Interesting~
Well since I'm Canadian, I thought canada and us gotta have the same education system. Or maybe it's specific only for some states? Dunno...
In our education system, we learn French starting grade 2 if you're going to an English school. A lot of people decide to send their kids to French schools so they could be fluent in both, English can be learned in society eventually and French can be learned in school. Well I went to an English school but like I said I started learning French since grade 2. And it's a must, it's not an optional thing....unless you're an immigrant.
Also the main language can be different in different provinces. I live in Ontario so the main language spoken here is English and you rarely see any French. But in Montreal, the main language is French. And despise the fact that the country's main language is English, if you speak in English in Montreal, they won't answer you back...err if you're a native and not a tourist.

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K n e e l .... This is the difference between your and my eye-level.
Rai from Noblesse

Spanish 0/
Started learning English in the school, but I'm not good in there, so I learn by myself later whit music, reading and hearing all stuff in english, and now more resently, whit a friend from Finland, cause he talks in finnish, and I in spanish, so, if we don't do it on english, we can't understand eachother.
Buuuttt i need more practice, I think.
Now i'm like a kid of 5 years old writen, but I understand pretty much everything if I read, love read manga in english, is better coz the translate is better
So Hi from Argentina, and thank you for the page

Well the main problem with foreign spoken language is the pronunciation. If the pronunciation is very different from the languages you can speak it can be difficult to learn the language. One of the most difficult (bigger) spoken languages is Yue Chinese if you're not used to tonal languages because at first you can't even hear the differences. On the other hand because there's no such problem with Spanish, even if you find Spanish very difficult to pronounce it only takes so long to learn to do it.

As for written languages, there's the problem of irregular reading. In some languages you can't be sure how to pronounce a word you see for the first time—as you said, English is like this. And although colloquial Japanese is fairly easy to master, the written Japanese is more difficult than written Chinese, really.

But as I said earlier, you can't really learn a language from a school book. Most people learn the language properly after they start using it. With only the English skills from school I wouldn't be able to read a single post here. Without actually "studying" per se I learned English by reading books, writing on forums, talking to foreign people in English etc.

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Far-off places with sweet sounding names.

1. native German
2. fluent Polish
3. rather fluent English
4. basic French
5. some Chinese

Just started to learn Spanish, simply because I like the pronunciation. I live in Germany, my parents are from Poland. I learned English and French at school but I wasn't on good terms with my French teacher so my willingness to learn this language suffered a lot. I started to learn learn Chinese because I was curious, it's so different from European languages

I'm german.
as to what was said before: english isn't all that irregular. the german grammar on the other hand is because there are many special cases. btw. mark twain got so hung up on it that he wrote a book "the awful german language", although I'm not sure how serious he was altogether.

on the other hand....everything is pronounced as it is written, so no surprises there.

hmm..and as far as I remember finnish is supposed to be difficult because of its grammar

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In New Zealand at school they taught us basic Maori, but the mainstream was in English. Also when I was 12 or something I took a 5 week Korean course, the only thing I remember is how to write my name in Korean, and how to say sit down/stand up.

I know a couple of swearwords in Tongan and Samoan (lol) but my main is English

Well for me English was by far the simplest one.
In Polish, Latin and German nouns have "gender", and depending on both the gender and the case (4 cases in German, 6 in Latin, and 7 in Polish) they look different (and of course while in Polish "car" is masculine, in German it's neutral and so on, and why is "a girl" in German an "it"?!).
Second one is pronunciation: when my Chinese friend tried teaching me the difference between different "ma" (a question, a horse... ) I couldn't hear the difference. And (maybe it's just me) reading an English word correctly is not such a big deal, though some words might be tricky (infamous coming from infamy and not fame for example).
And about the number of words.. most of them come from Latin either way so they are not really that "foreign" to some Europeans. And many newer "professional" words in other languages come from English.

hahahaha I don't even understand finnish, i just know 4 things.
How say:
-and= ja
-good night = hÿvää yötä
-shit = paska
-pain = kipua
No, wait, i don't even know how say it, just know only write that hahaha And when they had the point over the letter, i donnnnn't have idea how pronounce that

I think it's the same logic as with German u > ü. Not sure if that helps though.

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Far-off places with sweet sounding names.

Finnish is pretty much the same in this. Every letter has the same sound, not matter the word or the placement within. And yes we use the "special" letters ä, ö and å. Not too many, all things considered.

What makes Finnish quite difficult is how we can basically modify various words into something that then takes multiple words or even short sentences to say in some other language.

For example. Take the basic verb (to) "run". This would be "juosta" in Finnish. Then lets tweak it a bit and say "juoksennellaanko?" This would translate into "shall we run?" with an added implication that the running to be done will be aimless and most likely will not have a specific destination or goal in mind, so perhaps "shall we run about?" would be more accurate.

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All this Finnish talk reminded me of a certain line in a book... let's see now... ah, here it is:

—Castle of Days: book three "Castle of Days", chapter three "Books", part three "How Science Will Conquer the World of Fantasy"

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Far-off places with sweet sounding names.

i'm a native german speaker and writer ... and depending on your teachers during your school time you can become quite good at it, since somebody further above made the connection to Mark Twain, he said something about the german language: "It should be called a dead language, since only the dead have enough time to learn it"
if you look into it a little further than what you learn in school, you kinda have to admit that he isn't all that far off. and if you hear "normal" people speak on the street or at work and you are someone like me who at least tries to get everyday speak to have right grammar, your ears will hurt ^^
well enough of that...
by the way.. there is a bunch of american comedians out there (refering to youtube) who seem to think germans or the language in general all sound like Hitler... don't believe a word of it ... Hitler would be a good example of what was thought of as good rhetorical work in the 1930-1950's in the german speaking areas in europe but by far not what the people sounds like
english from grade 2 onwards... the last 2 years in school i took additional classes in order to take the cambridge advanced exam (with which you can study in england without further language tests) .... i failed by 2 points ... didn't really learn though so it was to be expected.
4 years of french... 2 with a good teacher during which i learned a lot (i'd say) and the other 2 with a teacher with whom i lost my joy in learning it... so i saying my french is superficial and rusty would be an overstatement

I too am brazilian. and I agree... I didn't learn english in school at all, videogame helped me out way more than brazilian teachers, by the time I got in high school I already knew everything they were teaching.. it's not their fault, though.

Malay. English is a second language and used extensively in my country, so I didn't have too much trouble picking it up. My English still sucks big time, though. And don't even get me started on speaking it..

Btw, Kyoki(did Google Translate got that right? xD), are you.. gasp.. a native Japanese speaker? The methods you mentioned earlier also did much good to improve my English, except that last one. I'm not confident enough to speak with people in English. xD

Last edited by SlyzertVoltrond at 6:53 am, Sep 29 2013

there is something similar in german. we chain nouns together which creates a new noun that every german would understand. but for foreingers it seems to be difficult do discern the combined meaning of the basic nouns.
it makes things a lot easier since you can quite accurately describe things you never heard or saw before.


Last edited by jelzin89 at 12:32 pm, Sep 29 2013

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