How Does German and English Link?
If someone is ranking the strangest countries among the world, he should definitely count India because India has 22 major languages and more than 720 dialects. With so many languages, it is even really hard for domestic citizens in different places to communicate with each other. Languages are important tools that link people together, but learning language is a very difficult process. However, if people have already commanded a language, learning a new language in the same linguistics family will be easier, and people will have a better understanding of it.
I have started to have this idea since my first year in UCSB. At that time, I joined a physics lab which researched how to use remote laser to detect evaporative molecular absorption’s spectrum. Although I was really interested in this topic and wanted to discuss with other group members more often, I still kept being an observer in most of time because of the language limit. For example, when other members were discussing why different spectrometers would have different graphs when measuring the same object, I really wanted to say my hypothesis that different interferences might cause spectrums changing in their shapes, but I could only remember how to speak “interference” in Chinese at that time. I knew that nobody could understand me if I spoke Chinese, so I really hoped that somebody could translate this term for me. Besides me, there was another international student in this lab, and he was from Germany. Although both of us didn’t speak English as our first language, he spoke English a lot better than me. In addition, even if sometimes he used German to help him express the idea, other group members could understand him without any difficulties. This situation actually brought me a question that why English speakers can easily understand some German terms?
Occasionally, I noticed that both English and German belong to Germanic linguistics family. With this, I started to hypothesis that languages in the same linguistics family shared a lot of in common, and this could help people to learn a new language. After searching on the Internet, I found that some English and German terms have very similar spellings and pronunciation. For example, “spectrum” in German is “spektrum”; “physics” in German is “physik”; “good morning” in German is “guten morgen.” Even native English speakers who have no knowledge about German can guess the meaning of these words without any obstacles. That is to say, if native German speakers learn English, they can worry less about vocabulary and focus on something that is more difficult. On the other hand, native Chinese speakers should start learning English or German from alphabet because Chinese is made up of Chinese characters.
It is obvious that native Chinese speakers have greater difficulties to learn English than a native German speaker. One of reasons is because Chinese speakers will forget English much quicker. In daily life, people tend to use their mother tongue to communicate with others, so it is undeniable that people have a chance to forget some seldom-used terms or phrases in another language. Even if Chinese students have the same progress of learning English with German students, Chinese students would take more efforts to prevent forgetting what they have learned because Chinese characters have no similarities with English, but German have the most direct connection. Another evidence can show this is the average TOEFL scores. According to “Average TOEFL Score,” Hannah Muniz states that the average TOEFL score for German speakers is 98, and the average score for Chinese candidates is only 79 at the meanwhile. With such a large gap, it is unreasonable to attribute this result to be students’ ability. Instead, it is more likely because of the language advantage.
To sum up, by comparing difficulties for native German speakers and native Chinese speakers learning English, I find that languages in the same linguistics family has a lot of similarities which can promote people learning a new language. Although I only collected one example in my research, I still believe this could be applied in other languages as well.
