Long term Alizée fans have you noticed

[Future Raptor Ace]

Originally Posted by Aaronius31

I think everyone can learn a second language, it's just a matter of whether someone's mind let's them!

Im not calling you out Aron but you think wrong, learning a language comes from a special part of the brain that fades in strength as one gets older (hence why it is easier learning a language when you are younger) .... take this into account with various common learning disabilities that many people have and it starts to become clear why lots of people "physically" cannot learn a second language. My Mom is a New York City teacher, and so is my Dad .... so believe me I know

[SpanishFan]

Originally Posted by Finnishguy

For example, I'm native Finnish speaker.

Finnish is definitely one of the hardest languages to learn. Thank god Alizée was not born in Helsinki

I can understand people having problems to learn french. It is more complicated than english, plus the fact people is not familiar with french. I mean, in Europe there´s a big english influence since we are kids. We listen to music or watch movies or play videogames in english since we are really young so when the time to learn english in schools comes, it feels very easy and natural.
I suppose it is much more complicated the other way round, for english speakers to learn a foreign language.

[wasabi622]

Originally Posted by SpanishFan

I can understand people having problems to learn french. It is more complicated than english, plus the fact people is not familiar with french. I mean, in Europe there´s a big english influence since we are kids. We listen to music or watch movies or play videogames in english since we are really young so when the time to learn english in schools comes, it feels very easy and natural.
I suppose it is much more complicated the other way round, for english speakers to learn a foreign language.

Kind of a similar story here in the states, only with Spanish. I'm so used to hearing Spanish on the radio and hearing bits of it on tv, when it came to learning it, it was much easier than learning French, which is rarely, if ever heard in American media.

[Deepwaters]

Learning a language is significantly easier when you're very young, i.e., a child. Growing up bilingual is definitely the best way. Learning a language isn't significantly easier when you're 25 than it is when you're 50, though. And it's significantly harder when you're 75 only if you suffer from senile dementia.

The reason I say that French isn't that hard for native English speaker is because French is one of the two roots of modern English, the other being Old English. English is technically a Germanic language, but a good third of the vocabulary of English is derived from French. That happened because of the Norman conquest. Several centuries followed in which French was the language of the royal court of England, and the language of all literature except for serious scholarship which was in Latin. English remained the language of the common people, but it was seldom written and over time it changed, simplifying its grammar and absorbing huge numbers of French words.

Of course, French is even easier for native speakers of Spanish or Italian, which are more closely related to it than English is. But this being Alizée America, I imagine most of our posters here are native English speakers as I am.

(Finnish, which is unrelated to any other European language AFAIK, would be really hard, I suspect, about on the level with Chinese or Japanese.)

[Finnishguy]

Of course it's easier to learn when you're young. And, for older people more and more difficult.

There's one funny thing when I started to study foreign languages. I was very young, but I knew everything about my native language. So, omg, I was really scaried, how I could to speak other languages. So different words.. In Finnish, just any words have so many different looks. I was sure that it would be impossible to learn..

And, now I'm wondering, how english child can't speak when he borns...

Edit:

Originally Posted by SpanishFan

Finnish is definitely one of the hardest languages to learn. Thank god Alizée was not born in Helsinki

If she would have borned in Helsinki, I could to thank God. But now I know that there isn't any god for us.

[SlipshodDread]

Up to the age of about 10, children can learn languages without any difficulty naturally. They can also learn multiple languages simultaneously without confusing them, which is how you get very young bilingual children.

After age 10 the part of the brain predisposed to learning languages seems to slow down, and it is very difficult if not impossible to acquire a language just from hearing it. As you get older you lose this ability more and more. You can still learn a language even at age 70, but by that time other factors will start mounting up against you as well, such as memory loss etc.

Obviously it helps to learn languages similar to your own. Most people start with grammar to learn a language, as lexis (words) by themselves will not help you speak a language. The closest language to English in this respect, is Frisian. However the closest major language would be Dutch or Norwegian.

English is closer to French than German grammatically, and also lexically, but phonetically it is closer to German.