The Off Topic Topic

[PDH]

#StuartRestorationNow

#PapismNow

Look at them, bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed.

[grumbler]

#StuartRestorationNow

#PapismNow

Look at them, bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed.

Well, I mean, we've got two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice.

[Habbaku]

#StuartRestorationNow

Which would be the House of Wittelsbach now. So really we would just be changing one German family for another.

Yes, but it'd be the correct Germans.

[Habbaku]

#StuartRestorationNow

#PapismNow

[Legbiter]

Jacobite Crypto-Papist here, unsurprisingly.

 

[The Brain]

As confirmed by the Convocation of Uppsala it achieved religious perfection.

[derspiess]

I'm surprised German is ranked more difficult than Dutch or the Scandinavian languages.  (I've never studied Germanic languages, other than English; I just didn't expect that.)

From what I've observed in both Dutch and German, Dutch seems a lot more English-like than German (Standard German/Hochdeutsch anyway). 

[Syt]

[derspiess]

*Every* Saturday??

[The Brain]

*Every* Saturday??

In civilized languages it's still called bathing day.

[Eddie Teach]

In relevant languages it's named for the God of Time.

[Josquius]

Saw this at CNN and I thought it was interesting:

Which languages are easiest -- and most difficult -- for native English speakers to learn?

The Foreign Service Institute (part of the US Department of State) has made some of their courses part of the public domain (available here.)  They also released a ranking of how difficult learning a language is for an English speaker (available here.)

I'm surprised German is ranked more difficult than Dutch or the Scandinavian languages.  (I've never studied Germanic languages, other than English; I just didn't expect that.)  I'm also surprised that Swahili, Malay and Indonesian are considered easier than even other Indo-European languages; (though as the CNN article notes, Swahili and Malay began as trade languages, which might explain that somewhat.)  I also didn't realize Japanese was considered more difficult than Chinese or Arabic.

I've seen this before. I say it's bollocks. Chinese is far harder than Japanese. The whole tonal thing is just incomprehensible.
And that they always say French is so easy. Yeah right.

But for sure Dutch and Scandinavian are pretty easy. Without learning anything you can pick up a Dutch paper and get the gist.

[Monoriu]

Chinese is difficult to learn even for Chinese    That's why they had the simplified version - to make it easier for the masses.  There were numerous attempts to switch to an alphabetical system, especially after the Qing were overthrown.  So they have the pinyin system as well, but that's largely restricted to students. 

From what little I know about Japan, it seems they consider the most difficult part of their language is the kanji, the Chinese characters.  Some Japanese have remarked that it should be easy for Chinese to learn Japanese, because they have already figured out the toughest part. 

[Josquius]

Yeah, when I took a Japanese class in the UK and took Japanese exams in Japan there were always a lot of Chinese people who chilled for much of the kanji part.
I don't find learning the meanings of kanji to be very hard at all. It's just pattern recognition. Pish. The difficulty comes in the dozen different readings and combinations.

I've come to the conclusion with languages that different languages are harder to different people, assuming the same start point, because they have different hard points.

Japanese is a very written first language. So much of their culture and the language itself is based around the written form. This makes it hard for many but... I'm good with patterns and such so not me.
French on the other hand has its main difficulty in pronunciation. Which I find impossibly difficult.
I am not just having a go at the French when I say I find French harder than Japanese.

[Maladict]

But for sure Dutch and Scandinavian are pretty easy. Without learning anything you can pick up a Dutch paper and get the gist.

Wouldn't that be true of pretty much any Germanic or Romance language?