<p>i always get mixed up with pronouncing elisions correctly:
j'ai trop peu d'argent
a technique i use to correct my problem is to write the d really really close to argent, or i just use cursive to join those letters.</p>
<p>i looked at arabic and the script looks really easy. chinese characters are all over the place, but arabic seems to be basically a straight line on which various marks are added.</p>
<p>fabrizio,</p>
<p>You make it sound like memorizing characters is...almost easy! As a non-native, it's not quite that simple. Even with radicals, character understanding building is very very difficult as a non-native. And while it does get easier over time, it doesn't get that much easier.</p>
<p>And yes, 2 to 3 thousand hanzi means reading fluency. But that doesn't mean that that task itself is easier than learning the vocabulary needed to read an English newspaper.</p>
<p>I have to disagree with everyone saying that Japanese is harder than Korean. My mom is fluent in both, and they are actually very much alike. If you know one, you will pick up the other extremely fast. The grammatical structure is pretty much the same, and some words with the same meaning sound pretty similar to the other language's.</p>
<p>I'm currently fluent in Korean and I'm learning Japanese from my mom - it's a breeze. I encourage everyone to learn these languages - they're a lot of fun!</p>
<p>I'm also teaching myself Russian at the moment, and it's pretty easy so far. Once you've memorized the alphabet aka Cyrillic letters, you're set. I think from that point on it's all grammar and vocabulary.</p>
<p>spiffystars,</p>
<p>Yes, but have you learned all the kanji? </p>
<p>What makes Japanese harder is not necessarily just the grammar or vocab, but learning how to read and write as well.</p>
<p>You should all just learn Finnish.</p>
<p>UCLAri - nope, I haven't learned the kanji yet. I'm actually trying to learn how to speak it before I learn the characters, etc. From what my sister tells me, it's not that hard. I know how to read and write Korean, and it shouldn't be too different or difficult than that, right?</p>
<p>it's gonna be difficulty</p>
<p>korean writing (hangul) is EASY....kanji characters are like learning every word separately to no system.</p>
<p>spiffystars,</p>
<p>Well, keep in mind that learning how to properly write Japanese is a different experience altogether.</p>
<p>Not only are there specific styles for writing (conjugation differs), you need to learn kana and thousands of kanji. Kanji is even more complicated in use than Chinese characters (hanzi) because the Japanese have multiple readings for each character!</p>
<p>You (both) raise a valid point. Well, bring it on, I say! My mom taught herself Japanese when she was eight from a book (while she was in Korea during the Korean War...she's so old, haha); I think I can learn it too with her help. Thanks for the enlightenment though, I'll just try harder :)</p>
<p>And yes, Korean writing/hangul is pretty easy unless you count out the bachims (don't know the word in English...the characters that go on the bottom!), I STILL have trouble with those! :p</p>
<p>UCLAri,</p>
<p>Sorry if that's how my post came across!</p>
<p>I meant to clarify some common misunderstandings with character-based writing systems. All too often I hear "3,000 characters? <em>Jaw drops</em> How can you know so many?"</p>
<p>In my mind, I'm aware that they're still thinking that each character is distinct and totally independent of one another (like a letter in an alphabet).</p>
<p>That's what I wanted to clarify.</p>
<p>fabrizio,</p>
<p>True! But then you get Japanese kanji, where they sometimes totally disregard any sort of patterns with some characters, and instead opt for randomly assigned meanings just for the heck of it. </p>
<p>I <3 Japanese.</p>
<p>My school had a 'linguistics' class in 7th grade which was basically a survey of the 4 languages the high school offered (French, German, Spanish, Latin) and the teacher was always telling us that German was the closest to English and therefore the easiest to learn. Now, she was also the first-year German teacher so she may have been just a tad bit biased. ;) I found it pretty easy to learn and I like the fact that things are actually spelled phonetically. We also learned a lot of Greek and Latin roots in one of my English classes and I find that between knowing those, English, German, and having Spanish written on damn near everything nowadays, I can understand a fair amount of the Romance languages without ever having really studied them. Shame my German teacher never saw it fit to teach us much vocabulary of practical use in everyday life. :(</p>
<p>Jhe' quaqe jehne' temie' pleu'?</p>
<p>slkelt tvish sehie ahkdu vand tohu halso?</p>
<p>Spanish can be pretty easy once you figure out how Spanish sentences are formed.</p>
<p>i'm really curious. do native french speakers know the gender fo ALL the nouns? it's really difficult to learn some noun's gender because of elision. apart from learning every word with its gender, for every verb u have to learn the accompanying prepositions. french is really tedious in this way. does other romance language have the same inconvenience?</p>
<p>i heard lot of ataic languages have no gender or no article at all. they must be pretty easy. </p>
<p>arabic seems easier than russian. russian alphabet is too intricate while arabic is a bit simple.</p>
<p>For me it also depends on what you consider learning the language. Like, I find French easier to read than Italian (despite the fact that I've taken Italian much more recently than I've taken French), but I find Italian much easier to understand when its spoken. Italian is easier to write, too, but that's mainly because it's easier to spell.</p>
<p>As a speaker of Hindi since the beginning and a speaker of English as an Indian-American I can tell you for a fact that anglophones would find Hindi to be harder than English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and most of european languages (maybe excluding hungarian, russian, etc. because they look nothing like the script that is used by rest of europe). But hindi is a straight forward language once you get used to the unusual pronunciations and strange grammatical concepts. Anglophones would definitely find Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Thai, etc. to be the hardest language of all the languages. Even I think Chinese, Thai, Japanese would be impossible for me to learn but I think I could handle Arabic because it has some similarities in pronunciations with Hindi.</p>
<p>hkapoo,</p>
<p>I wouldn't call it impossible. I mean, if you're willing to shut yourself into a room for 30 hours a week and slog through kanji/hanzi, you can do it.</p>
<p>YOU CAN DOOOOO IT! (to quote a bad movie line.)</p>
<p>Yeah... I got better things to do. Sorry :P</p>
<p>Oh, c'mon...what's better than memorizing thousands of hieroglyphs? </p>
<p>I dare you to come up with something better than that. Triple dog dare you!</p>