foriegn language

[scull]

lol! That's true. You get used to it after a while. I took four years of Spanish in high school so the feminine/masculine quirk has become second nature to me. I'm taking French (another romance language) in college now and -- well, you know -- it's the same thing.<br />

 

[kauboi]

<font color="yellow">lol! That's true. You get used to it after a while. I took four years of Spanish in high school so the feminine/masculine quirk has become second nature to me. I'm taking French (another romance language) in college now and -- well, you know -- it's the same thing.</font><br /><br />My native language is spanish and I think the most difficult part to learn for english speakers are the verbs, given that a lot of them are irregular, and I see many have trouble with the verb "to be" because we have two forms for it.<br /><br />The definte artcles in spanish for masculine, feminine and neutral are <i>el(los), la(s)</i> and <i>lo(s)</i> and the indefinte ones are <i>un(os)</i> and <i>una(s)</i>. They never change on the sentence though, no matter how and where you use them (except for some contractions).<br /><br />Now look at german...<br /><br />Definite<br />(masculine, neutral, feminine, plural)<br />NOMINATIVE der das die die <br />ACCUSATIVE den das die die <br />DATIVE dem dem der den <br />GENITIVE des des der der <br /><br />Indefinte<br />(masculine, neutral, feminine, plural)<br />Nominative ein ein eine keine<br />Accusative einen ein eine keiner<br />Dative einem einem einer keinen<br />Genitive eines eines einer keine<br /><br />It all depends of where and how you use them on a sentence and that's not talking about the adjectives and other words that suffer declinations.<br /><br />German has a much more complex grammatic structure than english or spanish, IMO. Still I think it is a pretty cool language.

 

[rhodan]

German grammar is hell, well, it was to me, and even though Dutch is very close to German, I find English a much easier language to learn.

 

[scull]

Wow, yeah, well, I never took German formally (and you sound like you did). Much of what I know is from my family (we're of German descent); so growing up I would hear my great-grandparents and grandparents speak some of it (but not much). I did it by ear basically. It's probably difficult if I take it in school now -- you kinda scared me.<br />

 

[george_w]

That's a phenomenon actually: kids taking <i>formal</i> instruction on their native language seem to have a tough time with it. Need I mention all our American students taking English in school? They can't seem to tell a period or a comma from a hole in the ground. And the grammar? Forget it.<br /><br />It's also the same when I took Spanish in school <i>some</i> years ago. The Hispanic students (some of whom spoke the language fluently) had a hard time reading and writing the language. They couldn't conjugate verbs, spell, or figure out where the accents go. Spanish is not even that bad compared to French when it comes to spelling and accents. In French you have written accents that slant to the left, right; they go down, up. It's hell. I heard there was a proposal years ago to try and limit those pesty accents.<br /><br /><br />

 

[CalliArcale]

I dunno -- I didn't find French to be all that difficult. It helps that although English is technically classed as a Germanic language, it's also related to French, so it's got a lot of cognates* -- more than Spanish, actually. (You can blame William the Conqueror for that.) One thing that still catches me is when doing past tense, some are constructed using "etre" (to be) and some are constructed using "avoir" (to have). Which is which is sometimes logical, sometimes not. Sort of like English phonetics, really....<br /><br />It is true that one tends to learn grammar more easily in foreign languages. I think this is because a foreign language student has no preconceptions to battle. That is, if you grow up thinking that a double negative is appropriate, it'll become so firmly ingrained that it'll be very difficult to swallow the teacher telling you that it's incorrect. But you don't have any inbuilt structures for foreign languages. There's no retraining required. You can learn it right the first time.<br /><br />The other difference is probably that you learn your mother tongue by a mysterious process that seems to be impossible for almost everyone over the age of six. It's intuitive, and the brain is hard-wired to encourage it. You learn language merely by being exposed to it. By contrast, when you are taking foreign language at the age of 18, you don't have that intuitive language learning ability anymore, so you have to learn it intellectually instead. That means learning the structure behind it -- structure which native speakers may or may not consistently use.<br /><br />* cognate: a word that means the same thing in two languages, or is very similar to a word with the same or a similar meaning, usually because it originated in one of the languages and then was borrowed by the other. Beware, however, of false cognates, words that look similar but are actually unrelated or have evolved sufficiently that they no longer have similar meanings. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[newtonian]

Ben89 - You might find sampling 264 languages helpful to choose one - note these at our site:<br /><br />http://www.watchtower.org/languages/languages.htm<br /><br />Note that there are many differences in language besides alphabets as you will note above. Often different languages involve thinking differently! Note:<br /><br />“Professor S. R. Driver stated: “Languages, however, differ not only in grammar and roots, but also . . . in the manner in which ideas are built up into a sentence. Different races do not think in the same way; and consequently the forms taken by the sentence in different languages are not the same.” (A Dictionary of the Bible, edited by J. Hastings, 1905, Vol. IV, p. 791) Thus, different languages require quite different thought patterns, making it difficult for a new learner to ‘think in the language.’ (Compare 1Co 14:10, 11.) This is also why a literal translation of something said or written in an unfamiliar language may seem illogical, often causing persons to say, “But it doesn’t make sense!”…<br /><br />We find, for example, that certain languages are monosyllabic (made up of words of only one syllable), such as Chinese. By contrast, the vocabularies of a number of other languages are formed largely by agglutination, that is, by joining words placed side by side, as in the German word Hausfriedensbruch, which means literally “house peace breakage,” or, in a form more understandable to the English-speaking mind, “trespass.” In some languages syntax, the order of the words in the sentence, is very important; in others it matters little. So, too, some languages have many conjugations (verb forms); others, such as Chinese, have none. Countless differences could be cited, each requiring an adjustment in mental patterns, often with great effort.” - Insight on the Scriptures, Volume 2, page 202.<br /><br />The Bible is the most translated book, about to be translated in 600

 

[kauboi]

<font color="yellow">It's probably difficult if I take it in school now -- you kinda scared me.</font><br /><br />Don't be!! if you are talking to a german and you don't use the proper article form you can still get your point across and they won't mind, you'll eventually distinguish everything by how it sounds right and the rest... well only if your plan is to learn the language perfectly you'll need it. Many germans commit errors when talking and most can't explain why and when they should use a certain article or declination. The truth is that it is a very interesting language IMO and it's worth to learn it.