well, I believe this idea, because according to the definition english is a german language or something like that, I can't remember very well my classes of history of the english language, but now I know there are many words from french for example dejavou, and from spanish like siesta , even there is a word for siesta, which is nap. Well in my case, as a spanish speaker, I could understand sometimes french, portugues and italian, because they are little bit similar, even all these languages are from latin and they grew up different areas.
Well correct my mistakes too if you could do that, thanks for your answers too.
Olivier, English is a germanIC language. That's a very different word than German.
England however was taken over by William the Conquerer some time ago and the French language was imposed on English in schools and government agencies for hundreds of years. About 1/3 of our words have a direct link to Latin roots and have cognates to Latin languages.
But.... just like I wouldn't know Spanish or Italian because of that connection and just like you can't automatically know those 1/3 of all English words because you know Spanish, neither do we know all the words with a germanIC or latin base.
English is not a dialect of German or Latin. The DEFINITION of a different language is that people can't understand each other across the languages!!!
I don't think Dutch and Germans speak better English than people whose first language is a romance language because English is in the same language group. I think it's more than likely because in the Netherlands movies and tv shows are not dubbed and they have a high emphasis on learning English. It's really to do with the education system I think.
I could be wrong but for English speakers I'm pretty sure French and Spanish are easier to learn than German. There are some similar words but there are also lots in French too. Words ending in -able, -al and some other endings are quite often the same in both languages.
Most Netherlanders can understand English very well because they are highly educated in English and I think they are required to demonstrate at least an intermediate level of proficiency in English. However, the vast majority of native-English speakers aren't very educated about the Dutch language. Therefore, they neither speak nor understand the Dutch language.
Netherlanders are highly touted by many well-traveled Americans as the best non-native English speakers in the world.
German would sound a little familiar as compared to Chinese, Russian or other Asian languages.
Most English speakers cannot, although it's relatively easy for English speakers to learn Dutch, and to a lesser extent, German. It's true that as recently as seven or eight centuries ago English was a Netherlands dialect, but William the Conqueror's invasion left modern English with a huge inventory of French / Latin words, as well a much simplified grammar (some might argue that Modern "English" is really a creole.. I wouldn't necessarily go that far). In my opinion, people from the Netherlands tend to speak the best English of any non-native speakers.
