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Hindi, Arabic, or something else? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mtrain17 Newbie United States Joined 5268 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: French | Message 1 of 11 22 June 2010 at 4:22pm | IP Logged |
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Hello all,
I have been teaching myself french for the past two years and I enjoy it a lot. Lately I have been interested in attempting to teach myself a more difficult language that uses a very different written system. I was curious if anyone had any suggestions for a fun and interesting language to learn for someone like me who doesn't necessarily desire to be perfect in that language. I have been thinking about possibly taking up Hindi, Arabic, Korean, or Japanese. Any suggestions? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7020 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 2 of 11 22 June 2010 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the forum. Of the four you mentioned, Hindi would be the easiest. What about Russian, Persian, or Greek? Of these three, I believe Persian would be the easiest.
Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5326 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 3 of 11 22 June 2010 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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Russian would be cool, the alphabet looks awesome (of course that's subjective)
I'd vote for Korean, we need more people to learn it 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mtrain17 Newbie United States Joined 5268 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: French | Message 4 of 11 22 June 2010 at 9:38pm | IP Logged |
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I was actually leaning towards Korean or Hindi beforehand. Thanks guys!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5272 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 11 23 June 2010 at 1:57am | IP Logged |
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From your list I would choose Hindi. Reasons:
1.) Hindi is the only Indo-European one on your list, so it will be most logical to you coming from French/English speaking background. 2.) Hindi is one of the top 10 if not 5 languages in number of speakers (hundreds of millions). 3.) Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu (Pakistan), although different alphabets are used. If you learned Urdu and it's alphabet, that might make shifting into Farsi or Arabic later on a bit easier because you have already learned some of the orthography. 4.) Knowing Hindi would open a door to learning other large Indian languages, especially Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5566 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 6 of 11 23 June 2010 at 4:59am | IP Logged |
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Why not Mandarin? It has a billion speakers, and chances are there are people near you who speak it. The difficult aspects of it are of course the characters and the pronunciation, but on the other hand it has an extremely simple grammar. There are no genders, no noun declinations, no verb conjugations, no plurals. Sentences are almost always subject-verb-object as in English, with any indications of time or place put before the verb. Basically, Chinese grammar consists of simply choosing the correct words and placing them in the correct order.
I find Chinese people who speak Mandarin are always happy to help you practice, and will be extremely patient with you even if your Mandarin isn't that great. No matter how much you suck, you're sure to get complimented frequently on how excellent your Mandarin is. I think for the most part they're just pleasantly surprised when a non-Chinese-looking person attempts to speak the language, and they want to encourage you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5530 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 7 of 11 23 June 2010 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
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I've got a simple suggestion for you. If you're very interested in the East Asia, I personally think Japanese may be more worth a try than Korean. If you're very fond of mystical languages (especially of the Middle East) and willing to accept Islam as your belief, then Arabic or Persian may be a good choice. At the same time, no offence, I wouldn't recommend learning Hindi unless Indians were wide awake to the importance of their native language, perhaps many of them are just proud to speak fluent English, instead of Hindi or Bengali.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| exscribere Diglot Senior Member IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5278 days ago 104 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Danish Studies: Mandarin, French, Korean, Hindi | Message 8 of 11 23 June 2010 at 4:00pm | IP Logged |
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I've started learning Hindi because my fiancé and I will be moving to Northern India for 3 years. I was curious about it anyway for a handful of reasons, and now that we're actually moving there for 3 years, I can't think of a reason why not to. Depending on where you might be going if you decide to travel, the usage of Hindi will vary: it's more dominantly used in the northern half of the nation than the southern half.
As Merv pointed out, Hindi is mutually intelligible (spoken, not written) with Urdu, and once you learn to write Devanagari, you can read (and generally speak) Sanskrit, if that's up your alley. You can learn to write Urdu later (it uses a modified Arabic alphabet), and will open up some new and interesting travel vistas and usage opportunities. I'm also studying Korean (though it's sadly taken a backseat to Hindi, given likelihood of use, now) and have enjoyed it. If you decide to take up Hindi, send me a message and I can share some of the resources I've scavenged. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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