misconceptions about language
Answers
- Only children can become fully bilingual.
- The younger the child, the more skilled they will be in acquiring a new language.
- We all learn a new language in the same way.
- English speakers don't need to learn a language, because English is the lingua franca.
- If you took a language in high school, you're all set.
Language is NOT about words.
It’s about words and structures and patterns. Look into an English dictionary. The overwhelming majority of words is of French and Latin origin. This does not make English a Romance language, because:
most basic words (around 80%), including almost all grammatical words, are of Germanic origin;
the morphology is wholly Germanic, though with many quirks and simplifications;
though the English syntax and semantics are very peculiar and not “typically Germanic”, they do contain many patterns of Germanic origin, which are expressed very differently in Romance languages. Compare to run in / out / away with entrer / sortir / partir en courant or entrar / salir corriendo.
A more extreme example is Albanian, which has only 10% or so of indigenous vocabulary. The rest has been borrowed from Romance, Slavic, Greek, Turkish…