German may appear insurmountable to start with.

On the other hand, pronunciation and spelling is straightforward and once you learn the -- admittedly many -- rules, that's it. You'll also realize why Germans never interrupt you during a conversation: they're waiting to hear the verb at the end to figure out what you were talking about.

Malay and Swahili hours. It's not surprising that the two non-European languages that are simplest to learn employ the Latin alphabet. Malay is the lingua franca of several Southeast Asia countries and has been simplified by its use as a second language by non-native speakers.

For example, the Malay plural is formed by repeating a word twice -- buku means book and buku-buku means books. Similarly, Swahili evolved as the trading language in East Africa and is described as having an Arab vocabulary upon an African grammar. Hungarian 1, hours. If you like a challenge, try Hungarian. It's like no other European language you've heard, except maybe Basque. I remember a conversation I had once with a friend who insisted that "nouns are declined but verbs are conjugated"; except in Hungarian you both decline and conjugate nouns, sometimes together.

You denote possession my garden, your garden, his garden and so on by putting verb endings to the noun garden. Think of the Shakespearean "thou takest" and "he taketh. You may well ask what happens to double possessives my mother's garden's flowers or the difference between my parent's garden's flowers plural, singular, plural and my parent's gardens' flowers singular plural plural -- but that's where I gave up. Greek 1, hours. Your next trip to Greece will be so much more meaningful if you take the time to study a bit of Greek.

Modern Greek is maybe the easiest language to learn that uses a different alphabet. There's a tongue-in-cheek book titled "Learn Greek in 25 years," but you'll be surprised at how straightforward it is to learn the alphabet: those alpha males, beta releases and gamma rays have seen to that. Because, yes, Greek is also a language that's contributed numerous words to English. Indeed, in Xenophon Zolotas, the then governor of the Bank of Greece, gave two speeches to the IMF that contained just Greek loanwords apart from the inevitable basic English.

Example: "Our policies should be based more on economic and less on political criteria. Russian 1, hours. The big advantage of learning Russian is that, once you're proficient, you can understand other Slav languages such as Czech, Polish or Bulgarian.

It's also spoken and understood in all former regions of the Soviet Union from Armenia to Kyrgyzstan. Hidden behind a Cyrillic veil of mystery, it's one of the harder languages to master, so much so that even many Russians speak it incorrectly. But any literature, music and ballet buff or aspiring astronaut -- Russian is a mandatory subject at NASA -- should study a language with over , words some up to 38 characters long , where the letter "e" sounds as e or o and nouns are "alive" or "dead.

Arabic 2, hours. It takes the average native English speaker a whopping 2, hours to become proficient in Arabic. There's an urban myth about a pharmaceutical company that advertised an analgesic pill with three non-verbal images for international consumption. The left picture depicted a woman with a headache.

The middle one showed her swallowing the pill and the right one had her smiling after the pain had subsided. It worked everywhere except in the Arab world, which read it from right to left. The direction of reading and the cursive script, which may or may not include vowels, are the two major hurdles for Arab learners. Classical Arabic -- the language of the Qur'an -- will make you understood everywhere, but colloquial Arabic may be more useful, because once the locals start conversing with each other, you'll lose the plot.

But who can resist a language with 11 words for love, five gradations of swearing and close to words describing a camel? Japanese 2, hours. As we tour the city's top sites, locals share what makes Tokyo one of the greatest cities in the world. Video by Black Buddha.

A country that's enriched the world with sushi, karaoke and manga, Japan has many devotees, especially among gamers and geeks. But they are confronted with an extremely challenging language that uses imported Chinese characters Kanji cut off from their original meaning as well as two syllabaries -- Hiragana and Katakana you must learn when to use which.

Counting objects depends on whether they are long and thin roads , small and round apples , thin and flat sheets of paper , broad and flat rugs and hundreds more varieties. What Japanese you speak also depends on your gender. There's a "rough" language for men and a more "ladylike" language for women, but you must understand both. By all means start a course of Japanese at home, but if you want to progress at all, pencil in a month of intensive practice in the Land of the Rising Sun.

One of the challenges of mastering Mandarin is learning all of the characters. Each Chinese dialect is effectively another language but Mandarin Putonghua in Chinese, which means the common language is considered the official tongue in modern China. To complicate the matter further, there are two main types of written Chinese characters under the same writing system: the traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the simplified Chinese in mainland China standardized and simplified in the s to increase literacy in the country.

They're basically the same character written in two different ways but pronounced differently when spoken in different dialect. Confused yet? Each written word when spoken is mutually incomprehensible between a Mandarin speaker in Beijing and a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. If you think that's odd, consider our number system: the symbol "9" is universally recognized but it's pronounced "nine" in English and "devet" in Slovenian. Every word must be memorized separately as you can't guess its pronunciation from the script -- but one could say the same of English if you consider plough, dough and tough.

Meanwhile, dictionaries list words according to stroke count. These go from one to over 60 strokes. And then there are the pronunciation challenges. In the days of the British Empire, if you were going to be sent to Hong Kong as a civil servant, you had to pass a musical test first because all Chinese languages are tonal. There are four tones in Mandarin: high pitch say G in a musical scale , rising pitch like from C to G , falling from G to C and falling low then rising C to B to G -- and if you think that's difficult, there are nine tones in Cantonese.

In Mandarin, there is a whole poem, " The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den " with just the syllable "shi" repeated times in various intonations. In other words, if you are tone-deaf you might as well give up now. A year of the world's Best Beaches There's a perfect beach for every week of the year. Join us on a month journey to see them all Go to the best beaches.

6 Surprisingly Easy Second Languages for Native English Speakers

I am pretty sure that you have great ideas, thoughts and dreams about your near Future. In the future where you can speak English as fluently as a native speaker, at your new job, with new friends somewhere in the USA, Canada or Australia. Take it easy. Admit one thing: you will never speak as a native speaker. You will stay a foreigner and you will have an accent. You will make mistakes. Even if you have no grammar mistakes, you will definitely have situational and cultural ones.

English language

This is one of the last places in Australia—and probably the world—where so many indigenous languages exist together. None of these languages, except English, is spoken by more than a few thousand people. For all these individuals to understand one another, one might expect South Goulburn to be an island of polyglots, or a place where residents have hashed out a pidgin to share, like a sort of linguistic stone soup. Many English-speaking Anglos who live in U. In other places, receptive multilingualism is a work-around for temporary situations. But at Warruwi Community, it plays a special role. Ruth Singer, a linguist at the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity Project of the Australian National University, realized this by chance, and wrote about receptive multilingualism at Warruwi Community recently in the journal Language and Communication. In , for one of her trips for fieldwork on South Goulburn, Singer and her husband had a Toyota truck shipped from Darwin by boat.

Learning Polish as a Native English Speaker

Is it difficult for you to understand native English speakers? Or maybe you can understand some native English speakers but not all? One reason you may not be able to understand native English speakers is this: native English speakers speak differently depending on their age, where they were born, and their style or experiences. The United States is a large country, and there are many different regions with different accents and ways of speaking. You may be able to understand your English teacher, or a news or radio broadcaster, but that is because they are trained to speak clearly.

What NOT To Do When You Don’t Understand English Speakers

As a Slavic language, Polish is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. When adults ask my advice as a translation services expert on what to pick up as a second language, the one language I never recommend is Polish. Watching where Polish winds up as it makes its way through this challenging time in its history is going to be well worth the price of the ticket. But Polish is a very difficult language to learn as an adult English speaker, for two formidable reasons: The sounds you need to produce and understand, and the grammar. Language is just sounds, after all, but producing the necessary sounds that comprise a language sometimes requires very specialised pronunciation, and the Slavic languages such as Polish are particularly challenging to English speakers. The sounds can be very subtly different from each other.

Examining the influence of native and non-native English-speaking teachers on Korean EFL writing

Do you sometimes struggle to understand native speakers?! Even the most advanced English learners can struggle to understand them. My hubby, Enri was in London last week for work, to meet with an agency that his company uses. We pretty much have the opposite thing going on — my comprehension in Italian is really strong, whereas my speaking not so much. I asked what the main problem had been, and he said the main thing for him, was speed.

The Small Island Where 500 People Speak Nine Different Languages

June 01, Berlitz. Have you ever wondered which are the most spoken languages in the world? Although there are currently more than 7, languages, only 23 cover more than half of the world's population.

Viewpoint: The Silencing of ESL Speakers

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George Fox University offers an online English for Speakers of Other Languages ESOL teaching endorsement as both a stand-alone program or as a part of various education degree programs. Monitor how you speak Pause for a couple of extra beats between sentences. After using an idiomatic phrase, briefly rephrase it e. Clarify cultural allusions that may be unfamiliar to people from another country. Use visual aids.

Understanding native speakers is one of the most difficult tasks to achieve in language learning. Would you have been able to understand if it was said slower? Or if it was written down? There is something you can do that will give you a better idea of your general skills. How much more do you understand when you can read what is being spoken aloud?

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