crystella333
New member
Try learning to read and speak welsh. The pronouncation of the llan.. and such it too gutted and trying to twist your tongue around them is hard.
Polyglots, your input please
- Thread starter Einion
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ArgoMina
New member
Hi, I'm Italian and I've improved my English lately. I think that learning a foreign language it's easy until you share the same alphabet. My roommate's sister is now fluent in Japanese but she spent the whole university learning it and still need hours to write it down...
So, in my opinion the harder are the oriental languages.
BTW, whats this all about?
So, in my opinion the harder are the oriental languages.
BTW, whats this all about?
cassar
BALLSCRATCHER
found this on the interweb
View attachment 4449
View attachment 4449
Shellshock
New member
Jeg elsker fransk hotdog. Booyah a bi-lingual Englishman, gold dust.
Einion
New member
Haha, second Pulp Fiction reference for me today.
Hen's tooth :shock:
Not even English? :rotfl:
I think it's two, in addition to kanji, the Chinese characters.
Einion
freakinacage
Well-known member
i don't find it too hard. you just feel self concious when trying to pron it well. a lot of welsh don't pron things properly anyway
who's that?!! i assume some sort of island language, polynesian or some such?
Torn blue sky
New member
Hehe "pron"
I actually wish that Thing Cassar posted was real!
I actually wish that Thing Cassar posted was real!
Einion
New member
Like Chinese - characters give no cues to pronunciation, meaning, relation to similar words and so forth.
No Hungarian speakers here?
Einion
IdofEntity
New member
Wow, you're right:
Hiragana
Katakana
Kanji
Romaji
How many dialects of Chinese are there?
Torn blue sky
New member
Half of C3-POs memory was probably taken up by Chinese, and accounted for a good amount of the cited number of languages =P
I dare say just about as many as there are secluded villages in China... :rotfl:
Seriously though, Wiki says:
Mandarin
Jin
Huizhou
Wu
Hunanese
Jiangxinese
Hakka
Yue (including Cantonese-Taishanese)
Pinghua
Shaojiang
Northern Min
Eastern Min (including Fuchow)
Central Min
Pu Xian
Southern Min (including Amoy, Taiwanese)
Teochew (including Swatow,Chaozhou,Jieyang,part of Shanwei/Meizhou)
That'd be sixteen dialects sharing four alphabets...
Perhaps my first statement wasn't that far off anyway...
me_in_japan
New member
Japanese frequenly makes me bang my head off a wall in frustration (usually metaphorically, occasionally literally.) The speaking is not so bad (altho extended vowel sounds and double consonants give me some gyp), but the writing system! Ye gads! 3 of the alphabets are not so bad - romaji is just japanese words written in roman letters - f'r example: boku no medama ga tokechatta (my eyeballs have melted). Hiragana is just a phonetic alphabet - about 50 or so simple(ish) characters which each have one sound (and one sound only, unlike english. For example た is the letter for "ta". It never, ever sounds like anything else. "ta". Thats it.) Katakana is exactly the same, except it's used exclusively for foreign words. (e.g. my wife can write her first name, Kazue, in hiragana if she wants. However her family name Boyle (cuz shes married to me) needs to be written in katakana. This tells you a lot about Japanese cultural attitudes to foreign things...
So that's 3 alphabets. The fourth, kanji, is where it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Thousands upon thousands of em. They're not the same as Chinese letters (although many are similar, and they certainly originated in China.) I reckon there's summat wrong with a language where a native speaker can be presented with someone's name and not have the first clue how to pronounce it. Seriously - it happens all the time where I work. A new kid joins the school, I'm typing her name into the computer and I find a new kanji. I ask my (Japanese) co-worker how to read it and she says "I dont know." A quick q&a round the teachers' room results in a great big "wakaranai" from everyone.
How is that practical?
so, in terms of writing, I have to say that Japanese gets my vote.
English would be second, by the way. e.g. What does this word mean and how do you pronounce it? - bow -
So that's 3 alphabets. The fourth, kanji, is where it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Thousands upon thousands of em. They're not the same as Chinese letters (although many are similar, and they certainly originated in China.) I reckon there's summat wrong with a language where a native speaker can be presented with someone's name and not have the first clue how to pronounce it. Seriously - it happens all the time where I work. A new kid joins the school, I'm typing her name into the computer and I find a new kanji. I ask my (Japanese) co-worker how to read it and she says "I dont know." A quick q&a round the teachers' room results in a great big "wakaranai" from everyone.
How is that practical?
so, in terms of writing, I have to say that Japanese gets my vote.
English would be second, by the way. e.g. What does this word mean and how do you pronounce it? - bow -
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Shellshock
New member
I can think of 4 meanings and 2 ways to pronounce 'bow' off the top of my head haha. Trippy, don't think of it like that as native English speaker how confusing words like that must be.
Einion
New member
Uh uh, kanji is not an alphabet. Romaji is simply Japanese spelled out (as well as possible!) in Roman characters so it just uses an alphabet.
Even hiragana and katakana are not strictly alphabets but syllabaries apparently.
A score or more? When my dad learned Chinese he thinks they were told it was 25.
It ain't!
But which language other than Esperanto is entirely practical? Bo (as in to bend something, a bow (for archery)).
Bau (as in to bow before a monarch, onomatopoeic word for a dog's bark).
Einion
It is also the front end of a ship, what you use to play the violin with, a character in the She-Ra comic(ok, not really relevant but a fun fact) and what you call a quote: "deviation of the center point of the median surface of a free, un-clamped wafer from the median surface to the reference plane."* when speaking of semiconductors
*Source
Anyone know more meanings of the word? I never really thought about that word having so many meanings...
IdofEntity
New member
To yield or submit.
An ornamental knot, oft used with ribbon.
English vocabulary is such a pain because the entymology for a word is borrowed from so many sources. Similar sounding words in different languages with different alphabets and different meanings are borrowed and converted to the same or similar spelling.
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Fizl
Secret Crocodile
I'm crap with languages (even English is borderline).
I believe there are 22 or 23 Indian languages where there are at least one million speakers, and loads more with more than 10000.
What throws me with languages is when you have to know the sex of objects (dogs=male, cats=female etc) or even worse when you have to know if an object is sitting standing or lying on something - in Dutch to glasses sit, stand or lie on your blooming nose? What do they do when you put them on a table?
*Head explodes*
I believe there are 22 or 23 Indian languages where there are at least one million speakers, and loads more with more than 10000.
What throws me with languages is when you have to know the sex of objects (dogs=male, cats=female etc) or even worse when you have to know if an object is sitting standing or lying on something - in Dutch to glasses sit, stand or lie on your blooming nose? What do they do when you put them on a table?
*Head explodes*
freakinacage
Well-known member
ok from what i know
males
females
male pseudo-hermaphrodites
female pseudo-hermaphrodites
true hermaphrodites
maybe they count trangender to add the final two?
males
females
male pseudo-hermaphrodites
female pseudo-hermaphrodites
true hermaphrodites
maybe they count trangender to add the final two?
