Languages

[Da1andonly]

hei olen icestorm

stick åt fittans satans älg fluga

2-fer!

[phata$$]

Tagalog or Japanese.

[Nockm]

I'm surprised so many people are saying chinease...

Try English. Omg just kidding, and don't be suprised people are saying Chinese - there's a lot of them and they have money to spend.

[Squeezer]

russian is the hardest language to learn. aren't there like 50+ letters in their alphabet or something?

As opposed to Japanese where there are 3 different alphabets, and thousands of characters for each.

[Zerzera]

russian is the hardest language to learn. aren't there like 50+ letters in their alphabet or something?

They use the Cyrillic alphabet, and Russian is not much harder to learn than any other random language.


You can't really say which language is hardest to learn, it depends on your own linguistic background and skills.

I don't know your age Ice Storm, but if you are older of age -it gets harder to learn languages when you grow up-, and do not really care about which language, I would suggest sticking to one that has a high resemblance with your own language (a West Germanic language). Just because it's a lot easier to pick up.

[Salubrious]

American Sign Language.

[Shan]

Personally I think Finnish is one of the hardest languages to learn. They have something like 17 ways to conjugate a NOUN. Then again all Finns speak English anyway.

Yeah, Finnish wouldnt be that hard if you wouldnt have to conjugate the words all the time.

[Jeansi]

Government? Go for Spanish. If you already know Spanish, go for Chinese. You want to learn Mandarin (official language of China).

Personally I think Finnish is one of the hardest languages to learn. They have something like 17 ways to conjugate a NOUN. Then again all Finns speak English anyway.

On the other hand, finnish is the easiest language to pronounce, together with some other language that I can't recall, ukrainian maybe. Only languages in the world where, if you can pronounce all the letters in the alpahabet, you can pronounce every single finnish word correctly when reading out loud, even if you don't know the meaning of them.

Whereas in english some words written in different ways can be prounounced like the'd be exactly the same. Can't come up with the good examples right now, but words like "seen" and "siin", maybe? edit: and according to Wikipedia, the "th"-part in "this" and "thing" is a good example of how the th-part can be prounounced differently, depending on the surrounding letters, and the non-existant difference in the pronounciation of "roses" and "Rosa's" in some accents.

Also, in Finnish, each vowel is intonated, whereas in english it sounds silly if someone does it on the wrong vowels.

edit: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Not saying finnish is a good language to learn though, you'll have no use of it whatsoever because so few speak it.

[freddie]

russian is the hardest language to learn. aren't there like 50+ letters in their alphabet or something?

Russian is easy compared to chinese.

[Blood]

On the other hand, finnish is the easiest language to pronounce, together with some other language that I can't recall, ukrainian maybe. Only languages in the world where, if you can pronounce all the letters in the alpahabet, you can pronounce every single finnish word correctly when reading out loud, even if you don't know the meaning of them.

What Jeansi means to say here is that the orthography, as in the 'writing form' of Finnish is extremely close to the pronunciation, whereas in English it is somewhat distanced. Finnish orthography doesn't depict the pronunciation precisely though, there's no /n/-sound in "kenkä" as in 'shoe', for example, but a velar nasal, as in the same sound as at the end of the word 'thing'. All Finnish n's in orthography which are followed by a /k/ sound follow this rule though, so it's somewhat logical.

Whereas in english some words written in different ways can be prounounced like the'd be exactly the same. Can't come up with the good examples right now, but words like "seen" and "siin", maybe? edit: and according to Wikipedia, the "th"-part in "this" and "thing" is a good example of how the th-part can be prounounced differently, depending on the surrounding letters, and the non-existant difference in the pronounciation of "roses" and "Rosa's" in some accents.

Word pairs like 'scene'-'seen' and 'plane'-'plain' are pronounced exactly the same in Standard English at least and this makes up for some confusion for learners of the English language, naturally. The pronunciation of the letter cluster 'th' is a good example yes, words like 'this','mother' and 'teethe' are in uniform here, as they feature a VOICED dental fricative ('dental' because that's where your tongue is, 'fricative' because there is friction when the air passes through and 'voiced' because your larynx, as in vocal cords, is creating a 'vibration' of sorts when pronouncing this particular sound.. try it with your finger on your throat if you don't believe me) whereas words such as 'think', 'thing' and 'teeth' feature a sound otherwise identical except for the missing 'voicing' in your throat.

There is a wealth of examples I could come up with here but I'm only going to mention the suggested alternative spelling of the word 'fish', which is 'ghoti'. Look for the reasoning behind it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

Also, in Finnish, each vowel is intonated, whereas in english it sounds silly if someone does it on the wrong vowels.

What Jeansi probably means to say here is that, in Finnish, vowel qualities do not shift according to word stress (intonation is a whole different thing). And basically in Finnish you always stress the first syllable of a word.

Not saying finnish is a good language to learn though, you'll have no use of it whatsoever because so few speak it.

If you are an American looking to learn another language, I'd also say Finnish is a bad choice because even though the pronunciation is logical and fairly simple, the grammar of it is just sick. Don't get into it, we all speak English to some extent anyways. Spanish might be a good choice in America, next in line Chinese perhaps.

Maybe it's best I don't rant on further, I could give (and have given) whole presentations on English and Finnish sound systems and things related to them. And yes, I am enthusiastic about the subject. And yes, it is weird. And yes, I am going to become a teacher.

[Zeebu]

learn click

thatd be cool

i know german... so far i havent used it much. but im hoping to transfer within my company to a branch in germany sometime.

[Emaho]

Latin would be cool to learn.

[genocidal]

Why would you need or want to know another language besides English?

[Blood]

Why would you need or want to know another language besides English?

English wasn't always the dominant language of the world and it's fair to assume it won't stay that way either.

[Reaver]

I can't speak for everyone but being an American, Spanish seemed fairly easy to learn and natural. Conjugating verbs seemed relatively straight forward though I studied mostly present tense and not as much future/past though they were just as straight forward. I can't really say anything in Spanish anymore since after I had taken two years of it, I graduated high school and haven't used it since nor did I take any classes in college on it. So make sure if you're going to put the time and effort into learning a language you plan to use it, at the very least know someone who speaks the language well. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the USA.