Language Facts

Chinese is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn due to a combination of factors. There are few similarities between English and Chinese due to their distinct writing systems, grammatical structures, and pronunciation styles. To become fluent in Chinese, one needs to put in years of study, and even then, it is uncommon to obtain native-like ability. Typically, in order to be deemed fluent enough to read the morning newspaper, one needs to master 3,000 characters. The language's tens of thousands of characters make achieving ultimate proficiency a difficult endeavor.  The fact that the written forms of Chinese words give no clues on the pronunciation and therefore must be learned separately further complicates the situation. Given that over 67% of words contain two or more characters, one can see how it earns the title of one of the hardest languages to learn. 

This country has traditionally been used as one of the main commerce routes by other countries due to its advantageous position in the Pacific Ocean. Because of this, native Tagalog speakers have been forced to modify their language and use loan terms to properly communicate, survive, and trade. According to sources , Spanish is the most significant language to have affected the Philippines' languages, followed by Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Sanskrit, English, and Japanese. Considering the nation was ruled by Spain for more than 300 years, there is no disputing that Tagalog has incorporated some Spanish loanwords that are still in use today. In fact, researchers state that about 33% of the words in Tagalog are of Spanish origin. Despite their apparent similarity, Spanish and Tagalog are technically not the same. First off, like French, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, Spanish is a romance language of Latin origin. On the other hand, Tagalog, an Austronesian language, is distingui

Have you heard linguists claim that English has a more significant number of words than any other language? Although the allegation is made, it is challenging to verify it. According to Steven Frank, the author of The Pen Commandments, English contains 500,000 words, compared to German's 135,000 and French's rough 100,000. The Economist's blog entry acknowledges that English has a large vocabulary, but for several reasons, it is impossible to compare it to other languages. Inflection presents the simplest challenge when comparing the size of several languages. Do we consider the terms "run", "runs", and "ran" to be three distinct words? Multiple meanings present another issue. Do we regard "run" as one word or two words if it is both a verb and a noun? What about "run" in the sense of a Broadway play's prolonged run? The word "run" has at least 645 different definitions, according to a recent NPR piece ! Do we