Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5097 days ago 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?
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Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3985 days ago 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 Joined 4250 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes 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 Joined 4044 days ago 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 4662 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 3840 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. |
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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.
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds 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 goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4662 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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