at my school we have two monopoly games... french and german... we've been playing them recently in italian (go figure) and i can understand about 70-80% of the stuff written on the cards... anyway gtg to school... c yas
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at my school we have two monopoly games... french and german... we've been playing them recently in italian (go figure) and i can understand about 70-80% of the stuff written on the cards... anyway gtg to school... c yas
[quote=TexasMark]I
"Trotz der Zugest
I take it Scandinavian languages have the thing where you're supposed to mention the expression of time first, or were you just translating directly?
I did the mistake of translating it word by word at first, then rearranging the words. Turned out a little messy...
messed up
the thing is americans have slang its sort of like a dialect. but the thing i dont get is why european and asian languages care so much about formalities and who uses them. i mean for "how are you doing" u have informal male, informal female, formal male, formal female. what is up with that? why dooes it matter that much?
If you are speaking to a female or male and informally ask them how are they doing, the question is the same. But if you are talking to a female you know well, you don't use the formal endings.
I believe that at one time English also had a formal form, which gradually went of use. However, what you're talking about goes beyong pronouns. Although you may use "you" with both of them, I'm sure you speak to adults you don't know differently than to your close friends.Quote:
Originally Posted by traveler
Eh? I don't think I've quite deciphered your message, Evgenia. If you are talking to a male you know well, you don't use the formal endings either.Quote:
If you are speaking to a female or male and informally ask them how are they doing, the question is the same. But if you are talking to a female you know well, you don't use the formal endings.
I know, Pravit. But he said this:
i mean for "how are you doing" u have informal male, informal female, formal male, formal female.
For "how are you doing" there is formal and informal, it does not change for gender. This is what I meant to say. Sorry. :oops: But for past tense there is formal, male, and female. There is no formal female and formal male.
As for languages...
I think English is pretty easy when it comes to studying it from the very beginning. To start speak bad English is much easier than to start to speak bad Russian. I mean it makes no dificullty to explain "I go, you go, he goes" or "I have, you have, he has" etc. But when you try to explain "Я иду, ты идёшь, он идёт" or "вижу, видишь" or "У меня есть", you inevitably stumbles over all those endings, root alternations and impersonal constructions, so if the student is not familiar with language terms, it almost impossible to say "WHY", it shoud be only remembered then.
On the other hand, to get the real fluency in English is almost as hard as to get fluency in any other language.
I agree 100% with Propp. Starting Russian is much harder than starting English.
The final stages of learning good English involve:
-developing the ability to use the full range of tenses accurately. Most students can do this eventually.
-developing some kind of unconscious internal rule set (with thousands of exceptions) telling you when to use articles and which to use. Non-natives never completely master this except in very special circumstances.
-developing a feel for and mastery of phrasal verbs; perhaps the hardest thing of all.
Of course one must also get to grips with idioms, connotation, collocation, register and perhaps some forms of slang, but that's true in any language.
On the subject of history, well, I'm no historian, but I would have thought that the development of the printing press must have had a big effect on the stabilization of the language. The internet may be having a similar effect on a global scale today :?
Ага. Only English will be left in its "basic" international form. :) :o :wink:Quote:
Originally Posted by waxwing
Yes, it's not an unreasonable prediction. But then again, we must not forget Mandarin Chinese, not just yet anyway :)
My vote goes to English being the hardest language to learn, period.
...IF being taught to you by a guy from Glasgow.
I think English is the most irregular language in the world. Especially due to its phonetics, pronouciation and spelling. English grammar though is not so difficult, I think.
Only French, I guess, has more difficult phonetics. If you open Russian or German or Latin dictionary you see no transcriptions or so. If you open English dictionary - you do.
So, I believe, learning Russian, German or Latin is easier than English.
When I heared native Italian speech I was able easily separate and understand words, but when I hear native English speech, I dont.
By the way, I think English much more far from other German languages than they are from the each other. So, I guess, It will be another "Anlo-Saxon" language family in the nearest future.
Besides, there are many German words in Russian, for example, солдат, патруль, пароль, патрон, вагон, вокзал, шторм, штиль, штык, штаб, эрзац, матрас, штамп, ранг, горн, флаг, штат и т.д.
French doesn't have more difficult phonetics. You might get put off by all the q's and apostrophes, but the spelling system is entirely regular. And, Nixer, you are a native Russian speaker, so of course you will think Russian is easier to learn.
ОК, May be French is easier, I could agree.
Please Delete and/or Ignore.
Do you by any chance attend Cranbrook? Just curious.Quote:
Originally Posted by a true arab
Now on the topic. I agree, English is extremely simple to the other languages I am learning, the very conjugations stay the same except in third person singular, while in French, German or Russian thats not the case. That's the only true difficulty I have encountered.
[quote=Dogboy182][quote=TexasMark]This thread is probably already dead. I think we can conclude (1) that some languages are easier than others depending on your first language and target language and (2) no generalizations can be made just because something is in the same language group.
As my final word on the subject, to prove my point in (2) above, rather than give a German quote, how about this one, from another Germanic language:
"F
Yeah, and which language has six cases with tons of exceptions and rules that have to be learned for each preposition? And two forms of the same verb to learn?
i am an american, english is my mother tounge of course, i would have to say the trick to learning to speak everyday english is informality, unless we americans are doing business we pretty much don't use any formalities. we are lazy speakers, that's why we have slang, we're lazy people when it comes to language, or at least most of us are. There aren't very many gendered words besides him, his, her, she, stuff like that, we usually don't differenciate between male and female with most of our words. English is a pretty straight forward lang., all the words go in order example: i don't speak french(easy,all words follow eachother) now in french: je ne parle pas francais( more difficult than english because the 'ne' and the 'pas' change parle/speak into a negative. And a lot of laguages are like that, i think english is quite simple, the laziest people in the world speak it...
actually, in normal french you'd say : "je ne sais pas parler fran
They go in order to you, because you are a native speaker of English. What if, however, my native language is one where the object comes first, then the verb, then the subject? To me, it would seem that English word order was completely out of whack.Quote:
English is a pretty straight forward lang., all the words go in order
Try to explain to a foreign learner the difference between:
If you had had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you would have had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you were to have some money, we could go to the movies.
That's just Possibilty, and lost opportunity. Nothing too hard about that.
If i were to move to russia, i could join spetsnaz!
Kinda drifting off topic, but to me, Arabic has the hardest spelling system. There aren't any vowels marked when text is written, only in dictionaries and kid books. For example, "Salam" which means hello, is written as "Slm". All consonants have a vowel added after them, but it isn't marked. Sa, la, ma. The a on the end of the m isn't pronunced, but it isn't marked either. You just need to know that it isn't there. Personally, if I was ever to learn arabic, that would be hell to try and memorize the vowels in every word but never writing/reading them.
Not necessarily. Imagine two guys sitting around. "If you had some money, we could go to the movies." No lost opportunity there. If they get the money, they can go.
The latter is just blatantly incorrect to my mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pravit
Conditionals are an area where semi-literate people often trip up :)
Sadly I've heard constructions like that in speech fairly often.
And the former would usually be "If you had had some money, we could have gone to the movies", although I suppose it's acceptable as a mixed conditional.
"If you were to have some money, we could go to the movies."
That's very weird ... I've never looked into the "were to" construction. I mean obviously it's pretty rare in usage nowadays. In this case it looks very unnatural, I think it's because "were to" should be followed by an action (i.e. not a stative verb) :?:
Cougar asked me the "were to" one, the other one is just me trying to come up with something awkward but possible :)
Why is it that I always read the same question and the same answers. How can you say English it's the trickiest language, or the easiest one? or is that lazyness is the cause for slang in English?Quote:
i am an american, english is my mother tounge of course, i would have to say the trick to learning to speak everyday english is informality, unless we americans are doing business we pretty much don't use any formalities. we are lazy speakers, that's why we have slang, we're lazy people when it comes to language, or at least most of us are.
Everyone thinks that his/her own language is the trickiest, the most difficult , the one with more slang... What happens is that as an English speaker, you know a lot more than non native speakers about its nuances, its slang, its tricky features. But you don't know so deeply other languages, and then you think others are more simple. Or maybe, as you know yours since childhood, you think others are more difficult.
But all in all, more or less all languages have the same complexity, otherwise there would be cultures in which children would acquire their spoken languages before others, or after others. And that's not the case. Writing is another question.
Maybe, instead of comparing English to German, Russian, Arabic, Japanese and Spanish (5 out of 5000 languages, 0.001 > 0.1% of all languages, that's nothing), we could compare English to some 500 languages (10%) and then take some conclusions, don't you think?
Have you heard about Ergativity in Basque or Caucasian languages? Have you heard about click languages, such as Xhosa, to talk about difficult pronounciations? And what about those consonant clusters of Georgian?
Or the 9 (are they really 9?) tones of Cantonese?
One last thing, if lazyness causes slang, then all language speakers are lazy. Do you think Spanish, for example, has no slang? And yet, we have dozens of verbal forms.
Excellent post, Jca.
Jca, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
You can find books in nearly every language (if it is written at all) where the author "proves" that his language is the most versatile, enables its users to express subtleties which can't be expressed in any other language, and is therfore the highest developed one in the world.
This is regularily done by taking phrases or even single words which don't have an exact equivalent in any other language (which the author believes to know).
Umberto Eco wrote about this subject (I think it was in "Foucault's Pendulum") listing nearly each of the European languages which somebody hat declared sometime as superior to any other known language.
To be honest i dont really have a "native language" ounless you count just being from a perticuler country.Spoke dutch first 11 or so years of my life,litle bit of bangla/bengali with pasing relatives and my dad and my mom (forcfully)taught me some english.
Yadering aside, I for one found english to be a fairly hard language to learn.True it's easy to get an emergency message acros but all the little tid-bits can be rather confusing(or maybe it's just me).on german though, I can speak dutch(though VERY rusty at the moment) and learned german seperatly.Sounds similer and you can get the gist of whats being said but it's got it's diffuculties from this perspective(again could be just me lol).
BTW, learned some hindi recently and all(to my knowledge) indian/sub-continet region languages have 3 forms of addressing.One for sub-ordinates/close friends, one for normal occasions and one formaly(though generly the formal is used with strangers allways, but thats just amnners and opinion).
I can only speak for bengali(litrey, cant read or get the numbers down well yet). but you can see the evolution quite clearly.In bangladesh it's somewhat like amarican english and british english.Has some arabic and now quite a few english words and the grammer system is much simpler.Technically we all speak incorectly but it's the norm now outide of formal documents.
Cпасибо Pravit, старик.
Kстати, старик Умберто Эко написал об этом в "La b
[quote=Jca]Kстати, старик Умберто Эко написал об этом в "La b
Finnish and Estonian. Although they are aren't that similar are they.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jca
English speaking countries do have a higher proportion of dyslexics, but that's just due to the horrible spelling.
And as for tenses, the same exist in Romance languages like French and Spanish.
talking about starting from scratch; i'm going to University to learn Chinese, all them wicked signs etc :(
How do you get pictures under your name?
Go to the top of the page and click on profile then scroll down to the bottom of your profile where it says show gallery and just click on it and choose one. Or you can click browse and upload one of your own.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tate
Not bad for a leather massager, eh what!
I know this is from an old post but:
Well, I read, write, and speak in both Russian and English-My mother is totally rusian, and my dad is totally english, but I think that even though english is a totally screwed up and whacked language, it is a tiny bit easier that the russian language. Both are my native tounge, 50%-50% each. Split. Even check out my name. Partly Russian. Hows that for a comparison?Quote:
Why is it that I always read the same question and the same answers. How can you say English it's the trickiest language, or the easiest one? or is that lazyness is the cause for slang in English?
Everyone thinks that his/her own language is the trickiest, the most difficult , the one with more slang... What happens is that as an English speaker, you know a lot more than non native speakers about its nuances, its slang, its tricky features. But you don't know so deeply other languages, and then you think others are more simple. Or maybe, as you know yours since childhood, you think others are more difficult.
But all in all, more or less all languages have the same complexity, otherwise there would be cultures in which children would acquire their spoken languages before others, or after others. And that's not the case. Writing is another question.
||
Sry that this is off topic--------V
Oh, and by the way, if anyone has like a cool pic for under my name of like sumthin stupid like an evil penguin or a killer squirrel for an avatar, it would be greatly appreciated. Ive been looking for one ever since i saw this site.(not when i signed up but like about four months ago)
8) :twisted: :off: :thanks:
THX AGAIn
I had to learn both Russian and Engsh ?cos my mother tongue is none of them. While I find Russian harder as regards to morphology for all the endings I have to remember, and for the perfective-non perfective verbal forms and uses, ... for example, listening and understanding what I heard is more difficult in English.Quote:
Well, I read, write, and speak in both Russian and English-My mother is totally rusian, and my dad is totally english, but I think that even though english is a totally screwed up and whacked language, it is a tiny bit easier that the russian language. Both are my native tounge, 50%-50% each. Split. Even check out my name. Partly Russian. Hows that for a comparison?
But of course, English is easier to me as there are more common words between Spanish and English than between Spanish and Russian. Maybe we should ask a Vietnamese what is more difficult (not a Vietcong guy educated in Moscow, of course, nor a traitor US friend).