Is it a long time ago since you were in France?
How do you find Paris?
I find Paris very beautiful.
Which regiment are you from?
Be wise... Have a good time!

I think (hope) I got it right.

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I speak Irish, French and English. I know enough to get by in Spanish as well.

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STFU. The only thing you speak is my fist in your face, you multilingual bastard! ...Just kidding. XD

It is one of my dreams in life to be a polyglot. I love languages and etymology.

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That's because the majority of people who go to Swedish schools are already speaking Finnish on a fluent level. It would be kinda dumb to force them to go on basic Finnish lessons along with the non-speakers, no? Believe me, if you can't speak Finnish, you're pretty much forced to learn it.

Still, I agree that Swedish isn't useful in some parts of Finland, especially east Finland, where Russian would be better. And the quality of Swedish lessons nowadays is a joke.

As for me: I speak Norwegian (bokmål) Swedish, Finnish, English and a bit of German, French and Japanese. I could also speak Sami when I was in a Norwegian-Sami kindergarden, but somehow forgot it later. Bleh.

(Yes, I was born in north Norway)

Yup I know some German.

Thanks! I was reading Snoopy and suddenly Marcie started to speak french.
Now I know French

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The languages I know?
English(Fluent,obviously)
Irish(or Gaelic,WHATEVER.Not very good at that :( )
German(Good enough..)
French(Bad.Only a few words and ONE phrase)

Also know a bit of Japanese(read:A few words),one phrase in Polish and a couple of words in Italian.

Languages?

English [Duh, my native tongue. Of course I would know English.]
Spanish [Limited amounts--mostly what I learned in high school.]
Japanese [Again, very limited amounts. I've been learning from books and tapes.]
German [VERY limited. I think I only know "good morning", "good day", "good night", "I love you", "I'm hungry" and "I'm thirsty". And "attention!" ]

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Clearly. XD Irish for Irish language is Gaelige. Gaelic's in reference to the sport mostly. (Gaelic Football)

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I speak English as my first langauge and German as a second. My German isn't really good though. I'm trying to learn Polish but it's difficult as well. I guess langauges aren't my thing.

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Woo for joining the discussion late~

Different languages have different phonetic rules. What would the point be if all languages sounded the same? French is a smoother language than English, and pronouncing fewer syllables (as you put it) makes it flow better. Languages also have different SOV (subject-object-verb) orders, and it's only natural that adjectives have different grammatical placements in other languages. The French adjectives that are placed before the noun generally refer to: Size (petit, grand, court, etc), age (vieux, jeune), beauty (joli, belle, beau, vilain), character traits (gentil, mechant), quantity (moindre, plus), and quality (bon, meillure, pire, mauvais).

What I find 'weird' is the fact that people are remarking on the strangeness of other languages when we're all speaking English

Myself, I'm Nova Scotian, and the only language I am fluent in is this one I actually really dislike English. If my first language had been something else, I would probably avoid it like the plague :F

I've been taking French in school since third grade, but I hated it and thought that it would never be useful to me--until I went to Quebec city for a school trip in Junior High. It frustrated me that Quebeckers were speaking my language to me when I was in their province, and I realized that the language barrier was the only thing that was preventing me from communicating with so many interesting people. I'm not very good at it, but now I'm quite passionate about learning French, and I hope to get a job translating things some day.

I also read manga and watch anime fansubs, so I'm familiar with a few odds and ends of Japanese vocabulary (Romaji, though, not in kanji), but not enough to piece together even a simple sentence (unless 'daijoubu' counts). It would be useful and interesting, but I don't have any particular want to become fluent in Japanese.

Once I master French I would like to become trilingual, but I don't know which language to choose for my third. I've always thought Swedish was cool, but I'm not familiar with enough languages to make a command decision.

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Heh, I only speak one phrase of Gaelige, and I'm not at liberty to say which. XD Lately I've been thinking that I should resume studying German. My teacher said my grasp of the language and pronunciation is really good, so I really want to be fluent someday...

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This is all very true.

Ahaha!

I love you so much.

Take some interest in Japanese. My interest is in reading and nothing else. This hinders 80% of my work because I need to write, hear and speak it to learn at a desirable pace. For me it's a lot easier to learn a language that has weird rules and uses different character sets to mark an immediate language difference. Bottom line: Unless you understand Chinese, you won't be wasting a lot of your time unlearning a bunch of useless crap just to move forward with the next piece of grammatically correct forms in vocabulary.

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Japanese is my first language and the second is English. I'm trying to learn french^^

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That is awesome.
I don't find english really weird. It's a pretty logical language, I think, but it's the kind of language that is easy to learn but hard to get good at. Of course, there are a lot of irregular verbs, but there are in almost every language.

About French, I think it's just confusing. A lot of people find it a very beautiful language, and I can kind of agree to that, and I understand that different languages have different phoentic rules, but of all the languages I know the basics of, only french is so hard to pronounce. English is easy to pronounce for most of the time. Norwegian is of course easy to pronounce for me as I am a norwegian. I can more or less pronounce german words, spanish words, japanese words ( as long as they're written in the latin alphabet), but french? No. It's just weird. It seems french people wanted their language to be more beautiful than understandable. Of course, I don't say it's impossible to learn french, and I probably could've if I really tried, but I don't have the patience to when I can choose another more useful and less confusing languages. That's why I chose spanish over french and german when I had the choice. I don't regret that.

I like spanish. It is relatively logical, and sounds pretty good too. Of course, it's really different from norwegian, but my knowledge of english helps me a lot there. And that the adjective is after the noun is not a problem. The hardest thing about spanish is the conjugating verbs (if that's what it's called, the norwegian word is a lot easier), but I think I'll remember all that after some years with the language.

I'm currently thinking of learning another language in the future. Anybody got suggestions?

by the way, I got the grade 6 on an oral presentation in english today. In Norway that's the best grade, but I've heard it's the worst in several other countries.
EDIT: the quotes bugged.

i know english french, chinese(but trust me it is so hard!!!!! ) and a little of Japanese

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Español es mi especialidad porque soy de Mexico y porque se me facilita, bwahaha.

And I only write/read English (Read it very well, write it more or less) I've never tried a conversation in English thus I believe my pronunciation would be not good enough.

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English (fluently)
German (some. I was taking German until our school cut the program. If anyone wants to help teach me, pm me, please! It'll be appreciated!!)

I really want to learn Italian, but teaching myself is too hard!

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Maybe try watching things in English? Maybe you could pick up some pronunciation that way. Unless you really don't know how stuff is pronounced.

I could try to help but it's harder to tell you how to pronounce something when I'm talking in text. Though I do know some Spanish so I could try saying ones that sound like others. But I don't know Spanish fluently.

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Spanish used to be my first language, but for the past ten years it's been slowly replaced by English. I even stopped thinking in Spanish and I'm fairly sure it would take me an embarrassing amount of time to write something lengthy in Spanish. I also want to learn Japanese very badly.

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Bier is learning material too!

Uhmm...Clicky?

I don't understand why there are so many people that have the desire to learn but have no idea where to go.

There are three things that prevent you from learning this:
Lack of learning ability/schedule(you'll discover what this really means later)
Weird comprehension of order/pronunciation(grammar)
Materials(exposure)

Japanese is a very weird exception to learning most languages because it can't be learned by exposure alone. You have to understand polite models of words, certain grammar rules and lots and lots of vocabulary. You need scheduled repetition to learn the language and even then it doesn't stop with learning kana. That begins the battle to learn kanji. I'm probably JLPT3 at this point but I still need to learn more grammar before I try to tackle that test. I have several upon several materials that I recommend:

Japanese For Busy People
Damn good starting ground. I didn't use it but looking back on it now, it's definitely a good starting point for beginners. It assumes English.

There's just one problem with this guide. Because you're at the beginner level, it is immediately assumed that you have no reading comprehension in the language. There is a very stupid-simple thing you can do to get rid of this problem. Consequently, doing this will make you hate this book:
Go here and download the outlined practice sheets. Print each page. Double-side your pages if you want. I did. The point here is that you have no clue what does what. Since Japanese is a sound-poor language, pronunciation isn't going to be an issue. The real problem is that reading comprehension is. The best way to take care of the reading issue is by writing. The large gray box shows you the character for practice. Each character has a stroke order(just like English characters!) which is shown by the purple box. The gray box under this shows which character the kana was forged from(not important). The pink box shows how the character looks when romanized into English(not important). The 27 white boxes are light traces of the character for you to draw upon(important!). The final page has the ゑ(we) and ゐ(wi) characters which are equally unimportant at this point. They are obsoletes and you will never see them in proper Japanese texts. Bother with them if you want but you're likely to forget them.

The entire point of these exercises is to beat these characters into your head the classic way. Work on one page(5 characters) each day and you will retain this information without a problem. I urge hiragana before katakana unless you were rushed like some of the people here. Katakana is a character set strictly used for foreign items and certain titles. You will retain hiragana better than you will katakana. You just will.

There are a few books out there dedicated to drilling just the kana, but this is probably the best drilling method available. There are some testing tools on the Internet to test your comprehension abilities and there's even one that moves the characters all over the screen and wants you to click them in order(yes these things HAVE an order to them! ). The overall process will take roughly 2 weeks to complete. Don't worry about rushing it. You're going to be able to pick up on how much this really exists around you and you're not going to be able to forget it no matter how hard you try.

Now that this is out of the way...Deep breath...Fuuuuu....There are no spaces.

.........

I'm not kidding. We have spaces as visual cues in English. Japanese has visual cues too. They're called kanji and there are so many of them that it will make you want to give up because it seems impossibletoreadsomethingthatseemstolooksomethinglikethis. It's not. They just need to be learned in a relative order. Heisig has a pretty good idea what that order is. After 40 characters you can play through the first portion of Gyakuten Saiban 2 without a problem. 80 is 1st Grade/JLPT4 testing level. You can probably get by in Japan fairly well if you understand this much. After 300 or so characters you're at a pretty decent level. I'm at about 350 right now and I've had a whole year or so to learn the characters but I'm stuck on learning every pronunciation and irregular before moving onward. That's just my quirk. Don't do that. You slow down like I do when you stop focusing so much on vocabulary. Don't do that. Look for as much vocabulary as you can and just try remembering the words first. Remember that sounding them out helps significantly. Now that you have kana out of the way, you might want to get serious about your learning abilities(and I have all different methods too).

Minna no Nihongo
The only series I take seriously. You'll see why when you open it. It consists of a few books like Oboeru(memorization), Hyoujun Mondaishuu(Standard Practice), Kanji Renshuuchou(KANJI!♥) and a few others that don't deserve mention due to the overwhelming factor. These books are supposed to be run through in tandem. I've been going through the Kanji practice book and at about half the book I started on the others. Since the other books are more oriented towards grammar and vocabulary, I don't really like them so much. You'll need them anyway. I'll tell you the kanji guide is fun. It consists of 138 pages, a brief caveman-like structure explanation, numerals and then 208 additional characters with vocabulary, 4 practice tests and 1 final. I'm almost at the 4th practice test right now. The final is immediately after this review so it feels kind of stupid for me to try and rush through it since it just ends with that. At least it gives you the ability to check a number pronunciation structuring chart and an answer key for everything in the book. You're probably going to have a question about this book if you start on it. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to answer it.

Basic Kanji Book
Two or more volumes at this point in time. I'm in the middle of the first one. It's 260 pages and it's perfect. Run through this after MnN and other stuff to make sure what you're learning is in permanent memory.

Kanji Power
A decent alternative to Basic Kanji Book. I don't like how this book is structured. It gives you some interesting insight on certain word constructions if you're going through the other materials. It's worth going through for at least that much.

Genki
Too much material for me to describe. It's perfect no matter what level you're at. The teaching focus is through common daily situations. Use it.

Genki II
I have no information to review yet. It's an addition to Genki the way MnN2 expands upon MnN. Again, use it.

JapanesePod
This is the most basic raw restarting point for every student. If you're out of material or believe you're missing something critical, go through these lessons. I've been trying my best to go through them in chronological order instead of rated level. It works. Just don't get caught up with release dates like I once did and try rushing to current day information. That will screw you. As of late, Premium Plus memberships are an option. If you make anywhere close to half of what I do and you love Skype like I do, SIGN UP!

Normally I would sign up with that level, but I use Skype to test my reading comprehension with this adorable 51 year old thingy that loves me because I'm...Well, rediculously attractive. Download Skype. IMEpad has a tendency to fail with my version probably because it doesn't like U3 applications so make sure you download a late build that runs from your computer. Register and pump a few $ into your account if you really want and setup your entire profile without any English. The critical point is to keep English marked as your language. Hit SkypeMe! mode and let it sit for half an hour or so and you'll start getting several requests. From here you can do what you want. I just use Skype as a chat application and I don't really have the power to call people with the switchboard I'm on so I'm kind of stuck this way until I start running Skype on a Nokia 800 or some other device.

This is where my material changes for the strange:

Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten
If you have a Nintendo DS, this thing is invaluable no matter what the situation. If I were in Japan, I'd have my DS on the charger as often as possible because I'd always be using this.

Nazotte Oboeru Otona no Kanji Renshuu
This is actually the first thing I was using while I was learning kana. It was a bit beyond me then but it's definitely awesome. Still, the fact that I could miss some drills to phrases like Tenchi Muyo proves that I'm either getting old or my memory is bad.

Shikakui Atama wo Maruku Suru
More practice. I don't care who you are, you'll love this thingy.

There are quite a few others. Just start playing a few games with Japanese text/subtitles and the comprehension will increase steadily. I know some of you around this point are thinking of the original Legend of Zelda on the Famicom. Going back through your childhood in another language is always a good idea but to my findings, this cartridge is bilingual and uses maybe 5 kanji at the very most. It's all Latin and Kana characters.

If I had access to SuperCard, I'd have all kinds of stuff running on a DS right now. Mostly the cute little style books, Otogi Juushi(you just have to see it), some Gakken books, Mondai na Nihongo, Lunar Genesis, Super Princess Peach, Unou no Tatsujin(bubbly fonts are annoying), New Super Mario Bros., Doraemon...

There are a few DS games for Japanese people intended to teach English, but they work pretty well in reverse. I don't mess with them as much though.

There's still a lot of ground to cover. Still, there's a weird point I need to make clear. No matter what your goal for understanding this language, you need exposure using all forms of communication and you need to use what you learn or the material doesn't stick.

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Thanks! I didn't know that even exsisted. I guess I should have looked, huh?

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I am interested in Japanese, but realistically I would not be able to learn it and retain it. I have a math- and science-oriented brain, and languages don't come naturally to me. I'm passionate about becoming bilingual, but I'm struggling with French alone, which is comparatively much closer to English. Japanese is in second place for the most difficult language for English speakers to acquire as a second language, and simply wouldn't be able to handle it.

"Watashi wa Larissa desu" is the best I can manage, and that probably isn't anywhere near correct.


From what I've read on it, it's true that, in your words, French is both phonetically and literally based mostly on beauty (it is, after all, a Romance language). There are also laws in place in some French-speaking countries to maintain lingual purity (names of new technologies [computer], etc, are generally given unique French names [ordinateur] instead of loaning names from their country of origin, and there are rules against using loanwords in the media), as opposed to languages like English that borrow much of their vocabulary from other languages.

As for French pronunciation, once you understand the basic phonetic rules it becomes a lot easier. It is really hard to get used to for an English speaker, because, though we don't usually think of it that way, English has a lot of hard consonants compared to the soft nasalizing of French syllables. Hearing and reciting the French alphabet was especially beneficial when I was learning, and since French words almost all directly adhere to the language's phonetic rules, knowing how individual letters are pronounced makes sounding out words much easier.


As am I

I don't have any suggestions, unfortunately. I don't know how good you are with languages (though that mark in English you got is much better than I could hope to get in French), and I don't have enough experience with languages to know which ones would be fun or interesting or useful.

What's Norwegian like? I may consider learning it

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Wrong on part of the account. The french word "ordinateur" comes from the spanish "ordenador", which is another regular name for the computer in Spain and some spanish-speaking countries. The french language caught on to this name later than the spanish did, and merely adapted it to their own language. =)

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Yes, I do watch movies in English, as well as all the games I play are in English and today most of them have voices (thoug I need the subtitles to fully undestand them) however that's not enough to train pronunciation.

Thanks for the offer! But don't worry, is not that I need to pronounce English properly (unless one day someone here happen to want to to call me by phone )

Dramatization:

*ring *ring*

Yunkel.- Hola?
Marshmello.- Yunkel, is that you? Its me Marshmello, how are you?
Yunkel.- Hum.. er.. H-hellouu
Marshmello.- What's up? What are yu doing?
Yunkel.- W-wat? I doooo not uunderstanddd youuu
Marshmello.- Come on, you know what I'm saying, I've seen you write English
Yunkel.- Argh! Speaak slowwly pleasss
Marshmello.- Nah! Forget it *hangs up the phone*
Yunkel.- DAMN! All because I don't understand spoken English and its pronunciation.

The end.

Fortunately, that's never going to happen.

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This may come as a surprise to you but I didn't mention anything in that list about basic click things like Rosetta Stone and small weak-programmed games. Things like that suck for memory recall because it doesn't force the word as-is into memory. This is why you won't like any of the romanized writing in Japanese for Busy People after you memorize the kana tables. Remember, those are just objects that represent sound. Most of the time you're not going to be piecing whole words together by using one or two characters together(but it certainly is a good starting point...Whole words like き and every individual character set in the first two rows have several vague stand-alone meanings until you force a kanji in their place). Case in point, Japanese is very much structured like simple and complex math equations alike. This probably explains why my memorization speed for sentence structures is this slow. As for the science portion, you're going to be thinking with a scientific mind as much as you can when memorizing kanji. 95% of the constructions when combining two or more characters is rediculously easy when you use logic. This is probably one reason I progress so fast. I'm not kidding. I've had less than 1 year of written exposure. I should be at the preschool level, not 5th grade. Still, my sentence constructions suffer.

One more thing that will kind of make you want to stop:
You know how my research shows that large concentrations of Baptists have a bizarre coorelation with hurricanes? Apply my principle to Japanese people and something interesting happens. Literacy seems to be poor in the less busy areas of Japan. The more people you're around, the more is expected out of you and in return, you're liable to remember a lot more(since you'll be reading more).

From what I understand of the adorable thingy I keep talking to, literacy is very poor in the country. What I'm saying is there are very few people at the adult level in reading. I guess the busy cities like Tokyo get a lot of foreigners that struggle to read and there are a lot of Japanese people that try their untested English. I guess you could think of these big places like an uncontrollable build of Skype. Ever since this girl started talking to me she's wanted me to come to Japan. Of course, I think it's only because she thinks I'm cute and she might just be sweet-talking me too, so you might want to ignore a lot of praise like I do.

Okay you have English as your mother language. You have poor French that will get far worse depending on where you use it since it gets abused much more than we abuse English. You have a fair interest in Japanese that will hurt like you won't friggen believe: A valiant uphill battle to learn the order and pronunciations of 3027 foreign looking characters JUST to have a completely firm reading base, learning what and WHY there are different levels of politeness and when NOT to use them and then supressing all the paranoia you'll have from learning bit by bit. You will never have perfect French and you will never have perfect Japanese since neither of these are your home language. All you can do is figure out which language makes the most sense to you and then push as much as you can.

Only two things wrong: It's in romanized writing and it's sound-focused. Learn the kana table and you'll see why that second part in there will drive you crazy for a few weeks.

Still it's better than:
Oi. Boku no namae wo Kyouya da yo.
Koncha. Wagahai wa Naruhodou desu ne. Yoro.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeto. Lana desu.
Kyouya? Iyaya. Kubiwa de nai! Watakushi no namae ga Garyuu de gozaimasu. Yoroshiku.

Or my favorite right now that gets ALL kinds of reaction on Skype:
Osu! Washi ga Ru-kasu deshou! Gasshukokujin desu ne.

Shut it Johnny, chicks love my weird constructions.

French is NOT a sound-poor language. You'll figure this out after first hearing it.

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Personally, I want a degree on it and sadly the place I currently live at only offers a minor in Asian Studies :/

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heh, it might be cute, but it's still weird.

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I'm not able to get my hands on the JLPT materials directly. Still, if you're getting a minor in Asian Studies, you should probably make sure English is your major. At least if you want to develop your learning abilities.

Of course I am! ♥

I try not to frustrate the random girls that poke me with their entire contact list. Usually the first trigger is when I open with Koncha or start using Wagahai/Ware when talking of myself. The most bizarre thing happened today when my intro convinced a Chinese girl that I must be a Japanese person and therefore have no comprehension of English. I shut her down after 5 seconds of my rediculous English. What the hell is wrong with people?

In any case I'm betting on the idea that most of these girls like my weird Japanese much the same way that some Americans find Engrish to be adorable.

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ORLY? That's really cool

What I wrote about French's linguistic purity is mostly just what I read out of a book on linguistics (don't remember the title... "Atlas of Languages" or something), but it could be out-dated or have unreliable sources. If you can't already tell, I'm hopelessly ignorant on the topic (hence my partaking in the discussion here).

DaemonForce, I appreciate you trying to convince me to learn Japanese and I think it's awesome that you have the same passion for Japanese that I do for French, but I wasn't kidding when I said I wouldn't be able to learn it. I have an awful memory and my retention is even worse; Japanese would sap all of my mental and physical resources. Learning thousands of characters of a foreign writing system and all of the gender- and situation-specific language would kill me. I sincerely commend anyone who's able to pick it up as a second language, because I really could never do it. I've found a love for languages in the past few years, and I would die to pick up as many as I can, but realistically it's just not possible. If I ever become confident in French and go on to learn a third language, I'd be aiming for something much simpler, or at least closer to the languages I already know.

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It's not really difficult when you use mnemonic devices like I do.

The key is to create things that are so rediculously stupid that you'll never forget them no matter how hard you try. Since there are a LOT of words in Japanese that sound exactly the same, it's always good to use those.

A good example is when I was trying to learn one of the alternate pronunciations for the #9. I setup a routine of being at the market and asking for 9 coconuts. The incessant chatter adds up to:
Kokonatsu wo kokonotsu kudasai!

I don't care what language you try to pick up. As long as you use something like Skype, you won't have much of a problem. The last weird conversation I had in Japanese had to do with SUGI(Japanese Cedar) for some reason. I think the girl I was talking to was named after a Sequoia tree. o_O

Anyway yeah...Skype. Go go go go go! ♥

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It also hurts that people who are fluent in a language seem to talk fast to people who don't know it as well. And it also hurts that people don't always pronounce everything perfectly in everyday situations (like skipping sylibils sometimes, actually pronouncing something wrong and not to mention that there can be accents). English is a pretty messy language anyway (yay for my 1st language being English so I don't have to worry as much about that).

At least be glad you know written English though. I'm only fluent either way in English, though I'm learning Spanish in school.


Another thing you could try is reading stuff in English out loud.

EDIT: One weird thing about our pronunciation is numbers. 105 is (in everyday speaking) pronounced kinda like "A hundred an/in/and five" (It's meant to say "A hundred and five" but the and can come out more like "in" or "an") and yet other numbers are pronounced as they look (25 = Twenty Five). So I guess 3+ digit numbers go the 1st way at least a lot of the time and 1 digit and 2 digit numbers go the 2nd way.

Also, 10552 would probably be pronounced (again, in everyday language) like "Ten Thousand Five Hundred an/in/and Fifty Two".

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*feels stupid*

What's Skype?

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*Beep!* SkypeNet is Online.

Skype is a phone application that lets you talk to people throughout the world via Internet connection. The other features it has are self-explanitory. Since I don't have the bandwidth to be calling people through the Internet, I just use it as an IM application. Since it's the only IM device I've ever used that HASN'T failed, I'd say it's pretty damn good. It saves chatlogs in a format that lets you recognize everything going on. You can even change the entire user language there are so many.

Use it.

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... Hmm. I don't really understand why everyone thinks Japanese is a hard language, personally. In fact, for someone who's mathematically-minded, it should be quite easy to pick up (the spoken part, at least). While I was never really good/didn't have the patience for the more abstract parts of maths, those Raven's logic tests were always easy to go through, and that's probably why I picked up Japanese so easily. It's a very logical language, with very few exceptions within its grammar rules... heck, even with kanji, you can guess what one means by looking at the various componants (and the context it's being used in, of course). The only time it gets complicated is with 'keigo' (honorific/humble language), but as foreigners, we don't really need to worry about it too much, unless we plan to live/work in Japan permanently.

French, on the other hand... *shudder*... I refuse to believe that the written and spoken language are related to each other, let alone one and the same. Reading it isn't so hard (Modern English owes a lot of its current form to it), but I could never understand it spoken... all slurred together as it is (another reason why Japanese is good - it's all broken into syllables).

tl; dr - I'm pretty good at Japanese (god I hope so, I'm going to Okayama Uni next year for a semester), I can read French at a push, and I can swear in at least... four other languages. :edgey: And of course English is obvious.
... oh, and I'm studying linguistics, so at any given time (until I'm not working on it anymore, and it slips out of my mind) I can be an expert on Russian syntax/origin of Pacific languages/relation between language evolution and culture/etc...

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The number system in the English language is fairly logical (not as much as in Japanese and Hungarian, but it's not bad).

In French, it's really confusing.

Now, in English, there are different words for 1-12 (one, two, three... twelve), and from 13-19, thirteen is basically "three and ten". And from 20-90, it's almost the same as 11-19 (thirteen - thirty, nineteen, ninety, you get it).
French, however, has different words for 1-16, and 20, 30, etc. aren't even similar to them like in English.

Twenty = Vingt
Thirty = Trentre
...
Sixty = Soixante
and this is where it gets all screwed up, because they don't have a seventeen. Instead they just say 60+(number between 11 and 19)
Like 78 is "soixante dix-huit" which literally means "Sixty-eighteen".

For 80, they say "quatre-vingts" which means "four-twenties". Weird, huh?
And there is no 90 either, instead it's 4*20+(number between 11 and 19).
99 is "quatre-vingts dix-neuf" (which means four-twenties-nineteen).

I'm not saying it's impossible to get used to, but it sure isn't easy.
But there is more.
For ex, when they say 200, they say "deux cents" which means "two hundreds", but if it's between 200 and 300, like 250, it's "deux cent cinquante", with no "s" after "cent" (basically two hundred fifty).
Also when the last number is a 1 (and the last but one isn't 1, 7 or 9), they use "et" (and).
21 = vingt et un ("twenty and one")
22 = vingt deux ("twenty two")

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm glad I don't have to use these numbers at Maths lesson :)

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*nods*

I like English because some phrases & words sound very very cool. But at the same I hate it for the differences in pronunciation.

Lets take for example the vowel "A". Its supposed to be pronounced as "ei" like in the word "take" yet in other words its prounciation changes completely to an "a" like in the word "All". Why don't you pronounce "eill" when using "all"? The same happens with the others vowels and several consonants.

On the other hand, in spanish when you see an "A" it will always be pronounced as an "a" no matter the word its in. If any, only two or three letters change slightly its pronunciation in spainsh.

That's what makes English complicated.

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I speak Dutch (native language :3), English, German, a little Japanese and a few Chinese words (Thanks to my old job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant).

Hm.

Finnish - I'm Finnish, so maybe it has something to do with it... Probably.
English - Good? Or something like that.
French - Yeah, so, I've studied it for about, umm, six years. I'm...err... Barely ok, if even that. It's hard to use it, really.
Swedish - I feel like I can speak Swedish better than French... Swedish's so logical.



I don't get the hatred for "forced Swedish". It's just your attitude that makes it dull. It's not so horrible. Really.

English (native language, can speak)
Spanish (learning, can decipher some)
Luxembourgish (learning, am clueless mostly)

I REALLY want to learn German or Japanese though.

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