Learning a new language is challenging. It requires time and consistency to improve your skills. However, you can make your job easier if you choose the right language for you. The more similar your target and native languages are, the easier it will be to learn quickly and efficiently.
For example, it takes 2,200 hours to learn Japanese as an English speaker, but only 600 to learn Norwegian. Well, you’ll be happy to learn that Haitian Creole and English are similar in many ways. You’re going to have an easier time than you thought when learning Creole. Let’s take a look at just how similar these languages are, so you can get a better idea.
- A Big Chunk of Vocabulary Comes from French
Haitian Creole is based on French. It’s no surprise that over 90% of its vocabulary is of French origin. English, on the other hand, is classified as a Germanic language.
Despite that, the English vocabulary contains less than 30% of words of Germanic origin. The majority of English vocabulary is derived from romance languages. 29% of all English words are of French origin, while another 29% derive from Latin.
Thus, there’s going to be some overlap between Creole and English words. Don’t be surprised if you stumble upon words that seem familiar!
- Both Have the Same Word Order
English and Haitian Creole are SVO languages, so their conventional word order is subject-verb-object. Declarative sentences are going to be built in the same way in both languages. Here’s an example of how that works:
The English sentence “I read a book” can be translated in Haitian Creole literally as “Mwen li yon liv”, and it remains grammatically correct. This might not seem that important. But SVO is characteristic of only 41% of all the world’s languages, so it’s not as common as you might think.
- Extremely Simple Verb Conjugation
Learning complicated conjugation tables is challenging if you’re used to the simplicity of English. If French, Spanish, or German aren’t your thing because you don’t like endless lists of terminations, consider yourself lucky!
Haitian Creole doesn’t require any of that. All verbs have only one form. Just as in English, any changes that a verb undergoes are marked by separate grammatical words. For more information about conjugation, check our other blog posts on Haitian Creole grammar!
- No Grammatical Gender
French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and German are among the most popular languages to learn. But they differ from English in one crucial way— grammatical gender. Most of these languages use a two-gender system, while Russian and German have three grammatical genders.
Remembering each noun you learn together with its arbitrarily assigned gender is tough work. But that’s not all, because grammatical gender carries on to adjectives. So, you have a lot of new endings to learn just to build a grammatically correct sentence.
English doesn’t do that, and neither does Haitian Creole. Any new word you learn, you can use straight away without worrying about using the right article or adjective ending.
- Both Use the Present Progressive Tense
English has a rather unique verb form used to express actions developing at the moment of speaking. This is something that you can’t quite replicate in other languages, so sometimes, the progressive aspect of the verb gets lost in translation.
But not in Haitian Creole! You can form the progressive form of any verb by adding “ap” between the subject and predicate. Consider the following examples:
M ap koute. (I’m listening.)
Y ap manje. (They’re eating.)
N ap kouri. (We’re running.)
Conclusion
While Haitian Creole has its unique features, you’ll find a lot of similarities to English. If you like straightforward languages and prefer something familiar, you should give Haitian Creole a try! We offer fun and immersive language courses for anyone interested in the Haitian language and culture. We work with complete beginners and advanced learners alike!