Playing catch-up, so my apologies for the lengthy post...
Arwenel wrote:Other languages i've attempted to learn and then dropped like a hot potato are Esperanto and German. At some point i'd like to actually learn those, and French.
Ooh, I'd be interested in dabbling in Esperanto at some point. Apparently it's supposed to be easier than learning English, although obviously I don't remember the process of learning English.
On the other hand, I do remember reading years ago about the man who created the language. L.L. Zamenhof (what a cool name!) wrote this in a letter from 1895 describing his motivations to create a universal language:
"The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil."
Which leads me to another thought...
Lady Arwen wrote:Chinese is *fascinating*, just on the written side. Plus, despite being tonal, there is so much regional variation that some argue it should be classified as several different languages in the same family.
Oh my.
Ah well, more challenge!
I have a particular interest in learning to read Chinese, and those thoughts are somewhat similar to L.L. Zamenhof's ideas that led him to create Esperanto, though perhaps ultimately more practical than idealistic.
A few years ago, I read that Cantonese is spoken southern China and Mandarin in northern China and that these languages are largely unintelligible to one another, but Cantonese and Mandarin speakers can communicate with each other just fine if they have a pen and paper because they use the same logographic writing system! When I discovered that, I thought "Well, everyone should just learn how to read and write Chinese and then everyone will be able to talk to each other, and we'll have world peace."
And then I remembered that I thought the internet was going to help bring about world peace, too.
And the Tower of Babel.
But still, how cool is that? With China rising as a world superpower, too, I'm sure that we'll need more readers and writers of the language as time goes on... I want to be one of them!
I know you've been using Chineasy for learning Chinese characters,
Wren... what resources are you using to learn Chinese,
hmj97? (And
Gymfan, too, although I believe you said you mostly learned through immersion.) I know that
Busuu.com offers a course in Chinese, but I've haven't tried using that site yet. Thinking about signing up for it soon, though, because they still have the launch date for the Korean course on Duolingo as 12/31/99.
Gymfan15 wrote:I never thought Chinese would be a language I'd learn but living in Asia makes it awfully convenient.
I think most people get freaked out by the tones and characters but honestly once you get past that it's really not a difficult language...the grammar structure is not complicated and you don't need a HUGE vocabulary base in order to communicate.
That's one thing that I've found interesting about learning languages is that some languages seem a lot more "economical" than others. I don't know if it's just because I didn't get very far with Russian, but it seemed like they could say a
lot in just a few syllables.
It's also strange for me to think that in Chinese, they probably don't have a bunch of words that essentially mean the same thing the way we do in English because their written language is logographic... I mean, would they even have thesauruses in China?
Varnafinde wrote:Some linguists say that Swedish, Norwegian and Danish aren't really separate languages. If we went by the language definitions we use elsewhere in the world, they would be seen as dialects of one language.
Oooh. That sounds like a three-for-one deal to me.
Among those three languages, is there one that seems like more of a middle point than the others, or are they all equally different? (Trying to figure out which one would offer me the most of an edge over the other remaining two, should I decide to learn one at some point!)
waggawerewolf27 wrote:Interestingly, Norwegian is still said to be spoken in the Orkneys, a group of Scottish islands closer to Norway than they are to London.
That makes a lot sense to me, because when I'm following etymological links in family names, my Scottish ancestry
might ultimately imply Norwegian ancestry at some point in the very distant past, but I'm still researching. (Briefly wandering a bit off-topic, but I actually started on this very fascinating journey into family history because of you mentioning the ancient overkingdom of Dal Riata on another thread, so thank you for that!
We really need a thread for discussion about ancestry.
)
wagga wrote:For all its dominance as a major World language, English was never the only language spoken in the British Isles. Some languages such as Manx and Cornish have died out, but Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic (Erse) have undergone a revival. I'd love to learn Scottish Gaelic, just to broaden my non-Gaelic but Scottish-born husband's education,
but I'm getting too old to remember anything for long.
Oh, that's only because you're already storing so many thousands of facts about history in your brain!
I'd also love to learn some Scottish Gaelic, just because of my aforementioned Scottish ancestry.
wagga wrote:Medical terminology uses Greek-based words quite extensively, and to some extent, mathematics and science as well. And Greek-based words like television, telephone, polygon, hexagonal, physics, psychology etc, are about as numerous as the Latin based words which occur not only in English, but also in many other European languages.
That's very true! Τηλέφωνο and τηλεόραση for telephone and television, and ψυχή means psyche, or soul... and the Greek pronunciation is so much prettier than ours. It sounds so airy and makes me think of the wind.
hmj97 wrote:If you ever want a language with a lot of untouched history, give Icelandic a try - their orthography hasn't had any major changes in at least the last 400-600 years, so many Icelanders can easily read old scrolls from centuries past.
I already have an interest in medieval Iceland, so that would be very cool to try to learn at some point! Especially if it meant reading some of the Sagas in their original language... that would be pretty awesome. I do follow the
YouTube channel of an Old Norse specialist and translator (who also dresses like a cowboy; a bit of cognitive dissonance there
); I bet you might enjoy some of his videos. He'll discuss Icelandic as well as other ancient Scandinavian languages, while I usually watch his videos talking about ancient myth.