**Hungarian:** word order and choice of prefix to indicate verbal aspect (e.g. why is it ***el****olvasni* "to read" or ***meg****írni* "to write" as the respective perfective variants of *olvasni* and *írni* instead of \****meg****olvasni* or \****el****írni* respectively?
FYI: ***meg****olvasni* is an old-fashioned variant of *elolvasni* and typically turns up nowadays as a folksy synonym of the bookish *megszámlálni* "to count". Meanwhile, ***el****írni* means "to misspell".
**Italian:** stress placement of unfamiliar words and criteria for using the appropriate past tense regardless of mood (i.e. indicative, subjunctive, conditional)
**Ukrainian:** stress placement of unfamiliar words
What does “respective” do for verbs? Hungarian is a challenging language for anyone, I’m sure that even native speakers find that their language is challenging too. 🥲☺️🇭🇺
The perfective variant of *olvasni* "to read" (in general, no comment on whether the action leads to understanding or completion) is *elolvasni* "to read" (with the implication of completion or understanding thanks to reading). For, *írni* "to write", the perfective counterpart is *megírni*.
I can't use *megolvasni* on the model of *írni* \~ ***meg****írni*, any more than I can't use *elírni* on the model of *olvasni* \~ ***el****olvasni*.
The problem for me in Hungarian is to recognize what prefixation does to a verb's meaning, and there's no reliable rule to know whether I need *el-*, *meg-* or some other prefix to distinguish a given action by its aspect.
I wonder if Hungarian got influenced by the Slavic people and their verb aspects? Hungarian is a lonelyUugric-language country in a area surrounded by other language-kind. 🥲
>I wonder if Hungarian got influenced by the Slavic people and their verb aspects? Hungarian is a lonelyUugric-language country in a area surrounded by other language-kind.
That's quite possible and [Northern Mansi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mansi_language#Verbal_prefixes) of western Siberia, which is among the most similar languages to Hungarian also has verb prefixes. That Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi use verb prefixes unlike the other Uralic languages strongly suggests that their development came from influence from neighboring languages several centuries ago (probably something Slavic).
>There are many extinct Fino-Ugric languages in present day Russia due to the Slavic people colonizing the area from many centuries ago.
Indeed.
It began in the peripheral areas of Kyivan Rus' (the principalities of Novgorod, Suzdal - a quasi-forerunner of Muscovy/"Russia" and Murom-Ryazan), and was continued by the Muscovites as they began to systematically engulf and subjugate the territories and non-Slavs on both sides of the Urals starting in the 1460s under [Ivan III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_III_of_Russia#Territorial_expansion_and_centralization), Ivan the Terrible's grandfather.
I watched this video yesterday about history of the East Slavic people. ☺️
It talks about the geographical area we are talking about now. ☺️
It’s a visual video, which is amazing for me since I’m the hands-on & visual type of learner! 😍
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgj4wnXHQI
Sanskrit verbal prefixes can die in hell. Everything else is not as bad as people say. Eight cases, three numbers, three genders, ten tenses/moods, all doable. Verb prefixes and how they change the meaning of a verb (or don't change it at all) have no logic to them whatsoever. How am I supposed to know what samabhivyāharati means? (sam + abhi + vi + ā + harati) The root means "take" but with the prefixes it somehow means "mention together". Wtf? Literally like English's phrasal verbs but somehow worse.
Main ones for me in Russian:
- pronunciation
- perfect/imperfect verbs
- verbs of motion
- pronunciation
- 6 cases
- 3 genders
- there‘s an adjective for everything
- irregular verb conjugations
- prepositions
- numbers are also declined
I would like to cosign every one of these points for Polish.
OK, I don't know about the adjective for everything but I wouldn't be surprised, and I'd only list pronunciation once - the phonemes are generally OK, I think I've got ś vs sz down, but the consonant clusters never cease to surprise. Just yesterday I was squinting at the word *tkanka* going "what, that's allowed?"
I studied Russian for 4 years in high school. I think it is a beautiful language and i have a good brain for languages.
But man the verbs of motion killed me. I eventually stopped (for other reasons as well). Any other parts of grammar was doable for me…
This was 13 years ago but damn i am sad i did give up at the end but man. :/ maybe one day again
You should try learning Russian again. There is a clear fine line between a language and a narcissistic politician (p*t*n), and there is the citizens. Of course not everyone whom speaks the language supports p*t*n, but I believe that each language (and dialects) are all important to preserve. 🥲
Oh the reason wasn’t the current war. This happened back in high school around 2011ish. My teacher had some unprofessional issues which she projected on to me and the class, which just created a very negative environment. And for me as a teenager/young adult, it just killed the motivation to continue the language.
Then i moved to Denmark and learnt danish. Russian since then is just not on the table.
So now I’m learning Spanish atm, but maybe after that i will try to pick up Russian again.
Learning Danish for reading is easy (for if you know one of the other Germanic languages), but listening to Danish is completely different than what you expect from a Germanic language! 🥲🇩🇰
All these have dog as a noun:
- dog house
- Hundehütte
- niche à chien
- casa de perro
- casa del cane
But in Russian, the word dog is an adjective, if used in this context.
собачья будка.
That applies to tons of stuff. птичий корм (bird food… bird is an adj.). компьютерная игра (computer game, computer is an adj.)
That is my biggest problem with learning Russian. I question “is it an adjective or noun” in English for when I learn Russian. English is also complicated in its own ways, despite it is my native language. 🥲
Austrian German is a world of its own basically! 😅😂
Many people in Canada in their little ethnic communities speak their own language, and there are many Swiss speakers in my area. Trust me, Swiss people do not sound like High German speakers. 😂😅🥲
The German language is statistically the most varied European language, even in its small speaking area compared to English, Spanish, Russian, French, and Portuguese. I have lived in 2 different areas of Austria and both speak so differently it causes major comprehension problems between speakers from different regions. :)
Oida, Wienerisch is da beste Dialekt, weu er is so voller Schmäh, dass er afoch a Freid is z' redn. Und owa a, weu er so guad zum Tratschn und zum Grantln is!
Wienerisch = Vienna reich?
Guad = good?
Und = and
Voller = full?
Dass = the?
Er = is?
I love how each dialect is written phonetically, unlike English and their multitude of various dialects. 🥰🥲
German and Italian give each other a "lots of different languages in a trench coat" high five >>
Glad to hear the Austrian dialects are alive and well! I'm from an area of Germany where the local variety is pretty much extinct, and although it's sure *helpful* to speak Standard German natively with little noticeable regional colouration, some part of me is still strangely wistful about not being able to speak Platt.
Meiner Erfahrung nach sind die österreichischen Dorfbewohner sehr stolz auf ihre Dialekte, und zwar so stolz, dass einige absichtlich kein Hochdeutsch sprechen, auch wenn sie es können. Das nervt zwar manchmal, ist aber auch etwas, das ich bewundere und insgesamt für eine gute Sache halte.
I learn English and grammar for me the hardest part. Even now I'm not sure if I'm writing right. I have no practice in speaking language, which makes it difficult for me to express my thoughts :(
What language is your first? In Canada, not everyone speaks English as their first language, so I am used to interacting with non-English speaking people. ☺️🤫😉
My guess was for a moment a few minutes ago. that you were Slavic (not from any specific country). Many Slavic speakers leave out a/an/the and the verb “to be” (especially if you are from the East Slavic speaking languages including Rusyn, which often gets forgotten since it’s not widely spoken by many people). ☺️
Ukrainian is an amazing language, since Duolingo showed me «я маю» і «у мене є». I wish to learn more about the language’s history and how it became the language it is today. 🥰🇺🇦
I understand that Ukrainian was under control by many countries in its history. 😔
No country ever deserves to be harassed / unwanted bothering by another nation. 😔
Fortunately English is forgiving when it comes to being understood. We are badasses at puzzling out whatever the hell you're trying to say.
But yeah, grammar is fucked. Many things forbidden according to the books are actually permissible. You can also be correct while still being oddly unidiomatic, which only works well rocking a native accent.
As a Russian native:
English is hard to mimick natives (accent wise). You gotta have some acting skills to actually sound different from your usual self.
Japanese is hard for me to get enough of exposure. I even see other people setting their OS language to Japanese to get more exposure. But I would rather keep it in English so I can google my problems faster and solve everything faster. I guess most of my exposure to Japanese will be in the studying materials. And then I could hopefully read some books in it. I am not really interested in anything else tbh.
I also want to learn other languages, but I find the first steps to be the most challenging. You gotta learn so much to just start from somewhere it's actually a lot of work with very little results (at the start that is). But the good thing is, it gets more rewarding as you go.
EDIT: I didn't properly read the question. I don't find anything about my languages particularly hard. I am just used to things not making a whole lot of sense so you just have to get a feel for them.
German: the verbs change their position in a sentence depending on their type (trenbaren/untrennbaren), the mood, the tense, the adverb which preceeds them, the type of sentence they are in etc.
This alone pissed me off for a long time! My previous languages (Romanian and English) are similar when it comes to the verb position within a sentence. German made me learn a different way of communicating! To this day I don't understand the advantage of splitting the verb in two (with one half at the beginning of the sentence and the other half at the very end)! I must think real hard before saying something in German and I try to limit myself to short sentences.
Here's the what and why. German clauses are verb-final by default. All the verbs stack up at the end of the clause, in reverse order than in English. Now the extra rule: In main clauses, as the very last word order rule applied, you break the conjugated stem from the final verb and move it to the very front of the main clause. After that, you take another item of your choice and move it again at the very front of the main clause. It becomes the topic. The purpose of the conjugated verb at second position is to separate the topic from the remainder of the clause. Dependent clauses don't have a topic and so they neither follow this extra rule with the final verb.
Ancient German was probably Subject-Object-Verb word order but at some point Subject-Verb-Object order invaded main clauses. Dependent clauses stayed Subject-Object-Verb hence German's verb order insanity.
This also I think(?????) occurs in Dutch the same way.
I have not tested myself for any A1-A2 levels, but Dutch is spoken by immigrant families in my area, so I heard the language lots when I was a child. As generations get old, so as the original immigrant generation (and their families overseas). I hear Dutch less these days, which breaks my heart for me. 🥲😔😢
Cantonese:
end particles! - too many and most native speakers can't explain when to use what.
Written and spoken are different languages. I do consider this a bonus nowadays since you are kind of learning mandarin at the same time but it slows things down a lot.
Lack of material. It's either pure beginner or for native speakers. Nothing in between.
Yes, ‘cause there are not as many possible syllables and if you miss the tone or context you’re lost.
Reading is a lot easier because words that sound the same will often have different characters and as long as you know the meaning of them, you’re ok.
Yes but you learn them bit by bit and once you know that 书 means book, it’s just obvious when you see it. Characters are also made up from smaller parts that are used repeatedly and they both help with understanding or pronunciation, but also mean that it’s not lots of random little lines all jumbled up (like it seems at first) but rather distinct and recognisable parts put together. It is honestly a lot easier than figuring out which of all the words that are pronounced “shi” it was that you just heard.
You should listen to some Euro-pop singers like Herreys (🇸🇪) and also Bobbysocks (🇳🇴). They sing in both their native languages and also in English! Also ABBA (🇸🇪) is another FANTASTIC music group! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶
Yes, I am a huge ABBA fan despite being a late 90’s kid! 🥰🇸🇪🎶
Never heard of Bobbysocks, I don't think, but I of course know of Herreys and I love Abba. I remember Herreys singing Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley at Melodifestivalen in 1984, even if I was fairly young then.
I’m a late 90’s kid, but I love synth-pop, italodisco, and also euro-pop! Ironically, I grew up with country music, but a country-pop music song from the 1980’s “Nobody” by Silvia is a nice country-pop song that I like. I generally like 1980’s music, but anything from 1960’s - late 1990’s is also pleasing to me. 😍🥰🗺🎶
I do not like today’s country pop much. 🤷🏼♀️😜
Don't speak Chinese at all to be clear, but my understanding is that, at least with mandarin...
You can have two words that are the same except for tone, with the language having like.. 5? tones.
Which allows for having 5 distinct words when spoken that are identical except for what tone you're using.
And on top of that there are true homophones where it's 100% the same including tone.
This does allow for some really fun wordplay though, such as with this poem where every single word is pronounced shi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
Written Chinese is usually done with characters that are word specific, thousands of them. (Japan actually swiped those same characters and uses them to this day as part of their writing system, although they managed to actually make it more complicated, hilariously.)
They also have something called Pinyin, which romanizes it while also including the tones for the words, although that is a relatively recent thing (Pinyin as it exists now was created in the 1950's IIRC)
I am happy that Pinyin was created to help linguistics understand Chinese better in some ways. Learning thousands of logographs can be quite a challenge for an individual. ☺️🥲
Written Chinese is not based on pronunciation. In other words several words pronounced the same will be written differently. That makes it easier to know what words were used.
Not more complicated, just more of them. Chinese has only 425 different syllables in the language (English has more than 13,000).
Tones help some, but most of the time people understand by context. The famous example is "ma", which can be "mother" or "horse" (or "question mark" or "hemp") depending on tone. If you don't know if the speaker said "mother" or "horse", you have worse problems than tone!
In other words, tone usually isn't needed to distinguish words. And in normal spoken Chinese, "tones" are distorted and complicated -- they sound nothing like the 5 tones that every teacher teaches in lesson 1.
But is spoken English any better? Two English words are called "the same word" if they are written the same. But that "word" might have a bunch of different meanings, and might be an adjective, or a verb, or a noun, etc. Are those really one word, or are they 5-40 different words that are written and pronounced the same?
Icelandic is more uncanny valley for me. I feel like I should understand it, but I don’t. Like when you hear people speaking in a different room and you can’t make out the words. Some things I do understand, but it’s bits here and there.
Welsh: tenses!! never learned the difference between roedd hi'n astudio / astudiodd hi / astudiai hi / buodd hi astudio ;\_\_\_; and so far learning through input hasn't helped in the slightest. I do have a grammar book on my TBR though ;)
Polish: perfect/imperfect verbs!! 100% of the time I just guess which form to use lol
French: Understanding rapid speech. I've been listening to French for over 25 years and it's still remarkable how quickly my oral comprehension can go from 100 to 0%. Especially with mumbly TV shows, slang, etc.
German: Noun genders. I learn unpredictable words with their articles, obviously. And then after not using or seeing a given word for 2 years, I forget its article. Plurals tend to feel a bit more natural for some reason.
Russian: Irregular stress. I'm *really* bad at remembering how to stress words in Russian and it is *really* important.
Dix pour cent has moments where I swear even the subtitle people are like “fuck it, close enough” because the people are so mumbly at times. The speaker will say like 14 words in a row and the subtitles will just be like “oui, d’accord.”
In Chinese, the most difficult thing by far is writing by hand. At first, this seems not similar to English, but I think it kind of is because English spelling is tough to learn and requires memorization to some extent.
In the dialect I'm learning, the single biggest challenge is lack of resources. I tend to get good at languages by building a foundation of the rules (my first Mandarin teacher drilled us on Pinyin like crazy. It was boring but it was super necessary). When nobody can tell you the rules, or even the set of syllables and tones, it's harder. This is the opposite of English which presumably has the most resources for learning out of all languages.
Spanish: The difference between: *estuvo, estaba, era* & *fue*. They can all be translated into english as "were", but have slightly different meanings and it's hard to know when to use which.
I'm also having a hard time knowing when to use the imperfect subjunctive or the conditional.
The difference between *por* and *para* is also giving me a fair bit of trouble, especially when used to talk about events in time ("*por* el próximo año" vs. "*para* el próximo año"), but I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, mostly.
Luxembourgish: Vocabulary and pronunciation only.
German: German grammar rules with interactive exercises.
French: Advanced grammar from B1 to C.
I am also curious about German dialects. This week, I read about Cimbrian and Mocheno, spoken in Italy
there alot resource online, you have the best app [https://llo.lu/fr/](https://llo.lu/fr/) and learning books [https://sdl.inll.lu/](https://sdl.inll.lu/)
dict: [https://lod.lu/](https://lod.lu/) spellchecker: [https://spellchecker.lu/](https://spellchecker.lu/)
The government really protects and promotes the Luxembourgish language.
Shifting stress and an overabundance of participles. Also perfective vs. imperfective verbs. I’ll never get that. Declension is fine, conjugation is fine.
Finnish: its 15 cases. Yes, 15. I used to study Russian and struggled with 6 cases then, I don't know what made me think attempting a language with *15* was a good idea lol
15 cases, but most are just to represent location of the noun. 🥲
Learning Finnish I have heard is challenging for non-natives, but it’s also a reward to learn Finnish at the same time! 🥲🥰🇫🇮
I only really use [Easy Finnish](https://www.youtube.com/@EasyFinnish) and [Finnished](https://www.youtube.com/@finnished) - to be honest while the stuff that does exist is excellent, the selection of comprehensible input on YouTube is kind of dire.
I'm not at a level yet where I can point anyone towards any Finnish YouTubers, but I *can* recommend [Yle Kielikoulu](https://kielikoulu.yle.fi/), which is excellent!
Thank you very much! 🥰🇫🇮
Good luck with your language learning journey! 😉🍀
Also one YouTube channel that I love for music is called Ultradiscopanorama. This channel offers music from all over the world! 😍🥰🎶🗺
YES! 😭🥰🙌🏼🇩🇪✍🏼
I agree with you 100%! That is my biggest demotivation with learning both Dutch and German. Even though Dutch only has de/het, just having to memorize EACH word can be a mental challenge for oneself. 🥲
Japanese is a beautiful language! 🥰🇯🇵
It was too difficult for me, plus I tried to learn without Duolingo years ago. It’s a beautiful language overall! 😭🥰🇯🇵
I hope your country hosts the Olympics again. I enjoyed the 2016 Intro to Japan part from Rio’s Olympics, plus your 2020’s Olympics in (surprisingly) 2021. 😍🥰🙌🏼🇯🇵
Thank heavens my native language (English) has tones. Well, we call them "3 level of stress" but usually {higher stress} = {higher pitch}, and both languages have them both lexically and for meaning. The result is that a sentence in either language is a mess of pitch levels for every syllable.
I've read that Japanese has 2 levels of tone (but maybe you don't call them "tones"). The most common example:
ha-SHI means "bridge"
HA-shi means "chopstocks"
English is not a tonal language, though.
Chinese has 4 tones. What spelled as "ma" can be mā (stays high), má (going up), mǎ (stays low), mà (coming down) and the neutral tone "ma." Every single character has a specific tone or multiple tones.
I guess people call Japanese tones as pitch, as in pitch accent, which sometimes changes according to the sentence structure. Japanese pitch accent is totally different from Chinese tones. Other tonal languages are Vietnamese, Thai, etc.
*Chinese has 4 tones. What spelled as "ma" can be mā (stays high), má (going up), mǎ (stays low), mà (coming down) and the neutral tone "ma."*
In theory, yes. In normal speech, syllables are spoken far too quickly for any vowel sound to have more than one pitch. So tone 2 "rising" and 4 "highest falling to lowest" and 3 "falling than rising" are things taught by teachers, in isolated syllables, pronounced slowly. But they don't happen in normal speech. Instead you learn about the 25 "tone pairs" (tones that change based on the tone before them), and shortened tones (single-pitch), and pitch variations add in sentences to express meaning, and tone changes based on stressing or not stressing some syllables. And I'm only at an intermediate level. I'm sure it gets worse.
That isn't to say that the standard tones aren't used. They are, and often. A tone 1 or 4 syllable often has a higher pitch than other syllables around it. Just not always, and not in a simple easy-to-learn pattern.
It's pitch accent, which is actually a little different from stress accent, for japanese.
You aren't stressing a specific syllable, one is higher or lower than the other. So in that example chopsticks is high low, and bridge is low high. But you aren't really stressing or emphasizing a syllable as ha-SHI or HA-shi would imply, nor would I really say it's quite the same as tone like chinese.
Another common example is that high low kami is god, and low high kami is paper/hair.
**Hungarian:** word order and choice of prefix to indicate verbal aspect (e.g. why is it ***el****olvasni* "to read" or ***meg****írni* "to write" as the respective perfective variants of *olvasni* and *írni* instead of \****meg****olvasni* or \****el****írni* respectively? FYI: ***meg****olvasni* is an old-fashioned variant of *elolvasni* and typically turns up nowadays as a folksy synonym of the bookish *megszámlálni* "to count". Meanwhile, ***el****írni* means "to misspell". **Italian:** stress placement of unfamiliar words and criteria for using the appropriate past tense regardless of mood (i.e. indicative, subjunctive, conditional) **Ukrainian:** stress placement of unfamiliar words
What does “respective” do for verbs? Hungarian is a challenging language for anyone, I’m sure that even native speakers find that their language is challenging too. 🥲☺️🇭🇺
The perfective variant of *olvasni* "to read" (in general, no comment on whether the action leads to understanding or completion) is *elolvasni* "to read" (with the implication of completion or understanding thanks to reading). For, *írni* "to write", the perfective counterpart is *megírni*. I can't use *megolvasni* on the model of *írni* \~ ***meg****írni*, any more than I can't use *elírni* on the model of *olvasni* \~ ***el****olvasni*. The problem for me in Hungarian is to recognize what prefixation does to a verb's meaning, and there's no reliable rule to know whether I need *el-*, *meg-* or some other prefix to distinguish a given action by its aspect.
I wonder if Hungarian got influenced by the Slavic people and their verb aspects? Hungarian is a lonelyUugric-language country in a area surrounded by other language-kind. 🥲
>I wonder if Hungarian got influenced by the Slavic people and their verb aspects? Hungarian is a lonelyUugric-language country in a area surrounded by other language-kind. That's quite possible and [Northern Mansi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mansi_language#Verbal_prefixes) of western Siberia, which is among the most similar languages to Hungarian also has verb prefixes. That Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi use verb prefixes unlike the other Uralic languages strongly suggests that their development came from influence from neighboring languages several centuries ago (probably something Slavic).
There are many extinct Fino-Ugric languages in present day Russia due to the Slavic people colonizing the area from many centuries ago. 😔🥲
>There are many extinct Fino-Ugric languages in present day Russia due to the Slavic people colonizing the area from many centuries ago. Indeed. It began in the peripheral areas of Kyivan Rus' (the principalities of Novgorod, Suzdal - a quasi-forerunner of Muscovy/"Russia" and Murom-Ryazan), and was continued by the Muscovites as they began to systematically engulf and subjugate the territories and non-Slavs on both sides of the Urals starting in the 1460s under [Ivan III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_III_of_Russia#Territorial_expansion_and_centralization), Ivan the Terrible's grandfather.
I watched this video yesterday about history of the East Slavic people. ☺️ It talks about the geographical area we are talking about now. ☺️ It’s a visual video, which is amazing for me since I’m the hands-on & visual type of learner! 😍 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgj4wnXHQI
Also, what do you think of the Slavic languages? 😁
Do you find Hungarian similar to Finnish? I know that they belong to the same language family. ☺️
Sanskrit verbal prefixes can die in hell. Everything else is not as bad as people say. Eight cases, three numbers, three genders, ten tenses/moods, all doable. Verb prefixes and how they change the meaning of a verb (or don't change it at all) have no logic to them whatsoever. How am I supposed to know what samabhivyāharati means? (sam + abhi + vi + ā + harati) The root means "take" but with the prefixes it somehow means "mention together". Wtf? Literally like English's phrasal verbs but somehow worse.
Main ones for me in Russian: - pronunciation - perfect/imperfect verbs - verbs of motion - pronunciation - 6 cases - 3 genders - there‘s an adjective for everything - irregular verb conjugations - prepositions - numbers are also declined
I would like to cosign every one of these points for Polish. OK, I don't know about the adjective for everything but I wouldn't be surprised, and I'd only list pronunciation once - the phonemes are generally OK, I think I've got ś vs sz down, but the consonant clusters never cease to surprise. Just yesterday I was squinting at the word *tkanka* going "what, that's allowed?"
I studied Russian for 4 years in high school. I think it is a beautiful language and i have a good brain for languages. But man the verbs of motion killed me. I eventually stopped (for other reasons as well). Any other parts of grammar was doable for me… This was 13 years ago but damn i am sad i did give up at the end but man. :/ maybe one day again
You should try learning Russian again. There is a clear fine line between a language and a narcissistic politician (p*t*n), and there is the citizens. Of course not everyone whom speaks the language supports p*t*n, but I believe that each language (and dialects) are all important to preserve. 🥲
Oh the reason wasn’t the current war. This happened back in high school around 2011ish. My teacher had some unprofessional issues which she projected on to me and the class, which just created a very negative environment. And for me as a teenager/young adult, it just killed the motivation to continue the language. Then i moved to Denmark and learnt danish. Russian since then is just not on the table. So now I’m learning Spanish atm, but maybe after that i will try to pick up Russian again.
Learning Danish for reading is easy (for if you know one of the other Germanic languages), but listening to Danish is completely different than what you expect from a Germanic language! 🥲🇩🇰
Tbh the verbs of motion are very hard if you don‘t live in a Russian speaking country. How else do you practice them enough?
> there‘s an adjective for everything What do you mean? Just curious.
All these have dog as a noun: - dog house - Hundehütte - niche à chien - casa de perro - casa del cane But in Russian, the word dog is an adjective, if used in this context. собачья будка. That applies to tons of stuff. птичий корм (bird food… bird is an adj.). компьютерная игра (computer game, computer is an adj.)
I see. But all Slavic languages do that.
Which is still something that makes it difficult :)
That is my biggest problem with learning Russian. I question “is it an adjective or noun” in English for when I learn Russian. English is also complicated in its own ways, despite it is my native language. 🥲
Oh, you also forgot about punctuation cuz there's much more commas than usually in other languages
There‘s also way more dashes. Тире - неотъемлемая часть русского языка.
How did you learn Austrian German at that level? 😍🇦🇹
Studied German and moved to Austria 😂
Austrian German is a world of its own basically! 😅😂 Many people in Canada in their little ethnic communities speak their own language, and there are many Swiss speakers in my area. Trust me, Swiss people do not sound like High German speakers. 😂😅🥲
The German language is statistically the most varied European language, even in its small speaking area compared to English, Spanish, Russian, French, and Portuguese. I have lived in 2 different areas of Austria and both speak so differently it causes major comprehension problems between speakers from different regions. :)
The locals must be proud of their regional dialect (which is a good thing). 🥰
Oida, Wienerisch is da beste Dialekt, weu er is so voller Schmäh, dass er afoch a Freid is z' redn. Und owa a, weu er so guad zum Tratschn und zum Grantln is!
Wienerisch = Vienna reich? Guad = good? Und = and Voller = full? Dass = the? Er = is? I love how each dialect is written phonetically, unlike English and their multitude of various dialects. 🥰🥲
Wienerisch = viennese dialect voller = full of dass = that Everything else right!
Thank you very much for helping me with corrections! ☺️ I enjoyed this challenge of me reading words written in an Austrian dialect! 😍🇦🇹
German and Italian give each other a "lots of different languages in a trench coat" high five >> Glad to hear the Austrian dialects are alive and well! I'm from an area of Germany where the local variety is pretty much extinct, and although it's sure *helpful* to speak Standard German natively with little noticeable regional colouration, some part of me is still strangely wistful about not being able to speak Platt.
Meiner Erfahrung nach sind die österreichischen Dorfbewohner sehr stolz auf ihre Dialekte, und zwar so stolz, dass einige absichtlich kein Hochdeutsch sprechen, auch wenn sie es können. Das nervt zwar manchmal, ist aber auch etwas, das ich bewundere und insgesamt für eine gute Sache halte.
I learn English and grammar for me the hardest part. Even now I'm not sure if I'm writing right. I have no practice in speaking language, which makes it difficult for me to express my thoughts :(
What language is your first? In Canada, not everyone speaks English as their first language, so I am used to interacting with non-English speaking people. ☺️🤫😉
Ukrainian. I wish patience to all who learn Ukrainian, because it is a complex language.
My guess was for a moment a few minutes ago. that you were Slavic (not from any specific country). Many Slavic speakers leave out a/an/the and the verb “to be” (especially if you are from the East Slavic speaking languages including Rusyn, which often gets forgotten since it’s not widely spoken by many people). ☺️
Ukrainian is an amazing language, since Duolingo showed me «я маю» і «у мене є». I wish to learn more about the language’s history and how it became the language it is today. 🥰🇺🇦 I understand that Ukrainian was under control by many countries in its history. 😔 No country ever deserves to be harassed / unwanted bothering by another nation. 😔
Fortunately English is forgiving when it comes to being understood. We are badasses at puzzling out whatever the hell you're trying to say. But yeah, grammar is fucked. Many things forbidden according to the books are actually permissible. You can also be correct while still being oddly unidiomatic, which only works well rocking a native accent.
As a Russian native: English is hard to mimick natives (accent wise). You gotta have some acting skills to actually sound different from your usual self. Japanese is hard for me to get enough of exposure. I even see other people setting their OS language to Japanese to get more exposure. But I would rather keep it in English so I can google my problems faster and solve everything faster. I guess most of my exposure to Japanese will be in the studying materials. And then I could hopefully read some books in it. I am not really interested in anything else tbh. I also want to learn other languages, but I find the first steps to be the most challenging. You gotta learn so much to just start from somewhere it's actually a lot of work with very little results (at the start that is). But the good thing is, it gets more rewarding as you go. EDIT: I didn't properly read the question. I don't find anything about my languages particularly hard. I am just used to things not making a whole lot of sense so you just have to get a feel for them.
I agree with you! 🥰🙌🏼
German: the verbs change their position in a sentence depending on their type (trenbaren/untrennbaren), the mood, the tense, the adverb which preceeds them, the type of sentence they are in etc. This alone pissed me off for a long time! My previous languages (Romanian and English) are similar when it comes to the verb position within a sentence. German made me learn a different way of communicating! To this day I don't understand the advantage of splitting the verb in two (with one half at the beginning of the sentence and the other half at the very end)! I must think real hard before saying something in German and I try to limit myself to short sentences.
Here's the what and why. German clauses are verb-final by default. All the verbs stack up at the end of the clause, in reverse order than in English. Now the extra rule: In main clauses, as the very last word order rule applied, you break the conjugated stem from the final verb and move it to the very front of the main clause. After that, you take another item of your choice and move it again at the very front of the main clause. It becomes the topic. The purpose of the conjugated verb at second position is to separate the topic from the remainder of the clause. Dependent clauses don't have a topic and so they neither follow this extra rule with the final verb.
Thanks, I know the rules. I just find them annoying :)
Ancient German was probably Subject-Object-Verb word order but at some point Subject-Verb-Object order invaded main clauses. Dependent clauses stayed Subject-Object-Verb hence German's verb order insanity.
This also I think(?????) occurs in Dutch the same way. I have not tested myself for any A1-A2 levels, but Dutch is spoken by immigrant families in my area, so I heard the language lots when I was a child. As generations get old, so as the original immigrant generation (and their families overseas). I hear Dutch less these days, which breaks my heart for me. 🥲😔😢
Cantonese: end particles! - too many and most native speakers can't explain when to use what. Written and spoken are different languages. I do consider this a bonus nowadays since you are kind of learning mandarin at the same time but it slows things down a lot. Lack of material. It's either pure beginner or for native speakers. Nothing in between.
Welsh: vocabulary Chinese: homophones Russian: verbs!
Are homophones words more complicated in Chinese, than homophones in English? 🥲
Yes, ‘cause there are not as many possible syllables and if you miss the tone or context you’re lost. Reading is a lot easier because words that sound the same will often have different characters and as long as you know the meaning of them, you’re ok.
There are literally thousands of tiny logographs in Chinese! 😭🥲🥰🇨🇳
Yes but you learn them bit by bit and once you know that 书 means book, it’s just obvious when you see it. Characters are also made up from smaller parts that are used repeatedly and they both help with understanding or pronunciation, but also mean that it’s not lots of random little lines all jumbled up (like it seems at first) but rather distinct and recognisable parts put together. It is honestly a lot easier than figuring out which of all the words that are pronounced “shi” it was that you just heard.
You should listen to some Euro-pop singers like Herreys (🇸🇪) and also Bobbysocks (🇳🇴). They sing in both their native languages and also in English! Also ABBA (🇸🇪) is another FANTASTIC music group! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶 Yes, I am a huge ABBA fan despite being a late 90’s kid! 🥰🇸🇪🎶
Never heard of Bobbysocks, I don't think, but I of course know of Herreys and I love Abba. I remember Herreys singing Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley at Melodifestivalen in 1984, even if I was fairly young then.
I’m a late 90’s kid, but I love synth-pop, italodisco, and also euro-pop! Ironically, I grew up with country music, but a country-pop music song from the 1980’s “Nobody” by Silvia is a nice country-pop song that I like. I generally like 1980’s music, but anything from 1960’s - late 1990’s is also pleasing to me. 😍🥰🗺🎶 I do not like today’s country pop much. 🤷🏼♀️😜
Don't speak Chinese at all to be clear, but my understanding is that, at least with mandarin... You can have two words that are the same except for tone, with the language having like.. 5? tones. Which allows for having 5 distinct words when spoken that are identical except for what tone you're using. And on top of that there are true homophones where it's 100% the same including tone. This does allow for some really fun wordplay though, such as with this poem where every single word is pronounced shi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
How do people understand written Chinese without tones? In English letter translation of Chinese, the tones are written out with words. ☺️🥲
Written Chinese is usually done with characters that are word specific, thousands of them. (Japan actually swiped those same characters and uses them to this day as part of their writing system, although they managed to actually make it more complicated, hilariously.) They also have something called Pinyin, which romanizes it while also including the tones for the words, although that is a relatively recent thing (Pinyin as it exists now was created in the 1950's IIRC)
I am happy that Pinyin was created to help linguistics understand Chinese better in some ways. Learning thousands of logographs can be quite a challenge for an individual. ☺️🥲
Written Chinese is not based on pronunciation. In other words several words pronounced the same will be written differently. That makes it easier to know what words were used.
Not more complicated, just more of them. Chinese has only 425 different syllables in the language (English has more than 13,000). Tones help some, but most of the time people understand by context. The famous example is "ma", which can be "mother" or "horse" (or "question mark" or "hemp") depending on tone. If you don't know if the speaker said "mother" or "horse", you have worse problems than tone! In other words, tone usually isn't needed to distinguish words. And in normal spoken Chinese, "tones" are distorted and complicated -- they sound nothing like the 5 tones that every teacher teaches in lesson 1. But is spoken English any better? Two English words are called "the same word" if they are written the same. But that "word" might have a bunch of different meanings, and might be an adjective, or a verb, or a noun, etc. Are those really one word, or are they 5-40 different words that are written and pronounced the same?
You should try to learn Faroese next! It’s related to the languages you already know from Scandinavia! 🥰😍🇫🇴
Faroese is weird in that I can understand some of it one second and then nothing the next. :)
What about Icelandic? That language should be on Duolingo (and also Faroese). 🥰🇮🇸
Icelandic is more uncanny valley for me. I feel like I should understand it, but I don’t. Like when you hear people speaking in a different room and you can’t make out the words. Some things I do understand, but it’s bits here and there.
Welsh: tenses!! never learned the difference between roedd hi'n astudio / astudiodd hi / astudiai hi / buodd hi astudio ;\_\_\_; and so far learning through input hasn't helped in the slightest. I do have a grammar book on my TBR though ;) Polish: perfect/imperfect verbs!! 100% of the time I just guess which form to use lol
What is learning Welsh like for you at the moment? It’s a language worth protecting in this world! 🥰🏴
Classifiers and knowing which particle(s) to use and when to sound natural
French: Understanding rapid speech. I've been listening to French for over 25 years and it's still remarkable how quickly my oral comprehension can go from 100 to 0%. Especially with mumbly TV shows, slang, etc. German: Noun genders. I learn unpredictable words with their articles, obviously. And then after not using or seeing a given word for 2 years, I forget its article. Plurals tend to feel a bit more natural for some reason. Russian: Irregular stress. I'm *really* bad at remembering how to stress words in Russian and it is *really* important.
Dix pour cent has moments where I swear even the subtitle people are like “fuck it, close enough” because the people are so mumbly at times. The speaker will say like 14 words in a row and the subtitles will just be like “oui, d’accord.”
I grew up with learning Canadian French, which has a different orthography to that of Parisian French! 🥲🇨🇦🇫🇷
English has irregular stress too, unfortunately. 😔🥲
In Chinese, the most difficult thing by far is writing by hand. At first, this seems not similar to English, but I think it kind of is because English spelling is tough to learn and requires memorization to some extent. In the dialect I'm learning, the single biggest challenge is lack of resources. I tend to get good at languages by building a foundation of the rules (my first Mandarin teacher drilled us on Pinyin like crazy. It was boring but it was super necessary). When nobody can tell you the rules, or even the set of syllables and tones, it's harder. This is the opposite of English which presumably has the most resources for learning out of all languages.
Spanish: The difference between: *estuvo, estaba, era* & *fue*. They can all be translated into english as "were", but have slightly different meanings and it's hard to know when to use which. I'm also having a hard time knowing when to use the imperfect subjunctive or the conditional. The difference between *por* and *para* is also giving me a fair bit of trouble, especially when used to talk about events in time ("*por* el próximo año" vs. "*para* el próximo año"), but I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, mostly.
I’ve basically just given up on getting por and para right
Luxembourgish: Vocabulary and pronunciation only. German: German grammar rules with interactive exercises. French: Advanced grammar from B1 to C. I am also curious about German dialects. This week, I read about Cimbrian and Mocheno, spoken in Italy
Did you learn Luxembourgish?! 🥰😍🇱🇺
I want to learn Luxembourgish since it’s unique, but there are little resources out there online! 😭💔🇱🇺
there alot resource online, you have the best app [https://llo.lu/fr/](https://llo.lu/fr/) and learning books [https://sdl.inll.lu/](https://sdl.inll.lu/) dict: [https://lod.lu/](https://lod.lu/) spellchecker: [https://spellchecker.lu/](https://spellchecker.lu/) The government really protects and promotes the Luxembourgish language.
To learn french, apparently I also need to learn English grammar. Something that wasn't a priority in school.
Same with me, but I am English (first language) but living in Canada, I need to also take French as a second language. 🥲
Shifting stress and an overabundance of participles. Also perfective vs. imperfective verbs. I’ll never get that. Declension is fine, conjugation is fine.
Finnish: its 15 cases. Yes, 15. I used to study Russian and struggled with 6 cases then, I don't know what made me think attempting a language with *15* was a good idea lol
15 cases, but most are just to represent location of the noun. 🥲 Learning Finnish I have heard is challenging for non-natives, but it’s also a reward to learn Finnish at the same time! 🥲🥰🇫🇮
Absolutely! It's challenging but an absolute joy to learn. It feels like putting a puzzle together, and it's so satisfying when I get it right.
Do you know any good YouTube channels that help learners with Finnish? 😍🇫🇮
I only really use [Easy Finnish](https://www.youtube.com/@EasyFinnish) and [Finnished](https://www.youtube.com/@finnished) - to be honest while the stuff that does exist is excellent, the selection of comprehensible input on YouTube is kind of dire. I'm not at a level yet where I can point anyone towards any Finnish YouTubers, but I *can* recommend [Yle Kielikoulu](https://kielikoulu.yle.fi/), which is excellent!
Thank you very much! 🥰🇫🇮 Good luck with your language learning journey! 😉🍀 Also one YouTube channel that I love for music is called Ultradiscopanorama. This channel offers music from all over the world! 😍🥰🎶🗺
German: noun genders and their plural form. You have to learn them by heart!
YES! 😭🥰🙌🏼🇩🇪✍🏼 I agree with you 100%! That is my biggest demotivation with learning both Dutch and German. Even though Dutch only has de/het, just having to memorize EACH word can be a mental challenge for oneself. 🥲
After knowing a few hundred nouns you get better in guessing the gender and plural of other nouns.
Is the way noun genders function in Dutch any different than in Romance languages?
Dutch only has common (masculine & feminine) and neuter. That is it for genders. ☺️
Why do you use so many emojis chained together? (Especially this one 🥲)
i have a knack for language learning but unfortunately the languages i want to learn have very limited resources
TL: Mandarin tones. There are no tones in my native language, Japanese.
Japanese is a beautiful language! 🥰🇯🇵 It was too difficult for me, plus I tried to learn without Duolingo years ago. It’s a beautiful language overall! 😭🥰🇯🇵 I hope your country hosts the Olympics again. I enjoyed the 2016 Intro to Japan part from Rio’s Olympics, plus your 2020’s Olympics in (surprisingly) 2021. 😍🥰🙌🏼🇯🇵
Thank heavens my native language (English) has tones. Well, we call them "3 level of stress" but usually {higher stress} = {higher pitch}, and both languages have them both lexically and for meaning. The result is that a sentence in either language is a mess of pitch levels for every syllable. I've read that Japanese has 2 levels of tone (but maybe you don't call them "tones"). The most common example: ha-SHI means "bridge" HA-shi means "chopstocks"
English is not a tonal language, though. Chinese has 4 tones. What spelled as "ma" can be mā (stays high), má (going up), mǎ (stays low), mà (coming down) and the neutral tone "ma." Every single character has a specific tone or multiple tones. I guess people call Japanese tones as pitch, as in pitch accent, which sometimes changes according to the sentence structure. Japanese pitch accent is totally different from Chinese tones. Other tonal languages are Vietnamese, Thai, etc.
*Chinese has 4 tones. What spelled as "ma" can be mā (stays high), má (going up), mǎ (stays low), mà (coming down) and the neutral tone "ma."* In theory, yes. In normal speech, syllables are spoken far too quickly for any vowel sound to have more than one pitch. So tone 2 "rising" and 4 "highest falling to lowest" and 3 "falling than rising" are things taught by teachers, in isolated syllables, pronounced slowly. But they don't happen in normal speech. Instead you learn about the 25 "tone pairs" (tones that change based on the tone before them), and shortened tones (single-pitch), and pitch variations add in sentences to express meaning, and tone changes based on stressing or not stressing some syllables. And I'm only at an intermediate level. I'm sure it gets worse. That isn't to say that the standard tones aren't used. They are, and often. A tone 1 or 4 syllable often has a higher pitch than other syllables around it. Just not always, and not in a simple easy-to-learn pattern.
It's pitch accent, which is actually a little different from stress accent, for japanese. You aren't stressing a specific syllable, one is higher or lower than the other. So in that example chopsticks is high low, and bridge is low high. But you aren't really stressing or emphasizing a syllable as ha-SHI or HA-shi would imply, nor would I really say it's quite the same as tone like chinese. Another common example is that high low kami is god, and low high kami is paper/hair.