Following article is written in simple English
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in Anglo-Saxon England in the early Middle Ages. It is now the third most widely used language in the world, behind Mandarin and Spanish.[4]
It is spoken in many countries around the world. Anglosphere countries include the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and a number of Caribbean nations. There are about 375 million native speakers (people with first language as English),[5] which is the largest after Mandarin and Spanish. About 220 million more people speak it as a second language. It is often used in work and in travel, and there are a billion people who are learning it. This makes English the second most spoken language, and the most international one in the world.
English has changed and developed over time. The most obvious changes are the many words taken from Latin and French. English grammar has also become very different from other Germanic languages, without becoming much like Romance languages. Because nearly 60% of the vocabulary comes from Latin, English is sometimes called the most Latin of the Germanic languages, and is often mistaken for being a Romance language.
Contents
Resources[edit | edit source]
| Resource | Duolingo | Lingvist | Clozemaster | Memrise | JW language | LingQ | Learning with texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available? | Yes1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Resource | Assimil | Pimsleur | Michel thomas | Language exchange | Rosetta Stone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes1 |
1 Duolingo and Rosetta Stone are available in English, but they are useless for someone who speaks English well enough to use this page.
Media[edit | edit source]
Reading[edit | edit source]
Books[edit | edit source]
- Of Mice and Men (1937) - John Steinbeck
- The Call of the Wild (1903) - Jack London
- The Great Gatsby (1925) - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Short stories[edit | edit source]
- The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) - Edgar Allen Poe
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865) - Mark Twain
- EPICAC (1950) - Kurt Vonnegut
Sources[edit | edit source]
- Goodreads - a site for finding and rating book
Movies and TV[edit | edit source]
- Jaws (1975)
- Casalblanca (1942)
- Forrest Gump (1994)
- Some Like It Hot (1959)
- The King's Speech (2010)
- Amadeus (1984)
Music[edit | edit source]
Last.fm - a site for music recommendations
| Germanic Languages |
|---|
| West Afrikaans Dutch English German Old English |
