What's an easy but effective language to do?

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Reply 20

paddy

wesetters

It'd still be easier for a non-european type alphabet to learn esperanto than English lol

Exactly, but to be fair English is highly irregular.

Reply 21

Mr. Jim

wesetters

Yep. I'd hate to learn English as a second language.

totally. despite how it's annoying that english is everywhere it is pretty hard and i'm glad i've got it L1

Reply 22

generalebriety

English isn't hard at all. No more so than any other languages, anyway. If you speak German or Dutch, English is piss. If you speak Arabic, English is difficult, but if you speak English then Arabic is difficult. :confused:

Easy but effective... bah. German, Italian, Dutch. Why study a language if you want it to be easy? Languages are challenging. That's why I love them. :smile:

Reply 23

Mr. Jim

i found this poem, it's like 3 pages long and it's all about the irregularity of english spelling - all these homographs that don't sound like eachother.

Reply 24

Gael

three tenses I meant, not conjugations.

Reply 25

kashiya

Polish is DIFFICULT! and in my opinion there is no use in learning it - do rather a useful langauge.
Russian sounds good, but I'd say CHINESE is best :smile:

I know that I'm biased, coz I wanna do CHinese myself, but hey - politics, busines, translations etc. you can do all that in China. All the manufactures are moving there, countries see China as an important partner on the Itl scene and there are VERY FEW ppl who are fluent in English and Chinese. SO go for it :smile:

oh, Edit: I missed the fact that it has to be an easy languge. Well Chinese is not that easy but it is still worth the thing.
But an easy language? ENGLISH... Unfortunately you know it already... So maybe, I dunno. Sory...

Reply 26

NotEntirelyNormal

Norwegian!! :biggrin:

That's what I'll be doing! Mwahaha. I assume when you say French and Spanish are too boring, by that you mean all the commonly taught languages right? Well Norwegian (and in fact Swedish and Danish) are no more difficult than something like German... only just that tiny bit more exotic.

Finnish is terrifying, but is also fascinating. As it happens, I'm going to Finland in just over a weeks time just for a little trip cos I love it, but thats besides the point, lol. It's the fact that theres 14 or something ridiculous different cases and loads of the words are loooooads of letters long and seemingly made entirely of vowels. Plus its like they have a word that can mean "throat" or "cucumber" depending on the context. And a lot of it is based on suffixes... like to ask a question its a case of adding the ending -ko to something, but i cant remember what right now. lol. Its also one of those languages where if you get the combination of words right, it's possible to ask an entire question in one very long word. Also words in a sentence can be in any order it seems, but it changes the emphasis. Also a nice thing is that it has no... what are they called? The equivalents of "a" and "the" etc. lol (Bear with me - brain leak moment, lol) and therefore also no genders.

Both of these languages are effective in that a majority of people are impressed if you suddenly go off on one in either language because so few people have studied them... however in terms of employment or whatever, theyre kinda not really all that useful unless you fancy working for a Nordic company or something.

Reply 27

gaijin

shyopstv

Esperanto

Chinese is supposedly not as hard as people say it is. Speaking is apparantly easy once you get over the tonal aspect to the language because there is no hardcore grammar that you get in many European languages. Reading is hard because of having to remember all the symbols but if you learn 3 a day, after 3 years you will have over 3000

The two forms of Japanese kana only take a few weeks to learn and then you only need to learn the Chinese style Kanji. It is also not a tonal language like Chinese which makes things easier

But don't just go for a language because of its difficulty

You have to learn by heart about 6000 kanji to pass the Japanese government's exam of Japanese fluency I believe. Also kanji can mean several different things - meaning that this 6,000 can easily become 30,000 and so on. Plus not only have to learn the representation of the symbols but also how to write it, in the right stroke order.

Although the speaking and grammatical aspects of Japanese are some of the easiest bits of the language, you have to contend yourself with a honorific system that can make little or no sense to those in the west.

Its far from easy, but its far from hard as well.

Reply 28

username30638

Elebert

What language would you suggest and why? I'm just curious really. Russian is really interesting but hard. I like Arabic too but it's too hard. Persian is easy, or so Oxford claims and it sounds cool. French and Spanish are kind of boring. Czech and Polish are interesting but I don't think they're considered very useful in today's world, or are they? Japanese and Chinese have some curiosity for me, but they're way too hard.

So what do you think?

I think that you want to learn languages without making any effort. It's not going to happen I'm afraid.

Languages are difficult, there is no avoiding it. Some are easier than others, but all require time, patience and practice. If you're not prepared to dedicate yourself, there's no point even starting because you'll never progress.