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Languages that are mostly about vocab?

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4582 days ago

715 posts - 1527 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish

 
 Message 9 of 11
26 January 2012 at 8:19am | IP Logged 
Afrikaans fits your description very well - no genders, verb conjugations or inflectional noun case system. Like Norwegian and unlike Chinese and Indonesian it also has the added bonus of numerous cognates with both English and German. Some of its grammar is quite different from English, like the v2 word order or the mandatory double negative, but they aren't that difficult to wrap one's head around (if you have studied German then the former should already be familiar to you, while the latter is present in French in a slightly different form).
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6513 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 10 of 11
26 January 2012 at 10:11am | IP Logged 
Actually the many English/German cognates in Norwegian defy the idea of a search for a language where vocabulary is the main problem. Here Indonesian is a much better bet - its grammar is just as fluid as that of English, word order is not a big issue, but vocabulary certainly is - even loanwords are sometimes difficult to recognize (lif = lift, pos = post, sains = science from English), and most words have nothing in common with anything known from European languages.

Edited by Iversen on 26 January 2012 at 10:13am

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Camundonguinho
Triglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 4559 days ago

273 posts - 500 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish
Studies: Swedish

 
 Message 11 of 11
28 January 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged 
Norwegian is difficult because of the pronunciation, not only sounds but tones as well.
And if you don't want to sound like an old snob from Western parts of Oslo or like a person from Bergen, you have to use 3 genders, feminine gender is very much alive: boka, lua, dama, sola...But somehow Norwegian 3 gender system is easier to memorize than the German one.
The problem in Norwegian is pronunciation, especially tones. If you don't use tones you will sound very foreign, no matter how perfect your grammar or vocabulary may be.


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