I've read in some places that the best Arabic literature and poetry was written before they got way too strict with their religious beliefs towards the end of their Golden Age. Most of it is shunned or "non existent" anymore within Arab culture. They're often regarded as poetic and beautiful, but I don't know the name of any in particular.
Latin:
Love: The power and eloquence of spoken Latin
Hate: Dead language, lol
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Anonymous2008-04-07 1:44
>>12
>I've read in some places that the best Arabic literature and poetry was written before they got way too strict with their religious beliefs towards the end of their Golden Age. Most of it is shunned or "non existent" anymore within Arab culture. They're often regarded as poetic and beautiful, but I don't know the name of any in particular.
Being an Arab, I can only look back to the liberal Islamic Golden Age and hope that the faggy fundie faggots ruling our countries now will choke on a dick and die so we can return our mindset to early Islam.
Early Islamic countries and caliphates had freedom of speech and religion, can you believe that?
>>6
>Russian:
>Love: The sound, the system and the elegance of the language.
>Hate: Nothing. Can't find anything I hate about it.
Its either because Russian is your first language, or because you didnt learn much of it. Russian grammar is fucked up beyound belief, I cant even imagine why someone would call it elegant.
Turkish has the eloquence of Finnish, but without the gayness...
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Anonymous2008-04-25 15:18
>>42
No, it is just as gay, but I'm letting this one slide because of holy GET
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Anonymous2008-04-25 17:04
Christianity is the worst religion for civilization, since redemption is dependent upon faith, rather than good works, and a lifetime of wickedness can be redeemed by a death-bed conversion.
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Anonymous2008-04-25 20:28
Arabic
Love: its so fucking rich
Haet: EXTREMELY DIFFICULT
I like Hungarian's overall sound, vowel harmony, some awesome words (mainly front vowel words like szeretett, nemesen, egészségedre), and the suffixes. I like being able to drop pronouns and the word "is" in many cases - it feels very natural. Being an English speaker, I'm glad that the pronunciation can almost always be determined from the spelling, and that there are fewer vowel sounds than in English. Verb particles are usually pretty logical too (and often have a corresponding English phrasal verb), which is nice.
However, I find it pretty difficult (there are quite a lot of grammatical cases and different verb conjugations), and when I pronounce some words like "sincs" there is far too much of the "sh" sound. I find it annoying how the Hungarian keyboard switches z and y. I'm also not entirely sure Hungarian food would suit me :)
>>46
What is your opinion of it? Are you also learning it?
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Anonymous2008-04-27 18:49
>>49
No, I'm not learning Hungarian, but I've been to Budapest and I think the language really is melodic and very nice to hear.
And also, Turkish has vowel harmony and the ability to drop "is" and pronouns too, but I don't think it sounds as good, probably due to the abundance of harsh consonants or because it sounds dull to me since it's my mother tongue.
Love: how it sounds and how it is elegant when someone uses it properly.
Hate: how it is in a terrible decline.
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Anonymous2008-05-13 10:29
Corelian
Love: Chicks dig it. I'm fat and pimply but when I speak this, chicks are swarming around me like flies, rubbing themselves to me while trying to open my zipper to suck my penis.
Hate: It's wwiting system (example: ერՀ თեաბեშია. Gezmtreyyibeb'bizh = I am happy). Too many sounds are represented by too few letters. ե can also represent u and f.
Love: The sound is pure awesomeness.
Hate: Too fucking difficult.
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Anonymous2008-06-03 20:02
English.
Love: Chanspeak. Celtic accents. Movies.
Haet: Messed up, unphonetic orthography. I often don't know how to pronounce certain words. Sometimes I hear a word and could think of 5 different ways of spelling it.
Love: Can sound very "epic". Many words, especially combined nouns, sound very, very cool.
hate: Genders. Some everyday-words sound pig-disgusting when pronounced in a certain way. East-Saxonian accents.
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Anonymous2008-06-04 8:40
Serbian
Love: sounds cool
Hate: serbs
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^^2008-06-19 2:13
Japanese
like: the sound, and written language (as impractical as it is)
>>72 written language (as impractical as it is)
haha, you know, the reason I started learning Japanese is that a weeaboo I know IRL told me about how the Japanese writing system works, and I was impressed by how smart a solution those Japs have found (I thought it was basically the same as Chinese, with like 50000 characters in use)
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Anonymous2008-06-20 18:47
Hah yeah, pretty much same, I have a Japanese friend and he told me some stuff, taught me the kana in two days. If you like efficient writing systems, you should check out arabic and korean too, which spend less time than the Japas really. It's odd how stroke order is pretty much the same, though, with Kanji and just writing cursive, apart from the things I hate, like writing 'ore' takes about 15 strokes, where as I is just 1...
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Anonymous2008-06-22 4:20
>>77
can you give a brief run down or anything about how the writing system works? seriously i fucking hate kanji
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Anonymous2008-06-22 15:35
Old English
Love: Sounds awesome
Hate: There is no future tense. You can only infer the future from context
There are two 'alphabets' (I don't have a great knowledge about language terminology, but alphabet is the closest word I can use to describe them). They are alphabets in that, each character represents a syllable, a phonetic. Each has 46 characters you need to learn, with variations, bringing the real total i suppose to about 66. This works by the use of two little dashes like " or a little circle like the degree symbol. This sounds very confusing at first, but the best example I can give without using any pictures or actual Japanese text is that "KA" on its own is pronounced "KA" but adding a " to it makes it "GA".
Hiragana, the most common of these writing systems, is what is used for things like compound words and other points of grammar, and also is used when one does not want/cannot use kanji for the word they want to say. It also plays an important part in conjunction with Kanji (the more complicated characters you see) to creat advectives and verb variations.
Katakana, the one that people seem to have most problems with (probably due to the fact that it's not as easy to come across as the others) is used primarily for writing words of foreign origin, and can get confusing because of the Japanese tongue, in which words such as "ADVANCE" have to be changed so Japanese people can pronounce them ("ADOBANSU"). Speaking Japanese, funnily enough, you will find you'll have to pronounce foreign words in this broken up way for anyone to be able to understand you properly. Katakana is also used for certain kanji words in comics, sheerly for simplicity's sake.
Kanji, the most complicated aspect of the writing system, is godknow's how many (to get by about 2,000) characters of chinese origin that represent a concept or an object. They get confusing when you realise that most of them have two readings (for example the kanji for "now/current" can be pronounced "IMA" or "KON", depending on whether it's grouped with another kanji or not. They conjugate in ways that seem very chinese, too, for example, "DENSHA" (train) literally means electric (den) wheel/car (sha). If I've explained this all terribly I apologise, but that's essentially the bare bones of it. If you're confused hopefully someone else could clear it up for you.
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Anonymous2008-06-22 18:45
KSEhxHetTenúktUÑ
Pros: No one else understands me
Cons: No one else understands me
>>81
haha thank you but it seems i have wasted your time. That was all stuff i already knew lol
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Anonymous2008-06-24 3:19
>>85
oh godammit ... in that case just check out this link. It goes a bit more in depth, but I can't think of anything else to answer your query without going in to as little depth as possible (unless of course you want to start learning, in which case I highly reccomend using the site from the link as a starting point)
>>85
I'm >>77, and what struck me as smart about all that was that
- Around 3000 characters are in use. That's much, but an amount that can actually be easily learned within a few years, as opposed to all those the Chinese use, where everyone is technically semi-illiterate.
- Every word can be written using the syllabries if you don't know the kanji.
- The syllabries are completely phonetic, save for a few well-recognizable exceptions.
- Kanji solve the problem of homophones. In English, words that sound the same are written using different letters, resulting in the ortography not being phonetic anymore. When I read an English word unknown to me, I can often think of many different ways to pronounce it. When I hear one, I'm not always sure how to write it. In Japanese, I can at least make out with which kana it would be written, and with that knowledge also look up the kanji for it if I wish. (I'd say that Spanish and Italian are superior to both in this respect, though)
- The Japs mostly took fairly simple hanzi and/or simplified them. This makes it often much shorter to write one kanji instead of up to four kana, or 8 Latin letters.
- The meaning of a kanji can still be guessed from its appearance.
- Due to kana and the use of romaji, it's not that hard to write Japanese on a computer.
In short, I like that they basically took all the pros of using a syllabry and the Chinese system while remedying many of their respective shortcomings.
(Also, I'm not claiming to be an expert with any of this shit, so nobody rage if I got something wrong)
>>90
German is pretty structured compared to the patchwork that is English, but it does have its fair share of exceptions, and it's a friss oder stirb situation with them (and not a fress oder sterbe situation).
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Anonymous2008-07-06 19:26
Spanish
love: I speak it
hate: I can't properly use irregular verbs and it's mother tongue )x
English:
Love: it's the easiest of all languages, everyone speaks it
hate: it's the easiest of all languages, everyone speaks it
German
love: It has attitude, really complete, pronunciation, and it brings me memories
hate: I can't fucking speak it and half of my family does
Japanese
love: I like how it sounds, pronunciation is easy, kanji
hate: all the weeabos learning it, and all the people with no social life that are nippon-religious.
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Anonymous2008-07-07 10:47
>>95 I can't properly use irregular verbs and it's mother tongue )x
How can you possibly do that when it's your own mother tongue? Spanish isn't even that hard.
THANK YOU! As a german-speaking American, while I can understand everything west of Berlin, once I get into the East, I'm fucked. Seriously.
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Anonymous2008-07-16 10:29
>>105
Yeah, that's normal. I'm from Hamburg and often don't understand shit when talking to them, while I have no problem at all with Austrian for example. When Saxonians are interviewed on TV, they sometimes even have to subtitle it.
That's really cool, and kinda hilarious, actually.
P.S. I'm assuming you can't call people from Sachsen "Saxons", as that has a completely different meaning. Is that the case?
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Anonymous2008-07-16 13:53
>>107
Nah, I just wasn't sure about the English word, read >>70's "Saxonian" and re-used his mistake. Saxons or Sachsen is correct.
Their dialect also sounds hilarious to most other Germans, by the way. It's always hard for me to take them serious, at first.
I remember when I was doing my time in the forces, my first instructor was an Ossi. Half of the recruits burst out laughing when he screamed his first sentence. Luckily, he wasn't too pissed about it.
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Anonymous2008-07-29 16:19
>>16
Spanish has no declensions. Only conjugations.
Nouns decline. verbs are conjugated.
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Anonymous2008-07-31 11:13
French
Love: The emotional quality embedded within each word
Hate: Not being able to pronounce their damned rolling "R"
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Anonymous2008-07-31 11:17
>>110
There's no rolling R in French, at least not in the standard version.
The standard version? You mean the R is prevalent only in french dialects..? Because among the things I still clearly remember from learning french is their rolling R.
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Anonymous2008-07-31 16:26
>>112
Yes, only in the southern dialects, per Wikipedia. The rolling R is an r you'd find in, for example, Spanish, Italian, Finnish... But hardly in French.
I didn't know French had strange RRRRRs
...I just listened to an Edith Piaf song and she has a very specific accent with strange Rs. Kind of a tremollo?
QUAND IL ME PRrrREND DANS SES BRRrrRRAS
I like speaking French and I like the poetry.
The most annoying part would be not fucking up the homophones when writing.
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Anonymous2008-08-19 1:00
Arabic
Love: triconsonantal roots.
Hate: too much phlegm.