What languages do memberS SPEAK

[darren]

I was just thinking about languages and was wondering do any members speak a 2nd language.

so do any members speak a 2nd language.

Im sure some of us mite have taken school classes in another language.




My 2nd language is japanese which ive been learning for about 18th months.

[George 1978]

I did German at school (my school was twinned with one in Germany, hence the language learnt). Not quite the same thing, but I do have a go at translating things via Google.

Funnily enough, I bought something earlier on today from Argos and its instruction manual consists of instructions no fewer than 28 different languages! - Ukrainian rather confusingly abbreviated to on the manual as "UK".

I wonder if things like sign language, braille and the like would also count as languages in this respect, even though we don't speak them?

[Richard1978]

I learnt enough French at school to get by on a holiday, & have been trying to learn Japanese for a few years without much success.

[George 1978]

If the Eurovision Song Contest and other places have anything to go by, it does seem that our European counterparts at least speak good English, and so in that respect, one feels as they are meeting us halfway with the language situation.

A bit topical l I know regarding Brexit and the like, but I was watching the BBC News earlier on and several European Prime Ministers were interviewed on camera, and many of them including the Dutch and Luxembourg ones spoke very good English and needed no subtitles on screen. In a nutshell, most people on the continent if asked whether they could speak another language, they would most probably respond "English", even if their "English" was actually based on American vocabulary.

[amethyst]

When I was a child could speak Welsh fluently.It was a difficult language to learn probably even harder now if your starting from scratch

[tex]

Apparently Mandarin is the hardest language to learn and Norwegian the easiest ...(source unknown)

[darren]

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Language Difficulty Ranking

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker. After this particular study time you will reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)”
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If there is a language in this list you would like to learn and it is in a high difficult category, don’t let this stop you from learning it. Even if they are ranked as difficult, it does not mean that they are impossible to learn and maybe it is not hard for you at all.

Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English
Afrikaans Danish Dutch French Italian	Norwegian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Swedish
Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours) Languages similar to English
German
Category III: 36 weeks (900 hours) Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Indonesian Malaysian	Swahili
Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours) Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Croatian Czech *Estonian *Finnish *Georgian Greek Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian Icelandic Khmer Lao Latvian	Lithuanian Macedonian *Mongolian Nepali Pashto Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik) Polish Russian Serbian Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Tagalog *Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek *Vietnamese Xhosa Zulu
Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
Arabic Cantonese (Chinese) Mandarin (Chinese)	*Japanese Korean

* Languages preceded by asterisks are usually more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category.

[zabadak]

Grade A at French 'O'-Level but that's it, although I know a few German words and numbers...

[Richard1978]

Thanks for the list Darren, I've heard Finnish is supposed to be the hardest European language to learn, at least for an English speaker.

While Japanese has 3 scripts to learn, the spoken version probably isn't much more difficult than another European language to learn, certainly it doesn't have the very tricky tones to learn that most other far eastern languages have.

[darren]

NO PROBS MATE.

CHECK THIS LINK ON JAPANESE.https://youtu.be/WjNNIUkdd4c

Thanks for the list Darren, I've heard Finnish is supposed to be the hardest European language to learn, at least for an English speaker.

While Japanese has 3 scripts to learn, the spoken version probably isn't much more difficult than another European language to learn, certainly it doesn't have the very tricky tones to learn that most other far eastern languages have.