Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

On Tuesday, May 25, 2004, at 05:31 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 04:43:21PM +0100, Joe wrote:
>> Easy:
>> (roughly in order, probably)
>> Dutch(possibly the easiest major world language to learn)/Afrikaans
>
> This is all horribly subjective,
Well, yeah - it can't be otherwise.

[snip]

>> French
>
> Er.  French?  Easier than the other Romance languages - for
> Anglophones? Are you feeling okay?  Temperature, perhaps? :)
Gosh - yes, must be.

> Having studied both Spanish and French I found Spanish much, much easier
> -
Agreed.

> even
> though I learned it first and therefore had its Romanceness on the brain
> to
> help me with French.  And Italian is only slightly harder than Spanish,
> while still easier than French.
What? I agree, easier than French - But harder than Spanish? Nah - but
then I guess Italian seems easy 'cos I've  been pretty well acquainted
with Latin for more than 50 years  ;)

>> German
>
> I would say German is harder than any of the Romance languages, despite
> the familial relationship with English.  It's those darn cases.
Certainly to read - those tortuous sentences :=(

>  I would
> put German on par with Russian, actually; I think the only thing that
> makes
> Russian more difficult than German is the extra hurdle of learning a new
> alphabet.
No that I didn't find a hurdle. I guess knowing the Greek alphabet made
Cyrillic come very easily.

but, hey, you guys, Welsh is pretty easy - and interesting too   ;-)

As for _interesting_ languages - where do I start? All the native American
ones - I'd be very interested to get hold of stuff on native Australian
langs - quite a lot in Africa - I guess, anything unusual or that I've had
little chance to get acquainted with.

Ray
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