Re: Rating Languages

>From: Colin Halverson <CHalvrson@...>
>Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 22:00:56 EDT
>
>Hey, I was wondering what you people think is the hardest language to learn
>(of the languages you know).  I've heard Hungarian is hard (of course I
>don't
>know any one who speaks Hungarian)?  Of course I would be wondering from an
>English point of view.
>
Well, I don't speak Hungarian either, but I found it quite easy to pronounce
well enough to not confuse folks on the streets of Budapest (with the aid of
my handy-dandy phrase book).  Of course that didn't help me understand their
answers!  And of course, I had no need to understand the grammar of what I
was repeating from rote memorization or reading straight out of the book.

>Also- are Chinese languages hard?  Are there many similarities between
>Cantonese and Mandarin?
If you can catch the tones Mandarin is not hard to speak, at least to me.
But learning to read and write is well, I don't think there's an apropriate
word in English.  Difficult doesn't quite cover it.

Cantonese and Mandarin share the same writen language (for the most part)
but the sounds and word choices of the spoken languages differ quite a bit.
And Taiwanese (another Chinese "dialect") has tone sandhi rules that are
just more fun than a barrel of monkeys.


And some-what on the same topic, are East Indian
>languages hard or similar.  I know some Indians and they all know about
>four
>Indian languages  (Bengali, Panjabi, Telugu and Hindi I think) who say they
>are different, but when I hear them the words sound similar to me- of
>course
>I live in a town of 2,000 with about 80 people of color, so what can I say?
Well, the northern Indian langs (like Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi, Gujarati,
etc.) do sound quite similar to me too.  I speak none of them so, like you,
I'm just going by the sound.  However Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam, etc. from the
Dravidian family in the south sound rather more distinct (as a group).  It's
something about the rythm and the greater preponderance of retroflexes(?), I
think.

Adam

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