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Easy languages with alternate scripts? | ||
Tags: Writing System | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Rabochnok Diglot Newbie Colombia Joined 5610 days ago 37 posts - 59 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Turkish, Persian | Message 9 of 21 21 April 2010 at 5:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I suggest Persian. Like NativeLanguage mentioned, it's Indo-European, meaning it's related
to English. Distantly, but still related. Persian's written in a version of the Arabic script. Not THE Arabic script (the one that Arabic itself uses), but, it's like English and German for example both using the Latin alphabet not THE Latin alphabet. It has 4 extra letters for sounds the Arabs don't have but they (and we) do. And some letters inherited from Arabic that have different sounds from each other in their original language sound the same in Persian, one example being 4 letters that in Persian all have the Z sound. Persian vocabulary.... well, being Indo-European, it shares some basic similar words with English. "bad"/"بد"(bad) & "mother"/"مادَر"(maadar), and also has French loanwords. Yes, there's also borrowed Arab words, but they're not too bad and because of Persian simplifying borrowed Arab letters the words that in Arabic have difficult sounds become easier to say in Persian. Grammar? It's pretty simple. There's no grammatical gender, not even words for "he/she" etc. No articles either, so no learning when to use the equivalent of "the". Lots of verbs are irregular, but only in the present stem. So, it's like "to be - I am", but there's no "to be - I was". Yeah there's those irregular stems to learn but they're less than in, say, Spanish. Now, on the other hand, it could be frustrating to have more than one way to write some sounds, such as T, and it IS frustrating how the short vowels (a, e, o) aren't always written. And there are colloquial pronunciations of several words. Some say that Persian has a harsh sound, you might be turned off by that, or maybe you'd like the sound. If any two sounds in Persian are hard for English speakers, the Gh and Kh sounds probably are. But they're not insanely hard. Iran, parts of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Uzbekistan are the only countries that speak Persian, and I admit they're probably not high on many people's lists of where to go. But there's speakers found in the US and online too. If you want a language that's spoken in a country that's safe and where you could go and have fun without a repressive government looming over you, then Persian's not for you unfortunately. Having said all that, Persian's a nice, fun, and surprisingly easy language that I think deserves to be given a chance. I admit, I'm not studying it right now, but I have in the past and will pick it up again later. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 10 of 21 21 April 2010 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hindi maybe? Or Bulgarian? Someone already said Greek.
You're not going to find anything as easy as a Germanic/Romance language written in a non-Latin script. Edited by Levi on 21 April 2010 at 5:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 21 21 April 2010 at 5:26am | IP Logged | |||||
Yiddish? :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 12 of 21 21 April 2010 at 5:26am | IP Logged | |||||
I stand corrected. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| quendidil Diglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 6312 days ago 126 posts - 142 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 21 21 April 2010 at 6:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Germanic runes are an option, though the number of inscriptions is of course limited.
Thai is unlikely to have many lexical similarities with English, but the grammar should be rather straightforward and isn't too difficult if you can get past the tones. The writing system is moderately difficult to master though. Edited by quendidil on 21 April 2010 at 6:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gareth Groupie United States Joined 5458 days ago 51 posts - 67 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cherokee, French | Message 14 of 21 21 April 2010 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What about Armenian? It has a fairly out there script. It is even indo-european.
Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս հանճարոյ: Čanačʿel zimastutʿiun yev zxrat, imanal zbans hančaroy. To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding (taken from wikipedia) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5809 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 15 of 21 21 April 2010 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think you’re overestimating the importance of language families in language learning. As a native Italian I feel
that Maltese (an afro-asiatic language) is much easier than Hindi (an indo-european language). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 16 of 21 21 April 2010 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have to disagree with those who suggested Greek as an option for an easy language. Although the alphabet is
very easy to learn to read (writing is more complicated since there are often several letters/letter combinations for a given sound but you can get good at guessing the spelling if you have enough exposure), the language itself will present itself as a challenging one. The vocabulary shows some relation to English and common Indo-European roots, but there is much, much more of it that is completely unfamiliar. Many of the roots that English speakers learn are from Greek are really from Ancient Greek and the corresponding words in Modern Greek are now considered extremely formal. Because of this difference in formality, Greek often has two or more words for the same concept. For example (common first, formal second): vuno // oros = mountain luludhi // anthos = flower psari // ichthyos = fish psomi // artos = bread And so on. In addition, the grammar would be rather difficult for an English speaker as well. Firstly, it is an inflecting language that distinguishes four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, and vocative), three noun genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular, plural), and an extensive verbal system with the concept of aspect, comparable to Russian or other Slavic languages (this means that for the present, past, future, and subjunctive there are both simple and continuous tenses which change the verb stem). This is another point, that the language is very irregular in general. For example, to form the simple forms of the past, future, and subjunctive, the last consonant often has to be mutated and there is no way to predict this. In addition to changing the last consonant, to form the past tense conjugation for two-syllable verbs, one has to add a syllabic augment to the beginning and then add the appropriate past tense ending. Finally, there are several sounds in the language that are unfamiliar to English-speakers. This is not to discourage a prospective student from pursuing Greek as a studied language, but I only wished to present some of the main difficulties so that the OP would not be surprised when he/she encounters some of these things. In comparison with some other languages, like Korean, Japanese, Finnish, Arabic, etc, Greek would definitely be much easier, but it should not be spoken of as an 'easy' language for English-speakers in general. --Philip (I apologize for the lack of Greek letters in my post; I was writing this at school and did not have access to a Greek keyboard.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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