Languages

[Blood]

So it is, and also related to English, so it shouldn't be hugely difficult for any English-speaker to learn!

[genocidal]

It's not related to English at all. Spanish, Italian, and French are romance languages and have the most similarities but none of them have much in common with English. English is more like German than anything, but it's really just a conglomeration of Latin, Greek, Old and Middle English, etc.

I mean I guess if you're comparing Chinese, Spanish, and English then they could be said to be more similar; but nobody would say with any accuracy that Spanish and English are "related."

[Blood]

Well I suppose so yeah, they've grown apart since the Indo-European language family.

[Epinephrine]

True blood, everyone should learn sanskrit

[Jeansi]

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

Mandarin is spoken by three times more people than english. From an estimate:

Chinese 850 million native speakers
Spanish 330 million
English 320 million

also note Hindi with nearly a billion people with significant knowledge of the language.

If you want to see the world, or deal with international business, the more major languages you know, the better. Even if you plan on staying within the borders of the United States for all of your life, knowing other languages might be nice because you could do stuff such as read foreign books in the language they were written in, and see foreign movies/listen to music.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ative_speakers

[Arikel]

isn't chinese like the hardest language to learn?

and theres like 2 forms of chinese (cantanese and mandarin i think?)

There are several spoken forms of "chinese" mandarin is the oficial one that every1 knows how to speak, cantonese is the laguage of "guangdong" also known as "guangdong hua" the dialect from canton, wich is a province of china in the south where hong kong and hau ma "macau" are located. Almost all provinces in china have a dialect so you can say they have dosens of languages. If you want to learn how to speak mandarin i will tell you you will have quite a challenge at it. First you will need to learn how to pronounce the sylabes wich are quite dificult to speak, they have 5 diferent "accents" or tones, then you have to learn more or less 3600 characters in order to read and write fluently, they have around 50000.
But don't get frightened by the numbers their grammar is pretty simple, in fact almost non existant compared to many western languages but the number of characters and the several tones for the words are "alien" at best for most of us
At the moment i'm at level 3 of mandarin i'm learning how to speak and write and already know more then 100 characters for sure but much more to learn

[404 Not Found]

I'll probably go for a job for the government, what do you think they are looking for in languages

I would assume Arabic

Woman I work with, her Daughter graduated from Amherst with a minor in Russian Language. She now works for the NSA and they are paying for her at every level, from grad school and further development of learning Russian, to a govt. car and insurance/health benefits to boot. Not bad for just getting out of college. Not a bad deal....plus they have her traveling everywhere too.

Russian, Chinese and of course Arabic languages are in high demand.

Spanish would be a plus for manegerial position in the States.

[Vykromond]

Mandarin is spoken by three times more people than english. From an estimate:

Chinese 850 million native speakers
Spanish 330 million
English 320 million

also note Hindi with nearly a billion people with significant knowledge of the language.

If you want to see the world, or deal with international business, the more major languages you know, the better. Even if you plan on staying within the borders of the United States for all of your life, knowing other languages might be nice because you could do stuff such as read foreign books in the language they were written in, and see foreign movies/listen to music.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ative_speakers

Native speakers are completely irrelevant in the case of English. It's more important to look at the breadth of adoption of the language. Mandarin isn't a more adopted language than English just because it has more native speakers.

Anyway IceStorm should learn Arabic or Mandarin for his government job.

[gran guerrero]

I think Farsii is the hardest language to learn. That's what i've always heard. I know some finnish only text on ss, because I was in Ancients for a while and that's pretty much all they typed in. Atleast when it didn't get overran by nubs :S newho........

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

sorry about the spelling errors

I want to practice a language, learn it the best I can then take a class in it.

i actually speak farsi, and i'm learning new things everyday when I speak with my parents. Its probably labeled hard because for most language learning programs, they dont have farsi. It's kind of difficult for me though cause i learned it how to speak with slang. the proper way i dont even understand, i dont even understand half the time when artists are singing.

[genocidal]

I was being sarcastic to bait the Euros. Don't throw the wikipedia at me!

[FarScape]

Learn sinadrin @_@

[Jz-]

i would say go learn cantonese instead of mandarin if you are going to learn chinese

sure, mandarin is used more often but from what i learn myself, once you learn how to speak cantonese, you pretty much know how to speak in mandarin

i have spoken cantonese all my life, and i have only learnt mandarin for a year and a half when i was in grade 1 in china.

now i'm in university in canada and i can still speak mandarin fluently and i haven't learned it back when i was like... 7 years old

however, cantonese would be much much more harder to learn because it can reach up to a different of 11 or 13 tones (i forgot was it 11 or 13) and mandarin will only have 4 tones + 1 neutral tone.
cantonese also doesn't have alpahabet unlike mandarin for you to sound out and the writing for cantonese would be alot more complicated BUT PRETTIER

[Spikester]

Can you pronounce äöå?

Me neither

[soup]

Isn't Chinese very difficult???

And a question for the US guys, how hard is it to learn Spanish?

And for the people who speak French AND Spanish, what do you think is easier?!

[Arikel]

Isn't Chinese very difficult???

And a question for the US guys, how hard is it to learn Spanish?

And for the people who speak French AND Spanish, what do you think is easier?!

Spanish is easier then French.
French grammar is complicated when you start to get to the higher levels of the language.