When it comes to vocabulary, German has more in common with English than Italian, due to the fact that they're both Germanic languages. Italian and German also use a different word order and sentence structure. Italian is similar to English in that they both have an SVO structure (subject-verb-object).
German is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German, Luxembourgish, Scots, and Yiddish.
The Easiest and Hardest Languages for English Speakers to Learn. Italian and German are both tricky languages to learn for English speakers. Italian is tricky because of its verb conjugations, which can be confusing at first. However, grammar and pronunciation are more straightforward than in German in other ways.
Close Language: German
This is why English and German share a great deal of vocabulary. All of this overlap in pronunciation and meaning means that despite German's complicated grammar, English and German are still considered 60% lexically similar.
Although English is a Germanic language, it has Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources.
Linguists use many factors, such as grammar, phonology, and vocabulary, to determine the historical ancestry of modern languages. The overall composition of English reveals strong Germanic roots. It's official: English is a proud member of the West Germanic language family!
For the same reasons Dutch is the closest language to English, German is also a close language, and another one that many English speakers may find easier to learn. Dutch is commonly mentioned as the language nestled between English and German.
The analysis shows that the Anglo-Saxons were the only conquering force, around 400-500 AD, to substantially alter the country's genetic makeup, with most white British people now owing almost 30% of their DNA to the ancestors of modern-day Germans.
English vocabulary comprises 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic, and 6% Greek. Why are there so many French words in English? French was King William's native language. He hailed from Normandy, a region in northwest France that gained notoriety as the site of the D-Day invasion during World War II on June 6, 1944.
These scores suggest a ranking of linguistic distance from English among these languages: Japanese being the most distant, followed by Mandarin, then French and then Afrikaans, Norwegian and Swedish as the least distant.
Nearly 97% of the Italian population speaks Italian or one of the several dialects. Although English follows Italian as the second most spoken language, only 13% of Italians speak English. English is a mandatory school subject in Italy, however it's not taught very well.
German is also considered a more “global” language than Italian, meaning it is more useful for business and international travel. Another advantage of learning German is that it is a more concise and logical language than Italian.
There unfortunately have not been any wide-ranging studies on language speed. One 2011 study from the Université de Lyon looked at 7 languages, which reported the order as Japanese (7.84 syllables per second), Spanish (7.82), French (7.18), Italian (6.99), English (6.19), German (5.97) and Mandarin (5.18).
Ancient German became Dutch, Danish, German, Norwegian, Swedish and one of the languages that developed into English. The English language is a result of the invasions of the island of Britain over many hundreds of years. The invaders lived along the northern coast of Europe.
According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to Latin in terms of vocabulary. According to the Ethnologue, Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian.
The proto-Germanic language evolved into North, West, and East-Germanic. The German language that we know today (high German) developed from the West-Germanic languages like the English language did. As a result, German vocabulary is sometimes similar to English vocabulary.
Except for Frisian, Dutch is linguistically the closest language to English, with both languages being part of the West Germanic linguistic family. This means many Dutch words are cognates with English (meaning they share the same linguistic roots), giving them similar spelling and pronunciation.
Norwegian is closer to English than either Danish or Swedish. In fact, it's often described as the easiest of the three languages to learn.
Is English a Romance language? Even though English has adopted many words from Latin (as you'll see in the table below) it is not officially a Romance language. In fact, English is categorised as a Germanic language, in the same category as German, Yiddish, Dutch and Afrikaans.
The modern English are genetically closest to the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, but the modern English are not simply Celts who speak a German language. A large number of Germans migrated to Britain in the 6th century, and there are parts of England where nearly half the ancestry is Germanic.
"England" is spelled in the exact same way in German, but its pronunciation is a bit different: /EHNG-lahnt/. You may say, for example: Mei...
Germany's second city and one of the 16 federal states, Hamburg is widely considered the nation's most Anglophile metropolis. Its links to Britain are many, its love of the British way of life intense.
The least similar language to English is also the least similar to every other language. Basque language has about a half dozen dialects and is a language isolate. It belongs to no language family. The English language is part of the Germanic language branch of the Indo-European languages.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Indeed, Danish and German often seem to be more closely related than either one is to English. Both languages have gendered nouns, but German has three and Danish has two. These nouns share a very common ancestry, but over the past centuries, they've evolved in their style, spelling, and pronunciation.