My wife and I completed the Duolingo Welsh course about 8 years ago. We try to attend the Malad Valley Welsh Festival each year. This year is was a short visit (yesterday) due to blustery weather. The only spoken Welsh I heard was from performers singing "Yma O Hyd". I couldn't find any Welsh speakers. Lots of Welsh ancestry in the attendees.
I find Welsh very natural. Very phonetic. It's a VSO pattern language (verb-subject-object). Singular/plural and first/second/third person all have a unique verb form. Most verbs a regular. A few like "to be" are irregular as is common with most languages.
I study German daily. Like English, it is an SVO pattern language and adjectives precede nouns. When I practice speaking, I try to achieve a natural flow in a sentence with correct inflection. It's a perpetual work in progress.
In the evening, I'm studying Mandarin Chinese. It's a tonal language with an SVO order like English. It employs particles to form a question (like Japanese) and to indicate a "past tense" without need for laborious changes of verb for each possible "tense". The grammar is easier. The tones are a challenge. In addition to getting the tones correct, there is also a "phrasing" with short clusters of words. The "Falou" app is strict with both phrasing and tones to get credit for being correctly spoken. The "Super Chinese" app provides detailed feedback on tonal correctness and only allows moving forward with a correct performance over 60% of the material. I have Praktika as well for Mandarin. The AI tutor in Praktika is pretty good, but the microphone handling for the Android app is pretty flakey. Praktika brings more variation, but doesn't make me work as hard as it could. The "Mandarin Blueprint" course material is first rate, but comes at a higher price point than I can justify given my teetering health. I would never derive the full value before heading for a dirt knap.
How fascinating!🙂
I wish I could speak some Chinese, but don’t know more that „I love you“ and the well known „Mother is scolding the horse“.
And in German, yes, most sentences use the SVO word order, but this is not mandatory, since, thank to the inflectional endings of German nouns, you can always know which one it the subject and which one is the object - that’s the strong point of synthetic languages.
It seems to me that Old English and modern German are closer to each other in grammar as well as phonetics than modern English and German are.
Old English: „Tham kynge licodon peran“
Modern German: „Dem Könige schmeckten die Birnen“, but:
Modern English: „The King liked the pears“
As a former student of Old English, I also found the resemblance between Old English and Old High German particularly striking.
Just great to be able to have this discussion with you, and with others, here on FR😀