Marcovdw wrote:
I have exactly 4 days to learn how to pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Thank you, English teacher
May the almighty Minions help me
You could cheat like us Welshies and just call it Llanfair P G
I was just on wikipedia on the page: longest place names
For the Belgian/Dutchies here, a very funny one from South-Africa (South-African language is derived from Dutch, but is funny for us):
Methinks it is bested by
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu
(Which btw is the Maori for: 'The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one'
Marcovdw wrote:
I have exactly 4 days to learn how to pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Thank you, English teacher
May the almighty Minions help me
You could cheat like us Welshies and just call it Llanfair P G
I was just on wikipedia on the page: longest place names
For the Belgian/Dutchies here, a very funny one from South-Africa (South-African language is derived from Dutch, but is funny for us):
Methinks it is bested by
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu
(Which btw is the Maori for: 'The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one'
How is Serbian rated as one of hardest languages to learn, and it does not have any of these weird words? I mean, there's only "onomatopeja" and "otorinolaringolog", but that's easy (comparing to ones listed above).
Believe it or not, but Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. In comparison with other languages it has very odd rules, if there is a clear rule. For some reason, Dutchies have very few problems learning other languages though.
Today is the fateful day my trusty old Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP died.
There was no warning. I pulled it out of my pack to play some Zelda and instead the entire case part in the middle of the 2 hinges was shattered, and the screen casing to the right of the right hinge and cracked off of the right should button. I am not naive. There is no way to save my console that I know of.
I should have treated it better. I had a case for it but I couldn't keep it in the thing because it wouldn't fit with an original Game Boy game in there. So I just slipped in in and somehow it broke.
My GBA SP was my first console besides a computer besides borrowing my cousin's N64. I remember my first time playing it. I've had it for like 10 years. And now it's gone. I mean it still works technically. All the insides are fine. But superglue ain't fixing this one. And now it's run is over. At least as something I can legitimately use.
Just Tuesday I was playing a game on it and it was fine. It always makes me feel horrible when things break. Like why does time work the way it does.
But I didn't even break this. It just appeared broken. I shouldn't have kept it in the case. Now all I have is a broken GBA pieces for where the hing divider used to be. At least it lasted longer than the average iPhone about 5 times over.
Selwink wrote:
Believe it or not, but Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. In comparison with other languages it has very odd rules, if there is a clear rule. For some reason, Dutchies have very few problems learning other languages though.
Dutch is easy!!!!
Everytime i speak German i'm told i'm actually speaking Dutch cause i suck so much Then went to test this on a Dutch person and yep, they said i was speaking Dutch...
However if i'm drunk then my German is quite good apparently.
And Afrikaans is not exactly difficult... Yes it's not the same as Dutch but it's really not that difficult.
Admittedly i seem to have a gift for languages. I can do German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish very well. French and Swedish well. And can dip in and out off Afrikaans, Polish, Russian, Maori!, Hungarian, Suomi and Portuguese.
Please don't use Google Translate or something, or this:
So if I understand this correctly, this is comprehensible
edit: oh, and perhaps Dutch is easy for you, but what I hear from many others is that Dutch is very difficult. Even for the Dutchmen, considering the amount of mistakes you see pretty much everywhere
Edited by Selwink on 14-11-2013 21:28
Selwink wrote:
Believe it or not, but Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. In comparison with other languages it has very odd rules, if there is a clear rule. For some reason, Dutchies have very few problems learning other languages though.
even I know dutch
your argument is invalid
iirc Hungaric was the hardest language to learn, at least that's what I remember of SpiderTech - Cervelo Part 2
@baseballlover312
my deepest condolences Edited by SSJ2Luigi on 14-11-2013 21:21
Selwink wrote:
Believe it or not, but Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. In comparison with other languages it has very odd rules, if there is a clear rule. For some reason, Dutchies have very few problems learning other languages though.
even I know dutch
your argument is invalid
iirc Hungaric was the hardest language to learn, at least that's what I remember of SpiderTech - Cervelo Part 2
@baseballlover312
my deepest condolences
Apparently the hardest languages to learn world wide are Euskara (Basque Country) and Hungarian, as they dont have any relation to any language or any relation to any root/branch/origin (choose whatever word you want ) of any other language.
(Believe it or not, but while studying geography I actually had the time to learn some linguistics.. Well, i did have a 2nd subject up to last year which was a language...)
Oh and Selwink:
Dutch is a germanic Language! It is derived from the same origin as German and even ENGLISH (yes my dear Anglo-Saxons!) so it surely isnt the hardest language to learn!
Hell, I speak German and Luxembourgian and I get by just fine... Dutch is piss easy (excuse my french)!
And for those who wonder, other germanic languages are all of the scandinavian ones, Scots and even your selwinks regional language: frisian Edited by miggi133 on 15-11-2013 00:51
Because they want that title, those towns are almost never called that by locals...
Also, languages to learn depends on where you start, for a Brit, Dutch and German are quite easy, for a Frenchman, Spanish and Italian will be easy, most of the Slavic countries will have similar languages. Same for Scandinavia, China, and maybe even traditional languages (ish)
Regarding dutch; I've heard that for norwegians (or people who speak norwegian) it's relatively easy to learn. As with many germanic languages, alot of the words are either identical or very close.
I don't the sentence structure of dutch, though.
There's a fine line between "psychotherapist" and "psycho the rapist"
The ability to learn languages depends upon your personal base. A lot of languages share bases, and hence learning similar languages is a lot easier. Languages with different bases are harder. Languages with different alphabets are the hardest.
German and Dutch are very similar, thanks to the Germanic base. English is about 1/3rd Germanic base, so it's not too tough for English people to learn Dutch/German. It can be harder to learn English because it is a broad mix of bases, with some Romantic and some Scandinavian... and just some wtf
Italian, or more specifically Latin, is a common base set up. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian all share the Romantic base. So it's quite easy for a French person to learn Italian, but not so much if they were to learn German.
Danish, Swedish and Norwegian all share bases, which link in with Germanic ideas as well. And some English is taken from here as well.
Suomi (Finnish) is different, but is just a pretty simple language anyway.
There are some oddities around Western Europe, such as Basque and other old local dialects.
Central and Eastern Europe of course has different bases. Polish, Czech, and former Yugo states use a fairly normalized alphabet set up, but the bases are different, on the whole, from those in Western Europe. That said they are not overly radical but do pose unique challenges.
Hungarian... just mental.
Further east and there is a switch to Cyrillic. The new alphabet creates unique challenges and is hence much harder to learn. But once the alphabet is learned it opens up a wide variety of languages and variations, mostly stemming out from Russian.
Much further east and Asia is unique again, obviously. Different languages, but each one is unique. Cantonese is different to Mandarin, is different to Japanese.
And of course Arabic is different, but is widely spoken set up with local variability rather than differing languages.
Africa... yep that's just totally different, with incredible numbers of differing languages.
I thought Finn was a difficult language, based derived from Magyar (!).
Most if not all languages on the planet share the same basic structure though : subject, action, object. Or in more common terms, subject, verb, object.
Selwink wrote:
Believe it or not, but Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. In comparison with other languages it has very odd rules, if there is a clear rule. For some reason, Dutchies have very few problems learning other languages though.
even I know dutch
your argument is invalid
iirc Hungaric was the hardest language to learn, at least that's what I remember of SpiderTech - Cervelo Part 2
@baseballlover312
my deepest condolences
learn faroese, it's way harder! Dutch is also very similar to german
TheManxMissile wrote:
The ability to learn languages depends upon your personal base. A lot of languages share bases, and hence learning similar languages is a lot easier. Languages with different bases are harder. Languages with different alphabets are the hardest.
German and Dutch are very similar, thanks to the Germanic base. English is about 1/3rd Germanic base, so it's not too tough for English people to learn Dutch/German. It can be harder to learn English because it is a broad mix of bases, with some Romantic and some Scandinavian... and just some wtf
Italian, or more specifically Latin, is a common base set up. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian all share the Romantic base. So it's quite easy for a French person to learn Italian, but not so much if they were to learn German.
Danish, Swedish and Norwegian all share bases, which link in with Germanic ideas as well. And some English is taken from here as well.
Suomi (Finnish) is different, but is just a pretty simple language anyway.
There are some oddities around Western Europe, such as Basque and other old local dialects.
Central and Eastern Europe of course has different bases. Polish, Czech, and former Yugo states use a fairly normalized alphabet set up, but the bases are different, on the whole, from those in Western Europe. That said they are not overly radical but do pose unique challenges.
Hungarian... just mental.
Further east and there is a switch to Cyrillic. The new alphabet creates unique challenges and is hence much harder to learn. But once the alphabet is learned it opens up a wide variety of languages and variations, mostly stemming out from Russian.
Much further east and Asia is unique again, obviously. Different languages, but each one is unique. Cantonese is different to Mandarin, is different to Japanese.
And of course Arabic is different, but is widely spoken set up with local variability rather than differing languages.
Africa... yep that's just totally different, with incredible numbers of differing languages.
So basically, what I said in more (and better words). However this is not all entirely true, as almost all languages come from a variety of sources, you explained Britain, but there are others too. So Russian will have bits from Scandinavia, and from Turkey, which will in turn have bits from hundreds of languages, like Russia, Scandinavia, Arabia, Little nomadic tribal languages, Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, all other Balkan. Then there's the languages for, former colonies, which are normally tribal languages, often melded with their former ruler's tongue. So the groups system is a bit invalid, as everything is merged together.
The Hobbit wrote:
So basically, what I said in more (and better words). However this is not all entirely true, as almost all languages come from a variety of sources, you explained Britain, but there are others too. So Russian will have bits from Scandinavia, and from Turkey, which will in turn have bits from hundreds of languages, like Russia, Scandinavia, Arabia, Little nomadic tribal languages, Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, all other Balkan. Then there's the languages for, former colonies, which are normally tribal languages, often melded with their former ruler's tongue. So the groups system is a bit invalid, as everything is merged together.
Depends how detailed and far back you want to go. Overall it's nice and easy and general.
But lets go a step further than you did, back to the first true languages such as Sanskrit. Everything in the 'Western World' evolved from this basic language. Same thing happens in Asia, all stemming from one or two incredibly basic and ancient languages.
And let's go even further backwards. All man stems from Africa, and our only communications were basic pictorial paintings, which is the true origins of conventional languages. So Cantonese has the same base as Russian as British as Swahili if you go far enough.
Or do we go even further and say the basis was "oogga ooga grunt".
So, it comes full cycle, if you go out and hear half the kids on the street now! I think that you're right, which is good for us, but imagine if we encountered aliens, it would be nigh on impossible, unless they had voice boxes. Should this not now be in the difficult topics thread, at first it was, find the longest word, now it's the roots of all languages, for a gaming forum, this is remarkably high brow, everything must become a philosophical debate!
