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#21
10-20-2006, 10:21 AM
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 English is known as one of the easiest languages by far, with the exception of the pronunciation, still it's not even a big problem. Especially grammar, conjugation are easy as pie compared to any other language. Almost no variant (conjugation), no accord (adjective, articles, etc), not even a gender for each and every noun! Look at this for example (just a conjugation example): I think You think He/She thinks We think You think They think French: Je crois Tu crois Il/elle croit Nous croyons Vous croyez Ils croient Not to mention that it's totally different if you use future: Je croirai Tu croiras Il/elle croira Nous croirons Vous croirez Ils croiront Compare in English: I will think You will think He/She will think We will think You will think They will think Or pasts (imparfait.... : Je croyais Tu croyais Je croyait Nous croyions Vous croyiez Ils croyaient ...and passé simple): Je crus Tu crus Il/elle crut Nous crûmes Vous crûtes Ils crurent English (same for both!): I thought You thought He/she thought We thought You thought They thought Still something totally different in subjonctif, subjonctif futur, subjonctif passé, conditionnel and lots more while there's no change at all in English! And I'm not talking about the 3 different groups of verbs (that vary forms) and all the exceptions! Talk about an encouragement for you to learn French  Last edited by aFrenchie; 10-20-2006 at 11:56 AM.. 
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#22
10-20-2006, 12:22 PM
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I agree, English is the easiest to learn. I had hard time learning my native language and so always liked reading and writing in English. But I still prefer speaking in my native language as while talking who cares about grammer. Getting back to the point, as aFrenchie mentioned English has simple grammer rules and if one can take care of pronunciation stuff then it is really easy. Also, I think pronunciations in French seem really hard. when I try and read something in French at times it seems easy but when I hear somebody speak the same lines I read my pronunciations are no where even close.
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#23
10-20-2006, 12:40 PM
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French may sound hard at first but if you try to learn Finnish, you will take your words back.
And I mean it ! It's fricking insane language... All the conjuctions and other shits... it just makes no sense ! Or well, it does if you understand the logic behind it... But correctly speaking it will take you decades... and still you'd be recognized to be non-native speaker. For example word "kuka" (who/whom/whose) can have these basic forms: In singular form: kuka, kenen, kenet, ketä, kenellä, keneltä, kenelle, kenessä, kenestä, keneen, kenenä, keneksi, kenettä And plural forms: ketkä, keiden, ketkä, keitä, keille, keiltä, keille, keissä, keistä, keihin, keinä, keiksi, keittä And like I said, they were basic forms... You could modify them further like (just singular forms): kukakohan, kenenköhän, kenetköhän, ketkäköhän, kenelläköhän, keneltäköhän, kenelleköhän, kenessäköhän, kenestköhän, keneenköhän, kenenäköhän, keneksiköhän, kenettäköhän Which means something like "wonder who", like in " I wonder who he is". And those rules applies to all nouns. Verbs har their own ways to be formed. 4 tenses, 6 different forms for every tense (for each personal pronoun). That gives 24 basic forms for each verb. One word can replace whole sentence. For example question: Taloissanikinko? It means roughly "[do you mean that] in my houses, too?". It could be written in form "[Tarkoitatko, että] myöskin minun taloissani?" Word order is somewhat free, you can mix and match as you wish (within certain limits of course). Which makes it's very hard for non-native speakers to understand. And not to mention that spoken Finnish is nothing like written Finnish. Spoken Finnish uses character replacing, word compression, word truncating, word combining... even word replacing... Also, the word order of spoken and written Finnish hardly ever matches. Finnish has no relation to any other (than Hungary) language in Europe. The closest relative is prolly some Indonesian language, on the other side of the world. And even them doesn't resemble anyway our language. Neat...
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#24
10-20-2006, 01:00 PM
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.Not sure but I think I've heard or read somewhere that the Finnish language has no article. At least, I could have guessed it because each time I read a Finnish person speaking in English, I always notice the lack of articles in many phrases. Do you confirm?
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#25
10-20-2006, 01:16 PM
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Yeah, we lack definite and indefinite articles.
"a book" = kirja "the book" = kirja Altho, you could use in the latter case "se kirja" which literally means "that book". And yea, we do forgot to use articles time to time. :P I do that all the time. :P Also, we do not have any feminine/masculine forms of words. Even pronouns: "he" = "hän", "she" = "hän". Ok, maybe exception would be some words that has exceptions adapted from other languages (and most of those words are occupations), like tarjoilijatar = waitress (female), tarjoilija = waiter (male). The -tar is added for female. But in modern Finnish, even that is dropping off little by little. It's very neutral language in that sense, male and female is treaten equally in the language. That may make it sound like easy then but as explained, we have million other rules to replace those. :P
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#27
10-20-2006, 02:23 PM
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Hey aFrenchie, you didn't mention the articles business! Learning when to place a, the, ... is a grand pain in the cul
Also, English has so many exceptions with pronounciation, like Twitch said with words that contain ough. Thirdly, look for and look at are the same word in English, but in French it is chercher and regarder. That's only one example, but there are many examples of weird stuff in Anglais that takes a long time to get right
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#28
10-20-2006, 03:04 PM
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Last edited by aFrenchie; 10-20-2006 at 03:09 PM..
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#29
10-20-2006, 03:38 PM
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Well, all the languages has their problems. I find French more difficult than English. But in English there's many things that are hard to remember (not hard to understand). English is more straight forward to learn, even tho, it has so much exceptions in grammar. French has more complex grammar in general. And it ain't helping that it has feminine and masculine words, which you simply gotta remember which is which.
Out of all languages that I have learned, Japanese is the easiest to speak. Without a doubt. It took 6 months to become almost fluent in speaking in Japanese. After 15 years of English studies, I'm still not fluent in it. Tho, my Japanese is rusty now since I haven't practiced it at all in year or so. And grammar is very easy. Well, atleast for me... It reminds bit like Finnish with it's flexible word order. Writing and reading is of course somewhat more difficult than European languages. But you quickly catch it, too. Katakanas and hiragana (kanas are syllables) you can learn in couple months and be able to read and write with them. It then just takes rest of the life time to learn all the kanjis (characters that means whole words)... Swedish I never learned. 6 years of studies for nothing... (well, I didn't even want to learn it but we had to study it...). It's said to be easier than English, tho. But I do not agree with that. Altho, I can understand bit of Swedish, thanks to English. But I could not survive if my life would depend on Swedish skills... But the little I know about it, helps me to understand Dutch. Altho, my vocabulary is so small that I couldn't write one sentence in it... But I can understand little bit it when reading. Dutch is like mixture of French, English and Swedish. Spanish looks kinda like French, to me, and it has about the same learning curve, I think. French might be harder tho, at long run. Italian seems to be the easiest of romance languages. At least it's much easier to pronounce for me than anything else (especially French is hard), and I can actually hear what they are saying ! Tho, I don't know anything about Italian grammar... Translating from Italy to English is very hard, tho. I'd say that it's even harder than from French to English. Altho, I'm not very good at either one.
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#30
10-20-2006, 03:42 PM
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 In the school I've learned and heard many times, that the Hungarian and the Finnish languages are relatives.Hungarian is supposedly one of the most complicated languages... Just one thing, what's much easier then English, German, French: we have one present, one past and one future, that's all.
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