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Twenty Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| learnvietnamese Diglot Groupie Singapore yourvietnamese.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4950 days ago 98 posts - 132 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 113 of 117 23 August 2011 at 5:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I think this is an interesting topic. I haven't thought about the 20 languages or know how to come up with this list but below are some of my thoughts on the languages I know.
I started with English, which I now find a nice and "highly intellectual" language as, in my opinions, it enables one to precisely convey ideas through a simple yet fully adequate grammar and a very rich vocabulary with interesting idioms and latest technical vocab. Then, French is exciting in terms of tenses, gender of nouns and very beautiful pronunciation, among others. This is also the first language I learned which has quite a number of inflectional forms for verbs. I also find Chinese interesting. First, it's its sophisticated but wonderful writing system, which I hope to know well enough for self-enjoyment. Another interesting aspect is that it's a highly compositional language where we don't introduce an entirely new word to express new concepts but by composing from existing words. Vietnamese shares this feature. And Japanese is also very enlightening in that its sentence structure is not the farmiliar Subject + Verb + Object (SVO) order but the SOV order. And then its formality is also something that also astonished me quite a bit. German, according to my very limited knowledge, is also very interesting as I find that it allows the parts of sentences to be arranged in a very flexible manner. And the agreement between subjects and verbs and nouns are even more thorough than French. Vietnamese is a compositional and tonal language. And it has a very interesting aspect of sound matching which allows creation of beautiful poems and songs. Since I'm native Vietnamese speaker, if anyone plans to learn Vietnamese, I'll be glad to join. I believe that learning different languages would expose us to different ways of modelling/structuring thoughts and ideas in addition to broadening our knowledge of foreign cultures. Edited by learnvietnamese on 24 August 2011 at 9:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 114 of 117 26 August 2011 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, first of all there would be the languages I already speak (to whatever grade of proficiency):
1. German (my native language) 2. English 3. French 4. Italian 5. Swedish 6. Latin Then, there would be the languages I'm already studying but which I don't yet speak very well: 7. Dutch 8. Icelandic 9. Scottish Gaelic 10. Ancient Greek Next, there would be the most important languages of all civilizations: 11. Russian 12. Japanese 13. Mandarin 14. Arabic 15a. Persian or 15b. Hindi-Urdu 16. Spanish 17. Portuguese 18. Swahili And last of all, there would be some rather unimportant, more or less exotic, languages: 19. Irish or Welsh 20. Polish or Czech I think it's very striking that I'm concentrating on the Indo-European language families. I'm not interested in exotic (i. e. Asian or African) languages except a few. Edited by Josquin on 26 August 2011 at 4:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| gerry Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5251 days ago 22 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian Studies: Spanish, Latin, German | Message 115 of 117 28 August 2011 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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1. English
2. Spanish 3. French 4. Italian 5. German 6. Portuguese 7. Mandarin 8. Japanese 9. Korean 10. Latin 11. Ancient Greek 12. Modern Greek 13. Arabic 14. Russian 15. Swedish 16. Norwegian 17. Dutch 18. Irish 19. Czech 20. Polish 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mark1003 Diglot Newbie Ireland Joined 4866 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 116 of 117 28 August 2011 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks xees, a few of my friends are vietnamese and I find the culture insteresting, so its definetely high up on my list, and I might learn it next. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mei190 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5341 days ago 29 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 117 of 117 28 August 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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My list in terms of 20 languages if I was ever to reach it.
No real order, however maybe with a few shuffles this is actually similar to the order I wish to learn them. Obviously with varying degrees of fluency. 1. English 2. Japanese 3. German 4. Korean 5. Mandarin 6. Russian 7. French 8. Italian 9. Swedish 10.Finnish 11.Arabic 12.Spanish 13.Vietnamese 14.Thai 15.Persian 16.Hungarian 17.Icelandic 18.Dutch 19.Polish 20.Cantonese 1 person has voted this message useful |
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