according to the British Foreign Office is Hungarian which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). Therefore knowing Hungarian means you have skill. Discuss.
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Anonymous2007-01-23 4:10
Just curious, anybody speak Indian languages (Punjabi is one, I think)? I heard it spoken once, and I don't think I could even pronounce half the syllables, let alone at the speeds they were speaking it at.
Japanese grammar is pretty easy; even it's pronunciation isn't that hard. It's Kanji is only a weaksauce version of Chinese characters anyways. I'm obviously biased, but I prefer English to Chinese and Japanese, since you don't need to memorize a bazillion characters to write. Not to mention it's a much better language to convey sarcasm.
>>41
<i>Not to mention it's a much better language to convey sarcasm.</i>
Yeah, right.
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Anonymous2007-01-23 22:59
English IS about memorization. Since the letters are nowhere near phonetical, it's about memorizing individual words. No different than memorizing pictures of kanji or hanzi.
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Anonymous2007-01-24 0:54
>>41
I speak Hindi. But I hate Hindi movies. Mushy, predictable, plotless pieces of shit.
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Anonymous2007-01-28 8:28
Ancient Egyptian.
No one alive has a fucking clue about how its properly pronounced, much less the exact proper gramatical rules.
Learning it from the rosetta stone is like trying to learn another language through one page of a fucking translated novel.
Anything you manage to get out of that pile of bs would, at best, let you infer and guess at the overall meaning.
I don't think any language would be more difficult to learn than a tongue that's been dead for over a thousand years :p
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Anonymous2007-01-28 9:32
>>43
clothing difference > easy
fukusou no sai > easy
服装の差異 > hard
vice-president > easy
fukusousai > easy
副総裁 > sounds almost the same... yet it's still hard
I agree you have to memorize individual words in both cases, but really until you memorise the basic kanji (these are all from elementary school but HS has like 950 more) it's a whole different ballpark of difficulty... middle school hard on gaijin!
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Anonymous2007-01-29 5:56
It really depends on your background. If you speak fluent Chinese, than the kanji part of Japanese would be the easiest part to learning Japanese... since its the same characters used in Chinese (for the most part.)
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Anonymous2007-05-20 23:01 ID:5sRF3uFB
Proto-Indo-European.
pwn'd.
or !Xoo. Try pronouncing fifty gazillion clicks.
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Anonymous2007-05-20 23:46 ID:TBwyVZ60
everyone is saying that japanese is not that hard of a language, but i would guess that those people have not studied it that much. japanese is very easy to learn at first, but once you get past dictionary form and get into desu-kei (which is not that hard) and kei-go (dear god my head explodes) it becomes very difficult. i'm not saying that it is the most difficult, but still. japanese people often say they have a hard time speaking kei-go. most don't even know how to properly use it themselves and if they are going to a high class reception job (hotel etc.) that they will have to go to class to learn kei-go. just saying, maybe not hardest but it's up there
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Anonymous2007-05-21 8:54 ID:v3SrdHC8
Swedish has two definite articles, but no rules for which one goes with which noun. You have to learn them all one by one.
so does danish, only difference is, you can't understand what we say even when you know the language! HAH!
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Anonymous2007-05-21 18:00 ID:Pzg1Y2zN
Everyone should learn 2 of the official languages of the United Nations
English
Français
Español
العربية
中文
Русский
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Anonymous2007-05-22 1:52 ID:cvcDrxEM
Being Polish myself i've never noticed until i started learning Japanese how, in fact, levels of politeness are present in Polish. Say, you want to talk about a person called "Piotr Nowak" and here are the different ways you can do it, each time with various implications:
Piotr Nowak - no implications whatsoever;
Pan Nowak - literally "Mr.Nowak", which is the standard polite form;
Pan Piotr Nowak - kind of weird, since people usually drop the first name while using the "Pan ..." pattern;
Nowak - without "Pan" it becomes kind of disdainful;
Nowaczek - dimmunutive of "Nowak": even more disdainful than plain "Nowak";
Pan Piotr - pretty informal and friendly (can be misinterpreted though);
Piotr - just the first name, used casually but still implies some distance;
Piotrek - the most commonly used diminutive: implies some amount of closeness;
Piotrus - diminutive, rather used for kids;
Piotreczek - yet another diminutive, same as above.
Peter Novak
Mr. Novak
Mr. Peter Novak
Novak
No standard English equivalent.
Mr. Peter (mostly used by children to a person in authority)
Peter
Pete
Petey
Peteykins
I think it's fairly usual for languages without explicit politeness forms to have a variety of implied politeness levels, or registers. Look at English: the polite way to tell people what to do is to phrase it as a question.
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Anonymous2010-01-12 0:39
Actually there was a study on how early kids of different nationalities learn to speak
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Anonymous2010-01-12 11:41
Adyg language is quite hard with 55 consonants.
Transliterated for cyrillics text looks like that:
schhxuxzkcmpaseyixplqux xpswoeiujlcv sdovizcujwlxcvy
north caucasian languages are the living wonders of how fucked up a language can be
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Anonymous2010-01-12 18:35
I had serious problems when I was trying to learn English because of those tenses. So I haven't learned grammar, end still use it without knowing anything about English grammar. This way it is quite easy.
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Anonymous2010-01-12 23:48
>>19
God, they must be dull.
They can't even describe shit???
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Anonymous2010-01-13 11:34
>>61 They can't even describe shit???
Where do you get that?