Topic: Which (natural) language should I learn? - page 4. (Read 10615 times)

Russian has been pretty fun so far... 



(Not super practical though. Spanish and french are my "practical" suits as of now.)

Italian, the closest to Latin of modern romance languages, is directly based on 13th century aristocratic Florentine. Dante Alighieri gathered the various dialects of Tuscany to produce what he thought was the most beautiful language for his poetry, La divina commedia in particular.

I've read the English translation of that. It is very good (though kind of strange). So I guess I would be interested in some Spanish literature.

It means that any common language is similarly rich and complex when taking all variables into consideration. Difficulty adjusts to human capability. As areas of the language grow other areas get deprecated.

Gabriel García Márquez' "El amor en los tiempos del cólera" is the most beautifully written book I've ever read. It's a pleasure in English, but...

A few lines of Pablo Neruda's poems will make most latin women wet and gringo chicks will wonder what power you wield.


And it is consistently structured, unlike say, English.


What does this mean?

German is good because it's a good step towards many other Germanic languages. It's not harder than Russian. As with many other languages with complex grammars (basically all major European languages have much more complex grammars than English) the grammar variation allows to make more constructions and you can express more memorising fewer morphemes.

All important languages are similarly complex. Languages are shaped by the complexity of culture and thought, and that's similarly complex for all peoples of the world. However, it's much easier when you have more common ground.

Learning a language is always a good idea, as it helps to communicate. ... uhm to and with whom?

It´s even worse! Natur and grammar can´t agree genderwise. Read "A Tramp Abroad" by Mark Twain to be profoundly convinced. 

Bugger! You forgot Switzerland ... although ä klisigs Chuchichäschtli is pretty ununderstandable to any native german.
Once you come along northern Germany make sure to know what "Feudel und Leuwagen" is. It is something like "42 and towel" so to speak. But rarely anybody who knows what a Gummmere or Naggebuzzle is will know what you are talking about and vice versa.
Nevertheless german helps you very well through all of europe from Portugal to Montenegro as well as from Norway to Sicily. It is spoken in Belgium and northern Italy, of cause Luxembourg and ... check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language
So far so good, but why bother whilst your english is good enough to by some Schrippen.

Have you considerd Latin or Sanskrit? Ok ... just kidding but still those two have a purpose of their own.
Russian? .... ja nje gawarju pa ruski ... which is the german way to say: I don´t speak russian.
Keep ya ljoobljoo tey ya in mind, the most important sentence in any language. 

French. It's simple, light to the senses and Quebec is amazing.

You forgot Quichua spoken by a large portion of the South American Natives

Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn. There are few difficult sounds to pronounce, it's widely spoken, beautiful, with much exposure and many resources (TV, books, net). If you can write Spanish you can speak it, if you can hear it you can read it. Few languages share that bijective property. Spanish has one of the easiest learning curves and does not get difficult until you learn very advanced (beyond conversational) grammar.

Learning any romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Catalan, etc) will help when learning any other romance. Learning any language at all will give you the mental tools to learn others.

Ease is not the only criteria for learning a language, but if you do plan to learn several languages, starting with an easy language can be a good strategy. I do not think that learning the tones of east Asian languages is a huge barrier. I learned a great deal of Thai (five tones) just listening to audio on repeat while I slept. The Thai people are extraordinarily encouraging and if you can handle being laughed at with, anyone on the street is an enthusiastic teacher. After some Thai, picking up conversational Lao (six tones) was cake. The tonal ear will help with others like Vietnamese (6) and maybe even Cantonese (with nine tones!).

Chinese characters are incredibly difficult will be time consuming to pick up, but learning them can be a fascinating endeavor. Perhaps more rewarding and motivated if you are actually in China (simplified) or Taiwan (traditional). Considering you intend to learn Japanese, you could start with the ~2000 tōyō and jōyō kanji which are shared between Chinese and Japanese (and are essentially the only Chinese characters used in Japan). Japanese has a few distinct sounds and predictable vowels. Mandarin Chinese has a few more phonemes and the added beauty of four tones.

In my opinion, the most fascinating languages are polysynthetic found primarily in the Arctic (Greenlandic) and in native American languages (Navajo, Mayan). But I don't imagine they'll be among your first picks if you're already undecided.

It all depends on where you are in the world, and where you would like to go in the world.

So take a good look at a map, and a better look at the peoples that speak the different languages, and learn the one that fits you best, both in taste and possibly geographically too.

Thanks for the responses!

Probably Spanish would look best on a résumé, but I almost never meet Spanish-speaking people who don't also speak fluent English (here in Wisconsin), so I'm not sure how useful it would be to me. I also can't think of any Spanish literature or media which might interest me. I feel like I would never use Spanish once I complete the required courses.

Sounds like Chinese is very difficult and likely not very rewarding, so now I'm leaning toward French. There's a ton of French film and literature which might be interesting, and there seems to be quite a few French-speaking people involved in P2P projects like Bitcoin, Freenet, and I2P, so French might be one of the more useful languages for communication I'm likely to engage in.


Ah, I hadn't realized learning Chinese would be so slow-going. Being unable to read anything substantial would make learning the language much more difficult, I'd imagine.

Max Keiser Germany and China will be worlds only superpowers

But the German accent is so, so, so... You'll just have to view the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_VZdQ92pQc

My father is german and my mother speak french. I speak only ~50 german words but a hottie that speak german arouse me.

Mais la même chose se produit à peu prêt dans n'importe quel autre language! / But same things happen in virtually any language!

Bitcointalk is my first forum where I have to write in english. I see myself improving way faster than by only reading it.

Since Spanish, ergo Italian, Prtuguese and now French, can easily be learned via Rosetta Stone, your choices have been greatly narrowed to either German or Chinese. Since you're attending college, you need to make your decision based on the following two images.

Don't discount the bolded part. Not having the hurdle of learning a different character set to get over will speed your acquisition immensely.

I took 3 years of German because its very similar to English, thought it was a pretty easy class. Go with Spanish if you want something you'll use more often.

Oops, derped there with the kanji stuff - guess I do need more sleep.