How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?)

[Mr Poltroon]

There are also countless surveys like this one: http://www.lexiophiles.com/featured-articles/results-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-poll

It asked readers to select the hardest languages to speak properly, to write properly, and to learn overall. English made the top 10 all three times.

However, this is all ignoring more obscure, ridiculously hard languages. For example read the paragraph for Tsez in this article: https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-non-indo-european-languages/

[Satsuki]

Btw, how come did Japanese and Korean get into top hard to pronounce language?

Should have put Vietnamese in instead.

One hour trying, and my homestay's host still couldn't pronounce my name right.

[Yeah Way]

Do you think English being the most taught language factors into this?

For example, 100 people learnt English, out of a 100, 31 thought it was hard. 30 people learnt French, out of 30, 30 thought it was hard. Mandarin, a language everyone is trying to learn nowadays, is right there up top.

 

 

And Portuguese being easy is nonsense. I refuse to believe it. I can't comment on Italian but I am a Portugueseman who failed to learn Spanish in school, so that's another one I don't agree with.

Subjective personal experiences 

[SanadaShadow]

It's just the way our brains are wired, eh?

[Satsuki]

Onto the subject (now we are officially derailed), I have no trouble understanding British/US/Aus English. However, Indian English is a nightmare for me. I met lots of Indian, and they almost always need to repeat 2-4th times for me to get what they said. Their accent is just...I don't know, just so hard to make out the word.

[Deep Blue]

Romance languages like the ever-popular Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Swedish and Norwegian are also said to be much more regular than English, though I don't know much about those two in particualr myself.

 

Whilst I did say "English is often regarded as one of the hardest languages", now that I go back over my materials, there are about as many people saying the opposite. ^^b

 

For example, here's a post which used a study by the US Army School of Languages: https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn/

It features a ranking system from 1-6 to represent difficulty of learning for English speakers. It also gave English a score, based on 'English-learners'. (Native countries/languages not mentioned) The study is highly contested, but it's the ony real academic source I could ever find on this subject that includes English itself.

 

There are also countless surveys like this one: http://www.lexiophiles.com/featured-articles/results-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-poll

It asked readers to select the hardest languages to speak properly, to write properly, and to learn overall. English made the top 10 all three times.

However, this is all ignoring more obscure, ridiculously hard languages. For example read the paragraph for Tsez in this article: https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-non-indo-european-languages/

 

So yeah, I think I'll be more careful next time with my wording when I talk about this.

[Yeah Way]

I can assure you that spanish is not an easy language to learn and it's pure bullshit in every sense you can imagine, specially speaking in a grammatical sense, writing in english is so much easier, for instance you don't have to use diacritics which any spanish speaker can tell you they are a pain in the ass to learn and to use, the same verb can change depending on where you place the diacritic, for example the verb cargar = to load can change depending on the use of the diacritic.For example "él cargó = he loaded", "yo cargo = I load" (and el and él means different things too, él = him but only used if you don't use the subject of the sentence, el = the) and that's just a tiny example on the many maaany things you need to learn, and when you pronounce something it's the same, like saying obasan vs obaasan in Japanese they sound very similar but they mean different things.

Oh and you have the spanish from spain(with its many dialects)  and the many variations from south and central america, for example when I hear a person from Chile speaking I can hardly understand it.

[SanadaShadow]

IT DEPENDS ON HOW YOUR BRAIN IS WIRED.

All the experiences you've had make it easier to learn something and harder to learn something else. If your first language was Swahili, you might have some trouble understanding French or something.

[Deep Blue]

I know all this. I'm learning Spanish...

 

It's really not hard at all. The easiest language I've learnt.

[Yeah Way]

Well lucky you I still have problems using diacritics from time to time xD and probably you have a facility to learn languages in general.

Not really. It's just that, compared to Japanese and Irish, I've found Spanish far easier.

 

What's your native language, if you don't mind me asking? English?

[Deep Blue]

Not really. It's just that, compared to Japanese and Irish, I've found Spanish far easier.

 

What's your native language, if you don't mind me asking? English?

My native language is spanish

Compared to Japanese it is, btw I'm not saying that Spanish is one of the hardest language out there I'm just saying it's not an easy one, I think italian it's much more easier.

[Nosebleed]

I can not conform with the fact English is easier than Portuguese when it took me double the time to understand how the latter worked while being a native.

In Portuguese everything has a gender. A table is a girl and you'd use a feminine pronoun to refer to it. 

The amount of tenses in Portuguese is also triple of the ones in English and unlike English, tenses in Portuguese as well as most romanic languages are all about adding different suffixes for every personal pronoun in every tense whereas English has much, much simpler and encompassing rules most people can easily get behind with.

Also, English doesn't have accents or freaking çedillas.

To put it in prespective, I'm worse at remembering Portuguese grammar and spelling than I am at remembering English grammar.

 

Note I'm not encompassing pronounciation here. There's certain languages that make pronouncing English properly more difficult.

But in terms of learning the rules, it's pretty straightforward so even if your accent is bad, you can probably still form useful sentences with a little practice.

 

 

This chart is probably relevant.

It shows the difficulty of certain languages in comparison to English. 

I have to agree learning English when you're Portuguese is easy due to the way both are structured in terms of Syntax (it's pretty much the same with the exception of adverb/adjective and noun/verb order but once you get used to that everything is pretty much the same)

[Kimossab]

I just gotta say, wether a language is easy or hard to learn depends alot on your native language and on how often words/sentences/whatever appears in the language what you want to learn in your country.

 

So explain that better I'll give myself as an example. I'm portuguese, all my life I've been hearing/reading spanish words/sentences/whatever. Most of the games I played I played in spanish when I had that option, because it was similar to portuguese. In time I came understand more words and they're meanings. I never really studied spanish and don't intend to do so. While I'm not very good at it, I know enough to understand a spanish and to make myself understood when needed.

 

Another example: about english, most movies are american movies, most songs played on the radio are either in portuguese or english (in your countries should be the same or similar of course changing the portuguese to your language). So wether we want or not we get used to those words and soon start to memorizing a few. About movies it makes everything more easy, because you got subtitles so you can match a few words to the they're meaning in portuguese. Adding that to the factor that english is very similar to portuguese and the grammar is easier, we can say that english is easy to learn. Though for those countries where those same american movies are dubbed and not subbed it becomes far harder to learn that same language.

 

So it's pointless discussing what languages are easy or hard to learn because that will change from person to person, from country to country, from culture to culture...

 

Just for the love of god, don't say portuguese is easy. It has one of the most fucked up grammars -.-

[Amon]

German with half Russian roots, but currently fully immersed in English and Japanese.

[Yuuko]

A table is a girl

[Funyarinpa]

 

Reminds me of the beginning of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

[Zakamutt]

To be honest, I find the word gender thing a bit overblown, depending on how the language works. In Swedish you'll sound silly, but you'll still be understood fine if you use conjugations belonging to the wrong gender.

 

Granted, In Japanese the entire meaning will change if you miss the verb type (ru vs u) and conjugate it w/ that (for example, "cut" and "to wear/put on [clothes]" are both "kiru", but they are of different verb types. Want to use the polite forms? One now has the masu-stem ki, and the other kiri. G_G (that said Fapanese grammar is pretty regular in general, what trips you up is more how sentences are built up)). Kanji does make this easier, but you won't have that luxury if you're actually speaking lol.

 

Swedish is apparently v. close to English in general, but considering all the subtitled TV shows etc there's a lot of immersion factor as well. Probably the main issue for us would be the th- sound, but really you can train yourself to make new sounds fairly quickly I find. Our r is also closer to the Fapanese r (though we have an r-l split, best of both worlds!).

 

We're only like 8mil people though so there's not much point in learning Swedish, people get English anyway too w

 

Also nose, aren't you supposed to split the topic now?

[Eclipsed]

^ikr

 

~~

I'm California, USA

[Pyonnu]

A lot of (other) Fuwa members from California, I'm surprised! I thought I would see more from New York or something.

[Kosakyun]

I'm California, USA

 

Well hello, California.

 

About the language thingy, I refuse to agree that any language who gives gender to its objects is easy.

I mean, it would be hella easy if objects had dicks or boobs. But noooo.

[Satsuki]

I know that all vehicles are female (all be called "her"). The others, don't know~

[Kosakyun]

I must admit though, fourchette's pronounciation is really nice.

[madvanced]

It seems I'm quite late to the party, but as everyone knows I'm from Portugal.

 

No one can stop the Portuguese speaking community from reigning over Fuwa.

[Yeah Way]

It seems I'm quite late to the party, but as everyone knows I'm from Portugal.

 

No one can stop the Portuguese speaking community from reigning over Fuwa.

There sure seem to be a lot! I'm surprised there aren't Portuguese-only threads or a Portuguese sub-forum at this stage. xD

[madvanced]

There sure seem to be a lot! I'm surprised there aren't Portuguese-only threads or a Portuguese sub-forum at this stage. xD

I don't know about the others, but I'm perfectly fine with English. Rather I much prefer to use it.

 

I've come to be more comfortable using it this way, since it's the language that I use the most. The subtleties and nuances of the English language seem sometimes easier to grasp, believe or not.

 

Having to use the 2 languages inside Fuwa would make have to switch gears, inside my mind, more often that I would like to.