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Comment by blumentopf | Hacker News Reader

English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

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How do you cope with the pronunciation though? It is my 5th year living in Germany, and as an italian I find the pronunciation much more straightforward in German than in English.

English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example:

  I redacted a  text, removing the froufrou.
  Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru.

French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.

English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).

I know, I receive Webster's Word of the Day and most of them are Latin words: really easy for anyone who speaks a Romance language. The last five were: incipient; indissoluble, indoctrinate, infantilize, inscrutable. So maybe Webster should have two mailing lists. One for anglo-saxons and one for speakers of Romance languages.

Funny, I was just googling for that :). The best I could find: http://www.quora.com/English-language/Is-there-a-thesaurus-t...

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