Understudied European languages (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Understudied European languages
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

85 messages over 11 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 2 ... 10 11 Next >>

mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5735 days ago
1335 posts - 1632 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

Message 9 of 85

15 December 2010 at 9:56am | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

I'd say a notable gap is the languages Scandinavia and the Netherlands. A fair number of people seem to start but never really get anywhere, simply because it's so easy to get by in English in these countries.

Particularly in the Netherlands, the willingness to accept many loanwords from English can't help matters any.

Polyglot_gr wrote:

Ukrainian is a good example of the degradation suffered by a major language that has not been an official language of any independent state for decades. Foreign learners treat Ukrainian as an inferior version of Russian, choosing to study the latter instead.
Finnish is another understudied language, mainly because of its notoriously difficult grammar and vocabulary.

Belorussian is probably understudied for the same reasons as Ukrainian is. I also agree about Finnish, though I should add that the vocabulary is not as impenetrable as you might think, there are some obvious Indo-European loans.

EDIT: I had to correct a few embarrassing typos.

Edited by mick33 on 17 December 2010 at 8:43am
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FuroraCeltica
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6676 days ago
1187 posts - 1427 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish, French

Message 10 of 85

15 December 2010 at 11:14am | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

Plus Scandinavian languages have a small number of speakers and relatively few resources anyway
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Emiliana
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4925 days ago
81 posts - 98 votes

Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Arabic (classical)

Message 11 of 85

15 December 2010 at 11:21am | IP Logged

I go for Icelandic because it is not only extremely difficult (as I heard) but also the number of native speakers alone is very low (I think around 200 000), it is very expensive to go there/travel around in Iceland etc pp.
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Polyglot_gr
Super Polyglot
Newbie
Greece
Joined 4906 days ago
29 posts - 64 votes

Speaks: Greek*, French^C2, English^C2, German^C2, Italian, Spanish^C2, Dutch^C1, Swedish, Portuguese^C1, Romanian, Polish, Catalan, Russian, Hungarian

Message 12 of 85

15 December 2010 at 11:34am | IP Logged

FuroraCeltica wrote:

Plus Scandinavian languages have a small number of speakers and relatively few resources anyway

Scandinavian languages are actually overrepresented on the Internet. E.g. there are more Wikipedia articles in Swedish than in Chinese! IMO a self-respecting polyglot has to learn at least one Scandinavian language!
Attention. Due to the close relation among Scandinavian languages, some people are tempted to learn all three of them, just to enrich their language list. Do not do that. For me someone who speaks Swedish, Norwegian and Danish does not speak 3 languages, but 1.4!
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6514 days ago
9078 posts - 16473 votes

Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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Message 13 of 85

15 December 2010 at 12:44pm | IP Logged

Polyglot_gr wrote:

Due to the close relation among Scandinavian languages, some people are tempted to learn all three of them, just to enrich their language list. Do not do that. For me someone who speaks Swedish, Norwegian and Danish does not speak 3 languages, but 1.4!

Don't learn anything just to enrich your language list - do it because it is interesting to see each of them from within instead of just through a neighbouring language. Otherwise it would also be stupid to learn Dutch AND Afrikaans, German AND Platt, Spanish (=Castilian) AND Catalan et cetera.

In fact if you deliberately avoided learning such close pairs you would be paying a tribut to language counting based on the kind of mathematics where 1+1+1 = 1.4, or where Irish, Greek and Navaho count as 1+1+1 = 6. Learn those languages or dialects which you find interesting insofar you can find the necessary time and resources.

If you decide to learn three Nordic languages then just be happy that the 1+1+1 = 1.4 rule apply to your time expenditure and go for it.

Edited by Iversen on 15 December 2010 at 12:49pm
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languagenerd09
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
youtube.com/user/Lan
Joined 4911 days ago
174 posts - 267 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai

Message 14 of 85

16 December 2010 at 3:20am | IP Logged

I would say Galician, Basque, Maltese, Occitan, Bosnian, Macedonian, a lot of East-EU languages, Finnish, Baltic languages, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Armenian and Georgian.
1 person has voted this message useful

Lianne
Senior Member
Canada
thetoweringpile.blog
Joined 4926 days ago
284 posts - 410 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French

Message 15 of 85

16 December 2010 at 3:40am | IP Logged

A few people have mentioned Ukrainian, which I find interesting. In elementary school, I went to a trilingual school (meaning instead of just having French classes we also had Ukrainian classes). I suppose this is because my city (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) has one of the largest populations of Ukrainians outside of the Ukraine and Russia, and even within the city they are fairly concentrated within my part of town. So I guess it really depends on where you live.
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Emiliana
Diglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 4925 days ago
81 posts - 98 votes

Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Arabic (classical)

Message 16 of 85

16 December 2010 at 9:59am | IP Logged

Yes, probably this is really very difficult to say. Personally, I know quite a lot of people who study Finnish, I think one reason is because they like the metal music from there. In Western Europe, North America and most other parts in the world many of East European languages are probably quite "understudied" but I can imagine that in Hungary they maybe teach Ukrainian at school and vice versa. I hope you get my point.

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