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Easy exotic languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| sotong Newbie Australia Joined 5825 days ago 9 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Indonesian, Mandarin, Polish | Message 17 of 19 10 December 2008 at 4:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Hate to throw the thread off-topic, although I feel I have paid my dues to the topic at hand given my (too lengthy?) post immediately preceding! I have a lot of respect for a polyglot as accomplished as Farber, and this is extremely nitpicky, but I was a little confused by a line in his book vis a vis bahasa Indonesia:
I am not a native speaker of Indonesian, but I always thought that orang-orang referred to a scarecrow or sort of a "toy-man", if you like, and never would have used that reduplicated form as a plural - ie the plural is just orang. There is an image on Flickr that confirms this point, although I am unable to post it due to forum restrictions. Of course, I could be wrong as wrong, or the reduplicated form as plural may be acceptable in Malay or a regional dialect. Would welcome some feedback from a native Indo speaker! Edited by sotong on 10 December 2008 at 5:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 7094 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 18 of 19 19 January 2009 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want a pretty easy yet exotic and chic language then I'd say Farsi is for you. When I was at DLI they called it Arabic lite. It comes from Indo-European so all the sounds are easy for English speakers and there is no gender, not even for "he" and "she". They just use "it". It uses Arabic script so you'll be able to impress your friends who will all think that it looks like some archaic scribblings!
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| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5912 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 19 of 19 20 January 2009 at 1:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm actually going to go against the current and assert that East Asian languages are not necessarily difficult. I cannot speak for Sinitic languages or Korean, but I can explain why I think this applies to Japanese:
-Pronounciation is easy. There are a few sounds that do not exist in European languages, but it is not difficult to learn to produce these sounds. -Grammar is indeed different from IE languages, but 'different' is not synonymous with 'difficult.' Once you get over the begginer's hurdle of getting a feel for the structure of the language (which is not hard to do), your learning will speed up at an amazing rate. Japanese also happens to have a very logical grammar. -Kanji (characters). This intimidates and causes problems for many non-Chinese learners, but IMO this is unwarranted. First of all, kanji can be learned at an alarming rate with the right method(s) [eg. mnemonics]. Secondly, Japanese people themselves often do not know how many kanji they know. I think the fact that foreigners are told right from the beginning that 2 000 kanji are required for literacy intimidates and discourages us far more than is necessary. I would also like to offer the following quote the blog/website AJATT, written by an adult man who learned Japanese to advanced fluency:
Having said all of this... I have previously studied some Hebrew and found it ridiculously easy. Pronounciation takes some time but the grammar is very simple and it doesn't have the wealth of vocabulary found in English or French for example. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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