Originally Posted by
SteveB
"She speaks English by your description, so explain it to her in English. Just give her examples of situations.
" Yes indeed.
Good rule of thumb, do not try to speak to someone in a foreign language you do not fully understand. At best you will make fool of yourself at worst you will be completely misunderstood and even offend someone.
English is a Germanic (mostly) language while Romanian is a Latin language so there is a lot of differences between them.
You cannot speak a language by simply substituting words. [People who think they can speak Irish take note]
And, of course I slight mispronunciation of a word can cause it to mean something completely different. [For Example, in English,
SHIT and
SHEET sound the same to many foreign ears but mean different things
]
And “college” and “colleague” sound the same in English but mean different things. : )
The basic and most common words in English are Germanic in origin but up to 70per cent of the vocabulary is derived from French and Latin. English emerged over a few hundred years from the merging of Anglo-Saxon dialects with Old Norse and eventually with Norman French. By the end of this process much of the grammar was ditched. So English in lts early days was a kind of a trade language or a Creole. The large Romance component in English should give us a head start in recognising a lot of words in languages like French, Spanish, Italian, even Romanian. (check out Slavic languages or Hungarian by contrast and we will recognise almost nothing except modern borrowings) Where we fall down is mastering grammar and pronunciation - English pronunciation has remained nearer to Germanic, hence our difficulties with eg French.
The college /colleague confusion could have been an issue with predictive text btw;-)
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Shalom/salaam.
10,000 years of Middle Eastern civilisation and the place is not at peace but rather in pieces.
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TheNightShift