How Many Languages Do You Know?

I just might take you up on the challenge.

Spoken Mandarin actually has no resemblance whatsoever the Japanese. English speakers usually pronounce spoken Mandarin better than Japanese people do (assuming they're all learning the language). I'll never forget a train trip to Shanghai when Japanese tourists were using me as an interpreter (English>Mandarin) in a conversation with a Chinese man and how he kept on looking at them, then me, as if he couldn't believe his eyes and we were playing some kind of trick. It'd be like if a dog started talking to you -- you'd be looking for a hidden camera and speaker.

Mandarin, Japanese, Malay are completely different language branches as well, one not resembling the other.

Here a weird language factoid:
-- The language of the Ainu minority in Japan resembles Basque so much that it could not be a coincidence.

Three: English, French and Arabic

I don't see this as a positive feature of the Arabic Language. It shows that it hasn't really evolved and I think it needs a bit of a shake up to join the modern times

But I do agree that it is a language worth learning.

Well, I forget which one is "standard", but arabic has like one or more major dialects per country. So Jordan and egypt speak different ones. Are you saying the written language is the same?

I have some arabic courses, etc... But, to tell you the truth, I haven't gone through many. I have been a bit bad about keeping up, but the ones I have studied are Danish, German, French, Spanish, Hindi. So I know, to some degree, 3 of the 5 most popular languages. The other two, of course, are chinese and arabic. Chinese and arabic have a number of things that will seem foreign to many.

I didn't even think of this before, though it IS one reason I never really looked at them that much, but for the 5 most popular languages, outside of english and spanish, which both use the latin alphabet, they ALL have different ways of conveying the written information. I WOULD say different alphabets, but that isn't quite right. I don't know about this part of arabic, but chinese tries to convey like concepts that may be used as words or to make up words. Hindi may have different sounds tied to a given position and the position may EVEN be out of place.

Let's say you read every symbol in the word "hindi"(the name of the language) in order. It would spell ihndi! The "letter" for the first I is understood to FOLLOW the letter it precedes! SO, though it is WRITTEN IHNDI, it is pronounced HINDI. BTW as I recall, though the BASE letters in hindi are rather modest, there are actually about 150 characters after you add all the potential changes below where the character starts. There are more ABOVE the character, but they indicate interstitial vowels, and I believe they are relatively new to hindi. Of course, by relatively new, that could be like 100years plus.

As for learning arabic? I found it hard enough to see the nuances in highschool, and my vision was far better then. My roommate showed me his farsi(persian) textbook, and farsi uses the arabic symbols. It is hard enough with hindi where a character may change such that the sound of the whole word may be different. I guess that might be almost as bad with chinese.

For SYMBOLS, one could say latin written languages are the easiest. There are only about 30 characters in the languages, and the differences are relatively obvious. BTW, I say ABOUT 30 characters because, though English, Spanish, Danish, German, French, Italian etc... all effectively use the latin character set, they are all slightly different. If I recall correctly, English has only the base characters and nothing else. But the other languages added several. In spanish, even ll is considered to be a different character, pronounced like Y(almost as in yolk). In danish, for example, there is an A with a ring over it, which is written as AA if the a with a ring over it isn't available. It is pronounced like a hard sharp O though. German has, among others, the esset, which is spelled with two ss' if not available. etc...

Steve

That to me stands as testimony of a pretty tightly knitted, isolated society with some undying normes. Language, being merely a code for our thought, always changes as society changes - an invasion can change language with startling speed. This is basically our misinformed politicians demand political correctness in the US now. They believe they will change our thought processes. I suppose it does in some form - but not in the way they were hoping it would.

I learned French and German. German in a conversational capacity because I lived there, and I took a couple of years of French in college...........and remember very little of either. I haven't used either in over 30 years, and I never did learn them well enough to think in them so I just forgot them over time.

I do have a degree in linguistics, though, so I can tell a lot of things about culture from their language if I know the structural pattern and have way to translate the words.

I've been thinking more and more about learning Russian lately. I probably will learn it at least remedially. Might be a good idea for something to do this winter.

I speak two languages. And I know a little bit about German.

I speak English, and French quite fluently. I have a good understanding of Italian (4 years of Latin helped!) and I know a little Maltese - my parents were both from Malta.
I would like to learn Spanish next. I love learning languages.