What language to learn? - Page 2

Every person in the Americas should understand spanish, period.

That said, next big language is mandarin, everybody (that matters) in China will understand it more or less. But this is more a business thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wildstar 

Every person in the Americas should understand spanish, period.

That said, next big language is mandarin, everybody (that matters) in China will understand it more or less. But this is more a business thing.

Yeeaaaah, Spanish isn't really as important in Canada. We don't have have a very notable population of Spanish folk up here, however, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Cantonese, Mandarin or Korean would be helpful here.

I've always had an interest in learning some Irish Gaelic and Latin-- I can speak a bit of Irish, but mostly phrases and random words.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik 

My problem with Asian languages is that they're extremely difficult to write or read the characters. You have to memorize thousands of characters, as opposed to 25-40 or so for other languages. As much as I'd like to learn Mandarin or Japanese, I don't want to spend upwards of ten years to become familiar with the written aspect.

After WWII, the Japanese government limited the number of characters to around 2000. This takes about 2 years to learn.  It is Chinese that requires 10,000 to read a newspaper and has a dictionary containing 80,000. 

You forgot flip!~pino, have you been to Bathurst? .. eheh as for me no need to learn, Since I'm in downtown GTA and most of my friends came from different kinds of flavors, We got good resources of translators over here very kind people... but I can understand Nihongo though. but cant grasp Kansai that well..

I just love languages! I've been learning Mandarin for over 5 years now. It's a very interesting language and I just love it, though my vocabulary is all skewed towards mechanical engineering terminologies haha. I think it was Flesch who said that if one aspires to be more concise in English; to study Chinese. Well I am still as verbose as when I started but, I can see what he's saying. It's almost as if they try to rid the language of unnecessary words. At the same time it's great to be able to communicate and know the locals on a deeper level. The girls also love the effort!haha. Deliberately making mistakes is also a very fun and effective way of learning any language, I find. I love Spanish too, it's perhaps the easiest of languages I've ever studied. I've been interested in Japanese lately, seems much easier to learn to speak than Mandarin Chinese.

Maybe President Obama should learn some Chinese.

Half brother Mark Ndesandjo  lives in Shenzhen and married to a Chinese woman from Henan.

Half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng lives in Indonesia and her husband is Chinese too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik 

My problem with Asian languages is that they're extremely difficult to write or read the characters. You have to memorize thousands of characters, as opposed to 25-40 or so for other languages. As much as I'd like to learn Mandarin or Japanese, I don't want to spend upwards of ten years to become familiar with the written aspect.

Japanese is extremely easy to learn compared to Korean and Chinese IME. Japanese sounds are clear and simple. Hiragana and Katakana are almost easier than the alphabet. It's only when you mix in Chinese, Kanji characters that it gets difficult but even then it's not as difficult as Chinese. Spanish is rather simple to learn too, but I travel to Asia a lot more.

My problem with Korean is not the writing, but the speaking. Even as difficult as it is to learn Cantonese, learning to speak Korean from scratch is no easy task.
 

Russia has beautiful women.

I vote Russian. It's not as hard as it looks.

Italy also has beautiful women. Italian is easy and is really fun to speak.

Most Swedes already speak English. No need to learn that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanakaku 

 

 

 

You forgot flip!~pino, have you been to Bathurst? .. eheh as for me no need to learn, Since I'm in downtown GTA and most of my friends came from different kinds of flavors, We got good resources of translators over here very kind people... but I can understand Nihongo though. but cant grasp Kansai that well..

Large Filipino population, but the way all my Filipino friends put it, Tagalog isn't really a fully developed language and in the Philippines they mostly speak English.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wind016 

Japanese is extremely easy to learn compared to Korean and Chinese IME. Japanese sounds are clear and simple. Hiragana and Katakana are almost easier than the alphabet. It's only when you mix in Chinese, Kanji characters that it gets difficult but even then it's not as difficult as Chinese. Spanish is rather simple to learn too, but I travel to Asia a lot more.

 

My problem with Korean is not the writing, but the speaking. Even as difficult as it is to learn Cantonese, learning to speak Korean from scratch is no easy task.

Actually, Mandarin has five tones. It's what makes it so hard to speak, because if you're not articulate enough you'll be spewing accidental homonyms. Most Kanji is essentially Chinese characters, but pronounced differently. And although Chinese has thousands of characters by definition, many of them look quite close to each other, and are based on interchangeable, simpler characters called 'radicals'. Take 木, wood, 林, woods, and 森, forest, for instance - they're based on the same character.

I don't know much about Korean or Japanese, but I've read that they have a bunch of rules and honorifics, so aside from pronunciation, actually addressing other people is something else.

Chinese is still really hard, though. Actually, all non-Latin languages are hard, especially if you approach them with an English mindset, since they're so alien compared to English and the like.

And finally, if you do learn Chinese, please learn to read/write traditional, not simplified, characters. Keep the original characters alive - Chinese is a work of art, and you can't cut corners when it comes to art.