Language Learners

[bwv 1080]

Romanian too has a very phonetic spelling: except for x in some words, everything is always pronounced exactly as written. 

Interesting that Romanian is considered significantly easier for an English speaker to learn than other Eastern European languages

[North Star]

Interesting that Romanian is considered significantly easier for an English speaker to learn than other Eastern European languages

Romanian is a Romance language so it's not strange that it should be in the same category as other Romance languages.

[bwv 1080]

Romanian is a Romance language so it's not strange that it should be in the same category as other Romance languages.

I guess we can all thank Trajan

[Spineur]

Interesting to see that Welsh, Basque and Brittany are unclassified languages, and Catalan doesnt even exist on their map.  Biased foreign service institute

[bwv 1080]

Interesting to see that Welsh, Basque and Brittany are unclassified languages, and Catalan doesnt even exist on their map.  Biased foreign service institute

They are diplomats, not anthropologists

[Jo498]

I mostly watch English language videos on youtube, so sorry I cannot recommend any in German. But there are quite a few about learning German, usually adressed to speakers of English.

There is also a nice app/program (I am only familiar with the PC/web version as I do not have a smartphone) called duolingo. It's just for the basics but it is fun. I dabbled with Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Greek in the last year with this tool. Problem is to get the energy and time for what should follow or what one needs for backup in grammar because duolingo is to gamified to get a real grip on grammar...

[Jo498]

Interesting that according to the map no European language is in the bright yellow category, German is the only one in the dark yellow, Icelandic is MUCH harder than the other Scandinavian languages (I would still have expected it to be easier than the Slavic ones or Turkish) and that Turkish is considered much easier than Arabic (I have no clue about either, I guess the writing is a big additional stumbling block in Arabic) I should also have thought that Dutch was easier for an English speaker than Swedish or Portuguese.

Catalan: red
Welsh: at least green or maybe light blue
Basque: at least dark blue or supposedly harder than that

[zamyrabyrd]

North Africa is blue, so Arabic should be among the hardest for native English speakers. I second that.
My son is learning Finnish, supposed to be difficult.
This year I am concentrating on Japanese.
The problem for those who think in English are the constructions of different languages, those with verbs at the end such as German and Japanese. Arabic has them at the beginning. Inflections take some time getting used to rather than relying on the place of a word in a sentence. Clauses are such in Japanese that one has to think backwards. Google Translate has picked up on that and reverses word order but not all the time.

[Jo498]

Because people learn the native language automatically, oddities of one's own language do not prepare one well for those of other languages because they are not made explicit. (English might be particularly bad as preparation for learning foreign languages because it is mostly very simple in grammar and hard in non-transferable things like grapheme-phoneme correspondence and idiomatic phrases. It is really pretty bad as an international lingua franca but history does not care.)

The best thing is probably to grow up multilingually (but again as a small child language learning works differently) and start learning foreign languages as early as possible. I guess some pronunciations will still always be very hard (especially for adult learners).

I never tried a non-Indoeuropean language with a very different structure and I guess that this can be really hard, maybe even harder if one already has knowledge of a bunch of similar languages (like English, French, German or so) and might have even more problems to wrap one's mind around totally different patterns. Vocab is also much harder, of course, than with fairly closely related languages.
Overall the learning times in the map seems quite optimistic and only apply to gifted people and/or total immersion in the foreign language + daily classes or so.

[Florestan]

Romanian is a Romance language so it's not strange that it should be in the same category as other Romance languages.

The funny thing is that, while for a Romanian is rather easy to learn other Romance languages, especially if s/he has native talent for and keen interest in that (like yours truly, for instance: I can understand 75% of spoken Italian / Spanish / Portuguese / Catalan and close to 100% when reading it, without any formal training whatsoever; I've studied only French), the reverse is not automatically true: Frenchmen or Spaniards have difficulty understanding Romanian without studying it. Of all the Romance languages, though, the closest to Romanian is Italian, followed by Catalan --- of all the Romance people I've met, the ones who were most able to understand something at first hear were from Southern Italy. 

[zamyrabyrd]

The funny thing is that, while for a Romanian is rather easy to learn other Romance languages, especially if s/he has native talent for and keen interest in that (like yours truly, for instance: I can understand 75% of spoken Italian / Spanish / Portuguese / Catalan and close to 100% when reading it, without any formal training whatsoever; I've studied only French), the reverse is not automatically true: Frenchmen or Spaniards have difficulty understanding Romanian without studying it. Of all the Romance languages, though, the closest to Romanian is Italian, followed by Catalan --- of all the Romance people I've met, the ones who were most able to understand something at first hear were from Southern Italy.

Romanians in my circle of acquaintance used to read Corriere della Sera without blinking an eye. It was an effort for me to learn Italian, despite my background, having heard dialect spoken by my grandparents and my parents to them from a young age.  They also seem to be at ease in Latin.

[Florestan]

Romanians in my circle of acquaintance used to read Corriere della Sera without blinking an eye.

Well, Corriere della Sera translates in Romanian as Curierul de Seară.

I just took a look at their website and picked this news:

Roma, esplode bomba davanti alla caserma dei carabinieri a San Giovanni.

Romanian translation: Roma, bombă explodată în faţa cazărmii carabinierilor la San Giovanni.

Latin: in patria nostra multe silvae sunt. Romanian: în patria noastră multe păduri sunt. The apparently dissonant word "păduri" (forests) is actually derived from another (vulgar) Latin word, padule. 

[zamyrabyrd]

Well, Corriere della Sera translates in Romanian as Curierul de Seară.
I just took a look at their website and picked this news:
Roma, esplode bomba davanti alla caserma dei carabinieri a San Giovanni.
Romanian translation: Roma, bombă explodată în faţa cazărmii carabinierilor la San Giovanni.

Will be interesting to know qui a fatto questo. Did not hear about it on CNN.

[Florestan]

Will be interesting to know qui a fatto questo. Did not hear about it on CNN.

L'attentato la mattina di giovedì, intorno alle 5.30 in via Britannia. Nessun ferito. Movente oscuro. Nella stessa caserma un altro attentato 30 anni fa. La procura indaga per terrorismo a carico di ignoti.

[arkiv]

Roma, esplode bomba davanti alla caserma dei carabinieri a San Giovanni.

Romanian translation: Roma, bombă explodată în faţa cazărmii carabinierilor la San Giovanni.

Español: Roma, explota bomba frente al cuartel de los carabineros en San Giovanni.

[rhomboid]

Some fake polyglots on Youtube.

[Karl Henning]

A few (apparently small) things about Dutch grammar which I cannot quite suss out on my own.

[greg]

Should be plenty of Dutch people here to help with that.


Finishing up a game tomorrow (visual novel) entirely in Japanese, and am about to start a collection of short stories which haven't been translated into English. Feeling some progress, for sure, though unfortunately the whole learning process is so slow that you'll never get quick ecstatic jolts from it unless you have photographic memory or something. This language by itself takes as long to learn as 4 or 5 of the easier European languages, after all.

[Karl Henning]

Should be plenty of Dutch people here to help with that.


Finishing up a game tomorrow (visual novel) entirely in Japanese, and am about to start a collection of short stories which haven't been translated into English. Feeling some progress, for sure, though unfortunately the whole learning process is so slow that you'll never get quick ecstatic jolts from it unless you have photographic memory or something. This language by itself takes as long to learn as 4 or 5 of the easier European languages, after all.

Yep, it's a mighty long haul.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

I know that the Russian and Cyrillic alphabets were largely influenced by Greek letters. Any Greek influences on the nouns, grammars and others in the Russian language? I see many Russian people in Greece.