hey everybody welcome to this a1 english listening practice video you can use this video to practice your listening and comprehension as i speak and remember to sign up for our one dollar listening practice seminars at polyglossa.com and download our free listening time podcast so you can practice your listening skills so today i'm gonna talk about the english language this is an important topic for all of you because you're all learning english in this video i'm gonna give you some interesting facts about the english language this should be fun okay so the first thing i want
to talk about is how many people speak this language well almost 400 million people speak english as their first language these people are native english speakers most of these speakers are in the us of course but there are many other english-speaking countries obviously countries like the uk australia canada and ireland speak english but there are also a lot of other countries where people speak english for example english is the major language of belize guyana jamaica the bahamas and other countries too there are a lot of english-speaking countries also many people around the world speak english
as their second language in every country there are people who are learning english as a teacher i've taught students from over 80 different countries cool huh we don't know exactly how many people speak english as a second language but there are a lot okay now let's talk about the history of english the first form of english appeared in the 5th century a.d today we call this early english old english old english was very different from modern english i can't understand old english in the 11th century old english became middle english middle english is a little
closer to modern english but it's still very different finally modern english began at the end of the 14th century but english continues to change so today's english looks a little different from the english of the past few centuries another important thing to know about english is that other languages have influenced it a lot so which languages well for example some experts say that almost 30 percent of english words come from latin and almost 30 percent of english words come directly from french that means that almost 60 percent of modern english words come from latin or
french that's a big influence also around six percent of english words come from greek and there are many words from other languages too but what language family does english belong to english is a germanic language that means english is related to languages such as german dutch and swedish however english speakers can't understand these other languages if i hear german or dutch i don't understand anything english is related to these languages but they're very different for example americans who only speak english can usually understand much more spanish than german that seems strange because english and spanish
are not related but english and german are related the reason why english speakers can understand many words from spanish french or italian is because these languages have many cognates cognates are words that have the same origin for example in english we have the word patience and in spanish this word is pasciencia these words look very similar because they're cognates so if an english speaker hears the spanish word passiencia they can probably understand the meaning okay one last interesting thing about english is that it has many many words some people say that english is the language
with the most words i think this is probably true because english has taken many words from other languages like i said before alright now i'm going to ask you some questions about the video to see if you understood write your answers in a comment down below number one when did old english appear number two what language family does english belong to and number three what are cognates okay before we go remember to sign up for our one dollar listening practice seminars and download our free listening time podcast to practice your listening skills and of course
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