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What is the best language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Crom Cruach Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3453 days ago 2 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 1 of 22 13 November 2015 at 8:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I know it's a vague question. Come on, don't say there is no best language. Don't say
they all have good qualities. I know. Just say your opinion. Just consider the language for its own sake. Pick anything you want! This is your time to decide. All your life, people have demanded beauty, efficiency, and helpfulness from you. But today is your day! Today, you are free. Today, you can decide what is the greatest language! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Glarus Girl Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4357 days ago 50 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swiss-German | Message 2 of 22 13 November 2015 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm going to bite because I am in a peculiar mood today...
I find this a really weird post - who are you to tell people that 'today' they can decide anything anyway?!! I am free every single day and therefore in my opinion I deem this not a vague question but a stupid question! Surely people have made their decisions by the choices they made for learning a language in the first place so what's the point in debating which one is the best, why does everything always boil down 'to the best'? And if this is your idea of fun, I think you need to get out more! :op 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crom Cruach Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3453 days ago 2 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 3 of 22 13 November 2015 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Basically I want to learn a language, but not based on being able to use it with a lot of
people. I don't care if I'll probably never meet another speaker of it, or ever go to a country where it's spoken, so all I need to know is what language is the best, just for its own sake. Maybe it is a stupid question, but just answer it anyway, okay? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6379 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 4 of 22 13 November 2015 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Explore various languages and see what appeals to you. My favourite is Finnish ;) Portuguese, Danish, Italian, Croatian are also very special to me.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 22 14 November 2015 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Weird question. If you measure things on number of speakers, number of learners, use in science and commerce and forums or average length of translated texts then English lies quite high on the list - and that's objective measurements so you can quibble about their relevance and ways to measure them, but they still represent hard facts.
On the other hand, if you measure languages on fuzzy things like beauty then I would say that you can't put languages on a scale at all. For instance I don't like that you say "you" in English when you mean 'people in general', and on a bad day that might spoil my relationship with English for several minutes - but then I'll nevertheless open an article in English because that's where I find something about a certain topic. So I'll feel free enough to refuse to put languages on a scale on anything but objective criteria like those I mentioned above. Edited by Iversen on 14 November 2015 at 7:06am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4226 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 22 15 November 2015 at 4:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Using the number of speakers as a standard everybody would be learning Mandarin. It is the largest language group by population but mainly limited to 3 places: China, Taiwan & Singapore. There are people like the polyglot Moses McCormick getting into minority languages like Georgian and other less common languages for interest sakes.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5323 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 7 of 22 15 November 2015 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
I would suggest you take your own advice and come up with your own "best language" . I mean I think the whole idea is incredibly flawed and your encouragement ("All your life, people have demanded beauty, efficiency, and helpfulness from you. But today is your day! Today, you are free. Today, you can decide what is the greatest language!") rather patronizing, but yeah - I really don't know what you're trying to accomplish. In short, you should find a language that you find interesting, not that other people do. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4948 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 8 of 22 16 November 2015 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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The one I find the most fun to study is Estonian, but this is largely because I don't find it so difficult now after having studied Georgian and Russian before which made me familiarized with cases and postpositions. So I can enjoy the concision and straighforwardness of the Estonian grammar and I don't have to worry about learning too many brand new concepts. I bet Turkish will be likewise fun, though phonetically I prefer Estonian. Agglutinative languages are pretty fun when you learn to say a lot with few phonemes.
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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