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What ’easy’ language do you find hard?

  Tags: Difficulty
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
134 messages over 17 pages: 13 4 5 6 7 ... 2 ... 16 17 Next >>
Darklight1216
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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411 posts - 639 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: German

 
 Message 9 of 134
19 May 2014 at 10:53am | IP Logged 
For me it's German. All of the prepositions (and the resulting noun/pronoun changes)
baffle me. The vocab doesn't stick very easily either.

Not to hijack the topic, but I'm beginning to wonder if Spanish and Italian might be
relative cakewalks since I don't find French to be particularly difficult... but then
again, maybe I would add those to German, who knows?
1 person has voted this message useful



Hungringo
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
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168 posts - 329 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish
Studies: French

 
 Message 10 of 134
19 May 2014 at 10:55am | IP Logged 
English. Spelling is incoherent, pronunciation is a nightmare, mutually unintelligible dialects, due to being a Norman-French--Anglo-Saxon mongrel lack of inner logic. In most countries people take lessons to sound more educated, in the UK and perhaps in other English-speaking countries as well people take lessons to sound like an uneducated thug.

Edited by Hungringo on 19 May 2014 at 11:39am

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Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
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Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 11 of 134
19 May 2014 at 11:10am | IP Logged 
Estonian isn't as easy as it looks, not that it's super difficult either.
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tristano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
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905 posts - 1262 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: Dutch

 
 Message 12 of 134
19 May 2014 at 11:30am | IP Logged 
Since now two languages for me.
- English. Native pronunciation seems to me impossible to achieve (the uk ones I mean).
You have to know the pronunciation for every word because there are no real patterns.
People with accents are really tough to understand because the minimal variation change
completely the meaning of the word. The grammar is also insane, seems to be a bunch of
random rules with more exceptions than rules.

- Dutch. It is supposed to be simple. After 2 years I'm still A1.

For the rest, I find French very simple and German easier than Dutch...
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tastyonions
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4666 days ago

1044 posts - 1823 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 13 of 134
19 May 2014 at 11:48am | IP Logged 
French may take more work up front learning the pronunciation and orthography but so far it seems to me that in Spanish it will be harder to reach a reasonable competence and automaticity with the verbal tenses and moods. There are more of them in regular use and they never sound alike so when you do make a mistake it is a lot easier to notice. :-)
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Gustavo Russi
Tetraglot
Newbie
Brazil
Joined 3844 days ago

9 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French, Italian

 
 Message 14 of 134
19 May 2014 at 1:35pm | IP Logged 
1e4e6 wrote:
A simple example could be «mundo» in Spanish, «mondo» in Portuguese, and
«mondo» in Italian--they sound exactly like how they are spelt. However the French
«monde» sounds more like the English "moan" with a nasal tinge at the end. If you asked
any Hispanophone, Lusophone, or Italophone to pronounce «monde» and almost surely they
would respond with two syllables. These things and even basic things wherefore the
third person plural conjugations have silent endings "parlent" having the "-ent"
completely silent, I cannot explain, and I am unsure how it developed that way.
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian do not seem to have this particularity.


Be careful - I think you messed up the romance languages there. "Mundo" is Portuguese
and Spanish, while "mondo" is only Italian. Can't blame you though, they're all very
similar :)
And the word "monde" actually has two syllables (the "moan" one, as you said, and a
silent "d", as the word ends with an "e")

Now getting back to the main topic, French was definitely the hardest language for me
to learn because it's hard to find the "logique" in it. I studied chinese for two years
and actually found it a lot easier.
On the other hand, German is known to be very hard and ever since I'm learning it on my
own, I actually find it quite normal. Not a monster at all.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 15 of 134
19 May 2014 at 2:58pm | IP Logged 
Esperanto and German. They are called logical but Finnish is much more logical to me :P

Portuguese, Italian, Spanish haven't been hard per se, but initially they were frustrating, as I was so used to the neat grammar of Latin and, again, Finnish. They've required me to change my strategy.
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tastyonions
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
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Joined 4666 days ago

1044 posts - 1823 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 16 of 134
19 May 2014 at 3:17pm | IP Logged 
The "d" in "monde" is definitely not silent, except perhaps in really rapid and casual speech.

http://fr.forvo.com/word/monde/#fr

Edited by tastyonions on 19 May 2014 at 3:17pm



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