Language topic

Dutch, English, and pretty OK with German. I know some Polish and French, although the knowledge of the latter is deteriorating every year (and German as well; I was way better 20 years ago).
 
Bulgarian, English and some decent Italian. I have basic knowledge of German and Spanish, and I can understand some Russian, Serbian and the other Slavic languages but I can't say almost anything in any of them.
 
Just English unfortunately. I know enough French to follow a hockey game, have a passable grasp of Greek swear words, and probably more Hul'qumi'num than anyone else on this board (even though that's probably less than a dozen words).
 
Unlike all the fancy people here :p, I can only speak English. I've taken classes in school for Spanish, French and German but remember so very little from those classes. I only remember some phrases, greetings, object names, colors, letters, numbers, just the basic sort of things but not enough to hold an entire conversation with anyone in any of those languages.
 
TheSeventhSonRoberto said:
how many languages do you speak?
Click to expand...

English, Spanish, Spanglish, Ebonics, Border Spanish, (Texas-Chihuaha and Arizona-Sonora specifically) fluently. My German sucks nuts, but I hope to improve it some day.

Forostar said:
Because I wasn't sure if the following deserves an own topic, I thought we could have a general topic on anything language related (we used to do language kind of "games" in other topics, and naturally all that could be done here as well).

I'd like to start with this:
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The weirdest languages (source)

We’re in the business of natural language processing with lots of different languages. In the last six months, we’ve worked on (big breath): English, Portuguese (Brazilian and from Portugal), Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Serbian, Romanian, Korean, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Croatian, Czech, Ukrainian, Finnish, Hebrew, Urdu, Catalan, Slovak, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Bengali, Thai, and a bit on Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Kurdish, Yoruba, Amharic, Zulu, Hausa, Kazakh, Sindhi, Punjabi, Tagalog, Cebuano, Danish, and Navajo.
Click to expand...

Thank God they specified what Portuguese they were studying! Makes it crystal clear they only studied one form of Spanish!
 
When I was in Poland and we took the boat to Westerplatte, when we got off the boat a guy with a golf cart was saying he could get us all around the area in an hour and back in time for the next boat back. Cool guy who gave some interesting info about the area who spoke decent English.

Anyway, we told him we were in Germany before and he asked what we liked better, Germany or Poland. I responded that they both had some benefits over the other, but that I had a lot easier time understanding people in German.

He described Polish as sounding like the noise when you switch between radio stations on a radio with a dial ... and I think that summed it up well.
 
Finnish, moderate English, basic Swedish and a little Russian (I can read the letters, at least).
 
English, quite a bit of French, and I somehow passed an exam in German at school but I can't remember much.
 
I am going to make an effort to improve my German. I feel like I can read it okay ... when I was there at a museum for example, I could read the displays and get a general idea of what they meant. The only person I could understand well was a tour guide at Ehrenburg palace in Coburg (which was an incredibly interesting place) because the guide spoke clearly, slowly, and slang-free ... and again I got the general meaning, but rarely word for word.

There are books and movies only in German that I want to read and I plan on returning several times.

I am thinking about doing a language exchange over the internet. Seems like a decent idea of pairing English speakers who want to learn German with German speakers who want to learn English. Think I am going to start in the next week or two. Either that or move to Muenster, TX the closest place to me where a lot of people speak German.
 
I have a question. The phenomenon of "if orange is orange, then what colour is orange?" has an equivalent in Turkish. We call brown "kahverengi", which means "coffee colour". "if coffee is coffee colour, then what colour is coffee?" Are there any more examples of this thing in other languages?
 
My wife (and family-in-law) comes from Poland, and to be frank, I haven't really spent lots of time to learn the language. I can't speak it well (at least not full sentences, although I know some) but I can understand some stuff when I hear it. Now I have another excuse, besides my laziness:

http://claritaslux.com/blog/polish-hardest-language-learn/
Polish – the hardest language to learn in the world
What is the hardest language to learn for English Speakers? Take a guess; it is not Chinese or Japanese. It is Polish. Polish has seven cases and Polish grammar has more exception than rules. German for example has four cases all which are logical, seem to have no pattern or rules; you have to learn the entire language. Asia languages usually do not have cases, or at least like that.

- - - -> More in link!



http://claritaslux.com/blog/the-hardest-language-to-learn/
What is the hardest language to learn?

  1. Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation. Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age 16. .
  2. Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root.Pretty Hard: Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet but easier pronunciation. Serbian-Also similar to other Slavic languages with a complex case and gender system, but it also has many tenses.
  3. Simply Arduous: Ukrainian and Russian – Second language learners wrongly assume because these languages use a different script (Cyrillic) that it out ranks Polish. This is not objective, as an alphabet is only lets say 26 letters. It is really the pronunciation and how societies use the language that influences ranking.
  4. Challenging contender jockey for position: Arabic - Three baby cases which are like a walk in the park compared to the above, but the unusual pronunciation and flow of the language makes study laborious and requires cognitive diligence if you want to speak it.
  5. Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese - No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher that says people pick up Chinese very easy, but he speaks several languages and could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even the easiest language to learn. Not the hardest language by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.
  6. Average: French - lots of tenses but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
  7. Easy: Spanish and Italian - People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
  8. Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.
----> More in link!


These articles don't sound very scientific (quite subjective!) but I find some of the points of view and comparisons pretty interesting. And there are indeed many exceptions in Poland grammar.

I disagree with some notions, e.g.:
In contrast Slavic countries are good people but there is not a lot of boisterous openness. If you try to speak their language they will switch to English. It is just the culture or laugh and switch to English.

I have never experienced this. In my country it's way worse: they switch to English as soon as they sense when you're foreign.
 
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If anybody here ever decides to compile an etymological glossary, ask yourself if it is really worth the effort first. You wouldn't believe how long I worked on 40 pesky words.
 
I know it's a joke, but the philologist in me is weeping.
 
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