Rofl German Is The Most Ridiculous Language Ever. Options

[FrankW]

I took German for four years. I enjoyed it, though I've gotten out of practice after many years of non-usage. I guess, in order to become adept at any particular language, you must live it. But, Shellshock, if you're getting any kind of handle on Chinese, I would think that German wouldn't be as much of a challange. Do those Rosetta Stone language instructional CDs work well ? I was thinking of studying Venusian so I can communicate better with women...or is it Martian?

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[shellshock1911]

I took German for four years. I enjoyed it, though I've gotten out of practice after many years of non-usage. I guess, in order to become adept at any particular language, you must live it. But, Shellshock, if you're getting any kind of handle on Chinese, I would think that German wouldn't be as much of a challange. Do those Rosetta Stone language instructional CDs work well ? I was thinking of studying Venusian so I can communicate better with women...or is it Martian?

Chinese is hard in a different way than German though. With Chinese you can sit down with a character book and learn some characters for a while and then communicate just by writing down the characters you learned in the proper order...it is almost impossible to be wrong grammatically, because there is almost no grammar at all.

That is why you hear Chinese people say stuff like "I be at store" "You get in car," and it sounds really immature English. And when you translate Chinese literally into English, it sounds rather immature. There is no such thing as conjugation and no such thing as declension at all, no such thing as irregular anything because there is nothing that can be irregular.

And yea I doubt anyone on Earth commands 2 languages. Sure plenty of people will say they are fluent in like 20, but may be fluent in 2 max and don't command their second language as far as vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic expressions go. Idiomatic expressions is a BIG one that people always forget, if you haven't mastered it, you aren't fluent.

There was once this guy on a forum that claimed to speak like 9 languages. I wanted to test his vocab, so I gave him some somewhat rarely used, but simple words.

Dog Leash
Shaving Razor
Mesh/Lattice
Shiver

Not suprisingly, he couldn't name any one of them in ANY of the 9 "languages" he claimed to know.

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This post has been edited by shellshock1911: Jul 10 2008, 01:24 AM

[Disturbed21]

took german last year in high school. found it easy to learn all the crap about irregular endings, conjugations,etc. only problem was actually saying it right (lol) but that went away after a while.

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[The Uncreator]

I actually didnt think it was that bad, Im sure spanish is easier. I can speak it pretty well, But i cant write it to save my life

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[shellshock1911]

I actually didnt think it was that bad, Im sure spanish is easier. I can speak it pretty well, But i cant write it to save my life

What? How is that possible? Don't you HAVE to read and write to learn how to speak in the first place when it comes to a second language. The only people I have ever heard of being able to speak good but write and read bad are native speakers or something. And Spanish is definately easier grammar wise but overall I don't know. Listen to Rammstein and Heroes de Silencio, with Rammstein, I can make out each individual word with Heroes, it is just like a bunch of vowels. German uses too many consonants, Spanish uses too many vowels. I think English is about in the middle. Not to mention how Spanish slurs so much because like every word ends in a vowel, like I said. Classic example for me was when I heard this native speaker talking, this was me learning Spanish early on. First thing he says is "Voy a" which means "I am going to..." I was scratching my head trying to figure out what a "Boya" is for like 5 seconds, by then he was already like 50 words ahead.

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This post has been edited by shellshock1911: Jul 10 2008, 01:36 AM

[The Uncreator]

I just forget spelling and stuff, Not that hard to see really, I can remember enunciation and meaning, proper placement in sentence. I just forget how to spell some words.

Oh and the articles (Der, Die, Das) I screw up sometimes. Nothing like having a "masculine" building or something

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[shellshock1911]

I just forget spelling and stuff, Not that hard to see really, I can remember enunciation and meaning, proper placement in sentence. I just forget how to spell some words.

Oh and the articles (Der, Die, Das) I screw up sometimes. Nothing like having a "masculine" building or something

That is another thing I can't stand, in Spanish it is pretty easy to distinguish between masculine and feminine words just based on the words themselves, but in German, it is more or less random, it seems.

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[The Uncreator]

Yeah it kinda is, And its not only masculine and feminine, there's also neuter too. Which is thrown in randomly

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[IDontWantMyUsern...]

Huh? When did that happen? I'm starting VG3 now, and haven't had a single german class

What? Have you had Spanish or anything like that then? You do at least have to learn one additional language apart from English and Norwegian, don't you? I'm starting at VGS now this autumn, and as far as I've understood, I will have to take German classes...

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[JVM]

So as someone who took 3 years of spanish and has always had a hard time writing even simple sentences correctly, what do you guys think is the easiest non english language to get a firm grasp on? One thing someone (shellshock?) mentioned about spanish was that it very commonly ends in vowels.. combined with the fact that most spanish speakers speak the language very fast. To my ears this makes it seem to blend together into one long word chained together by these vowels.

I've always been interested in learning other languages. I'd like to give greek or latin a crack, but I don't have the faintest clue how hard or not they are.

As a speaker/writer, in general I have a pretty firm grasp of english grammar and vocabulary, at least to the extent where anyone can understand me. Past that point, I ignore pointless rules. For example, the who/whom thing is pretty pointless in my eyes. And forget about essay and paragraph formatting and all that nonsense, I'll format my words however I want and as long as my sentences are easy to understand the whole thing is. I wonder if there is a language that skips past the nonsense and is just simple to understand.. a matter of learning basic grammar and vocabulary..?

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[shellshock1911]

So as someone who took 3 years of spanish and has always had a hard time writing even simple sentences correctly, what do you guys think is the easiest non english language to get a firm grasp on? One thing someone (shellshock?) mentioned about spanish was that it very commonly ends in vowels.. combined with the fact that most spanish speakers speak the language very fast. To my ears this makes it seem to blend together into one long word chained together by these vowels.

I've always been interested in learning other languages. I'd like to give greek or latin a crack, but I don't have the faintest clue how hard or not they are.

As a speaker/writer, in general I have a pretty firm grasp of english grammar and vocabulary, at least to the extent where anyone can understand me. Past that point, I ignore pointless rules. For example, the who/whom thing is pretty pointless in my eyes. And forget about essay and paragraph formatting and all that nonsense, I'll format my words however I want and as long as my sentences are easy to understand the whole thing is. I wonder if there is a language that skips past the nonsense and is just simple to understand.. a matter of learning basic grammar and vocabulary..?

That would be Chinese for you, really basic grammar and vocabulary is based on all literal terms. For example the word for "lantern" is just a combination of "fire" and "nail" so the word is like "firenail," closest English equivalent I can come up with is "manpower." In Chinese, most words are like that. However, enjoy the 8,000 pictures you have to learn.

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This post has been edited by shellshock1911: Jul 10 2008, 03:38 AM

[JVM]

That would be Chinese for you, really basic grammar and vocabulary is based on all literal terms. For example the word for "latern" is just a combination of "fire" and "nail" so the word is like "firenail," closest English equivalent I can come up with is "manpower." In Chinese, most words are like that. However, enjoy the 8,000 pictures you have to learn.

Wonderful, except for the 8000 pictures

I don't mind learning completely different grammar setups as long as it isnt a mess of confusing patch-up jobs, which seems to be the case for most languages. I don't think there's a language that exists that was made with "being easy to learn for a foreign speaker" high up on the list of necessities. I really just don't like the irregular stuff, it seems quite ridiculous to me. If I hadn't already learned the irregular english stuff I'd probably say to hell with it! I may pick up a book on chinese now though, would you suggest mandarin?

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This post has been edited by JVM: Jul 10 2008, 03:47 AM

[shellshock1911]

Wonderful, except for the 8000 pictures

I don't mind learning completely different grammar setups as long as it isnt a mess of confusing patch-up jobs, which seems to be the case for most languages. I don't think there's a language that exists that was made with "being easy to learn for a foreign speaker" high up on the list of necessities. I really just don't like the irregular stuff, it seems quite ridiculous to me. If I hadn't already learned the irregular english stuff I'd probably say to hell with it! I may pick up a book on chinese now though, would you suggest mandarin?

Yes, yes of course. And actually the total number of characters in use is 8,000, TOTAL number being 50,000, but there was a study done that came out with 700 of the most common characters make up I think it was 82% of average Chinese literature and writings, and 2,000 characters make up 97%. And the characters are actually very fun to learn, so that shouldn't be an issue. Also Chinese has a tone system where if you change the tone of a word, the meaning changes, there is 4 total tones in Mandarin, 8 Taiwanese, 9 in Cantonese lol WTF. It isn't near as bad as it sounds though, the tones are extremely distinct from one another. Another difficulty with Chinese is the intense amount of homphones. Saying "shi" in Chinese can mean 82 different things for example, and since there are 4 tones, you are talking about 20 homophones per syllable, however they are all different characters

Each character represents one syllable, yep probably knew that. There are several big dialects, but they all write the same thing, so the writing system is very important.

Funniest thing about Chinese is "shi" sounds just like sh*t, and the word used to negate "shi" in Chinese, like the English "no" or "not" is "bu." So you have "shi" and "bu shi" or sh*t and bullsh*t, what a coicodence...

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This post has been edited by shellshock1911: Jul 10 2008, 03:56 AM

[stickyfingers]

i guess french is quite regular and logical - not too many irregular verbs and easy declination. pronunciation might be an issue, though.

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[swingline]

i guess french is quite regular and logical - not too many irregular verbs and easy declination. pronunciation might be an issue, though.

French is easy in some respects but it can get relatively complicated. A simple understanding of the language is quite easy but becoming fluent is pretty difficult. There is 12 articles and it is not uncommon to modify verbs to agree with gender. They are also very picky on amounts and you must specify with things with a quantitative holder. I'd imagine it is easier than German but it is still one of the tougher languages to become fluent in. I can write French fairly fluently but ask me to speak it and I suck, I just can't get any form of accent (except American of course. ).

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[stickyfingers]

French is easy in some respects but it can get relatively complicated. A simple understanding of the language is quite easy but becoming fluent is pretty difficult. There is 12 articles and it is not uncommon to modify verbs to agree with gender. They are also very picky on amounts and you must specify with things with a quantitative holder. I'd imagine it is easier than German but it is still one of the tougher languages to become fluent in. I can write French fairly fluently but ask me to speak it and I suck, I just can't get any form of accent (except American of course. ).

yeah, i suppose youre right... it has been a while since i had french in school. i had been better at writing than speaking, too. but i always had the feeling that if you learned basic grammar rules and the few irregularities you could rely much more on those rules than for example in german.

once we had an exchange with french students years ago and they had been learning german for about 9 years already while we had french for about 4 years. they literally could barely express themselves orally while we were babbling french quite fluently using gerunds and stuff. then again their school had a complete different concept of teaching foreign languages. we attended one of their classes and their teacher stood in front of them - they would write down every word he said without ever saying anything. i dunno if that has changed these days.

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[swingline]

yeah, i suppose youre right... it has been a while since i had french in school. i had been better at writing than speaking, too. but i always had the feeling that if you learned basic grammar rules and the few irregularities you could rely much more on those rules than for example in german.

once we had an exchange with french students years ago and they had been learning german for about 9 years already while we had french for about 4 years. they literally could barely express themselves orally while we were babbling french quite fluently using gerunds and stuff. then again their school had a complete different concept of teaching foreign languages. we attended one of their classes and their teacher stood in front of them - they would write down every word he said without ever saying anything. i dunno if that has changed these days.

That seems like a real poor way to teach, in all of my classes that I have ever taken English was spoken quite often to convey thoughts and to tech in general, the farther I got along the less English was spoken but still.

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[erik]

German is obligatory at school here in Norway, I don't understand why!

No it's not (at least it wasn't when I was in junior high just three years ago )

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[Nighthawk1]

You should really invest your time in something more fulfilling than learning German...it's very difficult...of course depends on what YOUR mother tongue is...but the most rules really don't make sense in German

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[Gerardo Siere]

MMm I tried German for to weeks at a lyrycal singers class and I dropped, the gramar is too strange, I tried some Japanese (I play go) very few words, acording to their combination and the situation you get the meaning, I´m thinking in take some lessons again, have watched a lot of movies so I got familiar with the few things I knew. About english, I can understand almost anything people talk to me, (thank you South Park) but I´m pretty in troble when talking or writting

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