[Parzival]

Its fascination how the media and the Elite politicians are so clear and united in their opinions. I just remember 2000 when Austria die elect Haider, the EU even tried to put sanctions against Austria. What a joke. When the election was fair an the other candidate even won just by one single vote difference, its how it is. You also can't claim victory in sports just because you are 1 second behind. What this show, that 50 % of the people in Austria did support Hofer and among the other 50 % they did not all support Van der Bellen just had be against Hofer.
The downfall of the establishment isn't stopped. The whole refugee situation is not the reason for the crisis, just some gasoline that light the fire faster.

A few days there was a talkshow in Germany about the downfall of the establishment political parties in Germany. The articles had be very critical about the empty phrases of the mainstream politicians and one political observer said, it can't be that 80 % of Germans worry about the refugee situation but 100 % of the parliament have no worries about whats going on.

[Glaucon]

(05-24-2016 07:25 AM)Parzival Wrote:  

Its fascination how the media and the Elite politicians are so clear and united in their opinions.

The current elite and media is very happy with the current status quo, they will fight tooth and nail for it. This will be ugly.

[Stadtaffe]

You know, I am starting to believe there is some truth in the idea that women are influencing politics in a negative way. Have been quite sceptical that this could be the case but have a look at the chart :

http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/05/the-dem...-election/

..it is absolutely incredible how many more females are supporting green who is in his seventies and men are supporting our man, who is in his mid-forties. It's a sorry situation.

[RaccoonFace]

[Glaucon]

^^ how to kill your own culture in 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Give women the vote
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

[PowerGame]

http://m.focus.de/politik/videos/rechtsp...60818.html

A city called Waidhofen had an election participation of 146.9%

At least more than 3500 false votes alone in this city.

They will take until the first June to send the right numbers..

The media site uses the word conspiracy theory in context to Hofers party which senses deception.

And there is a highly suspicious number of invalid postal votes.. They are hand written and the election officials (often from establishment parties) can decide whether they are valid or not..

[Khan]

(05-24-2016 09:46 AM)Stadtaffe Wrote:  

You know, I am starting to believe there is some truth in the idea that women are influencing politics in a negative way. Have been quite sceptical that this could be the case but have a look at the chart :

http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/05/the-dem...-election/

..it is absolutely incredible how many more females are supporting green who is in his seventies and men are supporting our man, who is in his mid-forties. It's a sorry situation.

It's the truth. Unmarried women always vote more liberal and married women always vote more conservative.

I remember Ann Coulter claiming on several occasions that, if only men had the right to vote, every post-WWII US Presidential election (with the exception of 1964) would have resulted in a Republican victory.

[They Call Me Mister Tony]

(05-24-2016 10:17 AM)PowerGame Wrote:  

http://m.focus.de/politik/videos/rechtsp...60818.html

A city called Waidhofen had an election participation of 146.9%

At least more than 3500 false votes alone in this city.

They will take until the first June to send the right numbers..

The media site uses the word conspiracy theory in context to Hofers party which senses deception.

And there is a highly suspicious number of invalid postal votes.. They are hand written and the election officials (often from establishment parties) can decide whether they are valid or not..

If those false votes don't count, would a recount take place? I would hope that the officials decided that they were marked invalid.

[PowerGame]

They recount them but only for Waidhofen as I read.

Another source :
https://www.unzensuriert.at/content/0020...en-Van-der

It claims : a so called flying commission has 600% election participation (quick Google search says: sondersprengel in Linz)

78% more invalid votes than before when there were 5 candidates instead of 2.
92.655 to 165.212 which makes a difference of 72.557

Hofer needed about 31.026 votes to win with the actual results after the postal counting (even if the votes were already faked before the postal counts)

And : there were never so many postal voters before.. And they gave the win to the greens.
Statistics in Europe show that people who didn't vote before are activated by the right parties.. Why should there suddenly be, against the trend, a much higher activation by the greens... who were always weak against the real establishment and always cooperate with them.

746.110 postal votes 61.7% for van der Bellen who was behind 110.000 votes Sunday to win against Hofer.

BMI (state) and ORF(media) also had different results and news.

A krone.at online poll asked about manipulation and 70% of the readers believe it happened.

While the right party holds the door open to sue after this information ..
The media already celebrates a meeting between old and "new president" Bellen..

[PowerGame]

http://mobil.krone.at/phone/kmm__1/app__...tory.phtml

Shit storm on Facebook against Bellen.. He gets a special units team(Cobra) for his safety,because there are so many threats from people who believe in fraud.

Of course the source says the rights are bad loosers and other biased stuff.

[Parzival]

About manipulation, there was the case with the AfD as well in the state elections of Bremen in 2015. Pupils did count the votes wrong. The "mistake" only did came into light, because the AfD did as questions because they did fail to get into the parliament by a few votes.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/a...e-AfD.html

[Surreyman]

(05-24-2016 11:15 AM)PowerGame Wrote:  

http://mobil.krone.at/phone/kmm__1/app__...tory.phtml

Shit storm on Facebook against Bellen.. He gets a special units team(Cobra) for his safety,because there are so many threats from people who believe in fraud.

Of course the source says the rights are bad loosers and other biased stuff.

This election is very disappointing. Do you think there is any likelihood of Austrians forming paramilitary groups? I'm imagining something akin to Northern Ireland in the 70s.

[aardwolf]

Similar manipulations were happening in Polish local elections in 2014.
Agricultural "Polish People's Party" won unexpectedly large number of votes (over 20% while their typical support was rarely above 10%) and number of invalid votes was incredible (up to 17%).

As the result a social Movement for Control of the Elections was established and tens of thousands of volunteers were controlling 2015 Presidential and Parliamentary elections.

[EDantes]

Raising voting ages to 25 across the Western nations might be a good idea; anything to prevent pampered university kids from voting until they've actually had some work experience.

[marty]

(05-23-2016 08:55 AM)redpillage Wrote:  

On a different note, what's tougher to learn - Polish or Hungarian*? ;-)

*I'd vote Hungarian

Your question doesn't make sense. I don't want to offend you, it's a common misconception. There are no "easy" and "hard" languages. Every language is easy and hard at the same time.

There are certain aspects that make a language look easy or hard. What cause the biggest difficulties are the differences between one's native tongue (or other foreign languages one has already acquired) and the target language. So Spanish could be considered "easier" for a native English speaker than Japanese. But the same doesn't apply to a native speaker of Korean. Japanese would be "easier" for him than Spanish because the writing system and grammar are much closer to his native language than Spanish.

But other factors come into play, too. For certain English-speaking people Japanese would be "easier" to learn than Spanish, if he has no interest in said language but absolutely passionate about Japanese anime, manga, history or whatever. He would find it much easier to dedicate thousands of hours to master the language, although logic would dictate it should be harder for him than Spanish.

The other limiting belief I'd want people to get rid of is that a language is hard to learn. It isn't. There are certainly millions of people (in most cases) who had acquired it as either their mother tongue or as a foreign language. You can do it, too. All languages are constructed using the same elements, there is nothing inherently difficult about it. If you spend years learning a language and you can't speak it fluently (I could write a long article about what that really means) or read a book written for adults, you are doing something wrong and it's not the language's fault.

Now back to the original question, is Hungarian or Polish harder to learn? Let's assume it's an English-speaking individual we're talking about - they are basically the same. Both are quite different from English but still European languages with Latin alphabets, so you should find a lot of things that are similar to English. Pronunciation is really straightforward in both languages once you've learned the sounds and how the spelling works. You should rather concentrate on the easy aspects - every language has a ton of these and not on the difficulties, it will make your life much easier. Moreover there are a ton of native speakers of both languages who have learned English. Surely it can't be much harder the other way around.

[scrambled]

(05-26-2016 08:20 AM)marty Wrote:  

(05-23-2016 08:55 AM)redpillage Wrote:  

On a different note, what's tougher to learn - Polish or Hungarian*? ;-) *I'd vote Hungarian

Your question doesn't make sense. I don't want to offend you, it's a common misconception. There are no "easy" and "hard" languages. Every language is easy and hard at the same time.

I don't want to offend you, but the question made sense to me. He didn't ask which was "easy", but which was "tougher to learn"; so you engage with a straw man from here on out, never answering what is a very simple question (Hungarian is "tougher").

Quote:

There are certain aspects that make a language look easy or hard.

"Certain aspects" (which you do not define or list); and "look", as in the differences of one language are only superficial, as opposed to really being more complex and different from English? The problem is, those differences are more than mere superficial ones: languages greatly differ in the amount of time needed to master, due to the specific language's complexity and distinction from one's native language. Here's a good general list of difficulty, compiled by people who actual specialize in secondary language acquisition, the Foreign Service Institute (US):

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com...difficulty

Note that the chart above, while useful, has one extra variable not mentioned, which supports my earlier answer two-fold, in that not all of the languages are taught to the same level of proficiency by FSI; that is, one needs a "3/3" in French to graduate, but only a "2/2" in Hungarian. If they taught Hungarian to the same proficiency as say, they teach to French, it would be at least one year extra of training: approximately two years of full time education for Hungarian, against only six months for French. Notice also that Hungarian has an "asterisk", showing it is of increased difficult to learn, yet Polish does not. (For definition of the number scale used in Diplomacy, see here)

Quote:

The differences in difficulty between acquiring one language instea of another are real, and based on the differences between one's native tongue and the target language.

In any case, your argument is trying to split the baby, so to speak, by first pretending no language is 'easy' in the abstract, in which you make a metaphysical point that is true but irrelevant to human interest, but then must needs contradict yourself by saying there are "difficulties" present in learning languages. What "biggest difficulties" could there be since you said no language is "hard"?

Quote:

So Spanish could be considered "easier" for a native English speaker than Japanese. But the same doesn't apply to a native speaker of Korean. Japanese would be "easier" for him than Spanish because the writing system and grammar are much closer to his native language than Spanish.

Could be considered is a rather disingenuous use of passive voice, which you supplement with scare quotes over "easier"; even though easier is really what you mean, you cannot directly admit it because it contradicts your earlier "no language is easy or hard" dogma that you did not think of, but rather received from some "professor" who must have never had to learn more than one other language as an adult, but was trying to show how everyone is "equal".

Both Japanese and Korean are of completely different, and rather isolated, language families. As for the written forms, Japanese uses three different writing systems, and Korean uses a fourth, a unique Alphabet of its own. How are they closely related again, compared to Spanish? And in the context of this thread, who cares of the ease of a Korean speaker learning Spanish?

Quote:

But other factors come into play, too. For certain English-speaking people Japanese would be "easier" to learn than Spanish, if he has no interest in said language but absolutely passionate about Japanese anime, manga, history or whatever.

Your "other factors" are just the motivations of the learner; but that was not an issue in play, and any question of willpower is present in any situation in which someone is attempting to achieve something.

Quote:

The other limiting belief I'd want people to get rid of is that a language is hard to learn. It isn't.

If only! John McWhorter, linguistics professor, said all languages will "beat you up" due to their relative complexity, number of words to learn, etc. He believed that Spanish will probably beat up an English speaker the least and is a good starter language. When I went from studying Latin to Ancient Greek, Latin immediately became easy, so much more complex was Greek. Russian phonology, on the other hand, makes the Attic dialect seem like Hawaiian.

Quote:

There are certainly millions of people (in most cases) who had acquired it as either their mother tongue or as a foreign language. You can do it, too. All languages are constructed using the same elements, there is nothing inherently difficult about it.

Secondary language acquisition is completely different, from a practical point of view, than native acquisition; and saying that "all languages are constructed of the same elements" is misleading, since the devil is in the details: the difficulty of language acquisition is in the many months of (mostly memorizing) the "deets". It would be like claiming that since all languages have vocabulary and grammar, all must then require the same time and effort to learn, be they Algonquin, Italian, or Pirahã!

Quote:

If you spend years learning a language and you can't speak it fluently (I could write a long article about what that really means) or read a book written for adults, you are doing something wrong and it's not the language's fault.

Or you got bad advice on the internet, or tried to learn it in a classroom setting, the way the idiotic credentialing "educational system" of the modern west attempts to teach it.

Quote:

Both are quite different from English but still European languages with Latin alphabets, so you should find a lot of things that are similar to English.

Hungary may be in Europe, but the Hungarian Language is not Indo-European at all and is utterly different from them. The Magyars are of Asian origin as is their Language. It shows in the language itself:

description:

Quote:

WIKIPEDIA: Hungarian is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mainly suffixes, to change a word's meaning and grammatical function. The suffixes are attached according to vowel harmony. The verbs are conjugated according to definiteness, tense, mood, person and number. The nouns can be declined with 18 case suffixes, most of which correspond to English prepositions. Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order depends on the topic-comment structure of the sentence (e.g. what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

This ain't High School Spanish.

Quote:

Surely it can't be much harder the other way around.

Usually it is; languages differ in their acquisition difficultly even considering only two languages in play. For instance, it has been observed that Russian speakers seem to pick up English faster than the inverse, probably because English is a relatively simplified language. Ukrainians can understand Russian better than the inverse; etc.

[sixsix]

Disregarding any self-doubt instilled by the media and education system, what can honest men conclude from this:

"SHOWDOWN: EU Vows To Use New Powers To Block All Elected ‘Far Right’ Populists From Power"

And this:



JFK was no crazy internet fanatic, was he?

[Khan]

(05-27-2016 02:04 AM)sixsix Wrote:  

Disregarding any self-doubt instilled by the media and education system, what can honest men conclude from this:

"SHOWDOWN: EU Vows To Use New Powers To Block All Elected ‘Far Right’ Populists From Power"

Some interesting bits in the article. I just love the way Poles handle all those shit-tests from Brussels:

Quote:

Mr. Timmerman and Commission gave Poland an ultimatum and deadline to back down by, which expired yesterday.

They ignored the ultimatum and showed Brussels the middle finger. Well done Poland.

Quote:

As reported by Breitbart London today, the commissioner has now travelled to Poland to “negotiate” with the government there.

Meaning, he traveled to Poland and begged them to reconsider.

Quote:

There is no precedent to indicated what will happen next.

It's obvious what will happen - the EU Commission will have to send an entire delegation to Warsaw to suck Polish dick under the negotiating table. And they'll still get rejected.

[marty]

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

(05-26-2016 08:20 AM)marty Wrote:  

(05-23-2016 08:55 AM)redpillage Wrote:  

On a different note, what's tougher to learn - Polish or Hungarian*? ;-) *I'd vote Hungarian

Your question doesn't make sense. I don't want to offend you, it's a common misconception. There are no "easy" and "hard" languages. Every language is easy and hard at the same time.

I don't want to offend you, but the question made sense to me. He didn't ask which was "easy", but which was "tougher to learn"; so you engage with a straw man from here on out, never answering what is a very simple question (Hungarian is "tougher").

It doesn't make sense. No language is "tougher to learn" than any other. It is tougher for some and easier for others. See below

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Quote:

There are certain aspects that make a language look easy or hard.

"Certain aspects" (which you do not define or list); and "look", as in the differences of one language are only superficial, as opposed to really being more complex and different from English? The problem is, those differences are more than mere superficial ones: languages greatly differ in the amount of time needed to master, due to the specific language's complexity and distinction from one's native language. Here's a good general list of difficulty, compiled by people who actual specialize in secondary language acquisition, the Foreign Service Institute (US):

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com...difficulty

Note that the chart above, while useful, has one extra variable not mentioned, which supports my earlier answer two-fold, in that not all of the languages are taught to the same level of proficiency by FSI; that is, one needs a "3/3" in French to graduate, but only a "2/2" in Hungarian. If they taught Hungarian to the same proficiency as say, they teach to French, it would be at least one year extra of training: approximately two years of full time education for Hungarian, against only six months for French. Notice also that Hungarian has an "asterisk", showing it is of increased difficult to learn, yet Polish does not. (For definition of the number scale used in Diplomacy, see here)

Quote:

The differences in difficulty between acquiring one language instea of another are real, and based on the differences between one's native tongue and the target language.

In any case, your argument is trying to split the baby, so to speak, by first pretending no language is 'easy' in the abstract, in which you make a metaphysical point that is true but irrelevant to human interest, but then must needs contradict yourself by saying there are "difficulties" present in learning languages. What "biggest difficulties" could there be since you said no language is "hard"?

You said "languages greatly differ in the amount of time needed to master, due to the specific language's complexity and distinction from one's native language.".

That is basically what I said previously here:

Quote:

What cause the biggest difficulties are the differences between one's native tongue (or other foreign languages one has already acquired) and the target language.

I even brought up a good example which I will further clarify below. Sure, the complexity of the language comes into play as well, e.g. Esperanto was constructed to be much simpler than any natural language. I don't think these differences are as important as people who want to find excuses not to learn a foreign language make it out to be.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Could be considered is a rather disingenuous use of passive voice, which you supplement with scare quotes over "easier"; even though easier is really what you mean, you cannot directly admit it because it contradicts your earlier "no language is easy or hard" dogma that you did not think of, but rather received from some "professor" who must have never had to learn more than one other language as an adult, but was trying to show how everyone is "equal".

Sigh... I don't know why you have to be so condescending and resort to insulting me. I have no idea what professor you're talking about and I don't want to brag but I can assure you I have learned my fair share of languages as an adult.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Quote:

So Spanish could be considered "easier" for a native English speaker than Japanese. But the same doesn't apply to a native speaker of Korean. Japanese would be "easier" for him than Spanish because the writing system and grammar are much closer to his native language than Spanish.

Both Japanese and Korean are of completely different, and rather isolated, language families. As for the written forms, Japanese uses three different writing systems, and Korean uses a fourth, a unique Alphabet of its own. How are they closely related again, compared to Spanish? And in the context of this thread, who cares of the ease of a Korean speaker learning Spanish?

Who cares they are of different language families? English is a West Germanic language, whereas Spanish or French are Romance languages. Yet they have a lot in common. Based on your argument Spanish shouldn't be easy for a native English speaker to learn.

https://www.quora.com/How-similar-are-Ko...-languages

Quote:

They are very similar, grammatically. It isn't just word order. They both rely on particles and verb endings for most grammatical functions, and these systems are similar between the two, though most of the actual words are so different they don't suggest any obvious genetic relationship. They also both have counters. Also, adjectives are treated similarly to verbs in both. (In korean adjectives literally are verbs). Of those, only the particle system is shared with Chinese. They have a ton of shared vocabulary from Chinese, and the differences in pronunciation are predictable, so a good Japanese vocabulary translates to a usable passive vocabulary in Korean. Where things get more interesting is the non Chinese words. There are similarities there, too, especially if you compare words using the same patterns that emerge between their respective pronunciations of Chinese origin words.

I think this easily proves how Japanese is closer to Korean than Spanish, thus learning it would be easier for a Korean native speaker. Hence you can't say Spanish is easier than Japanese because people have different native languages. This proves that saying in general that a language is easy or hard doesn't really make sense. How could you measure it?

Quote:

But other factors come into play, too. For certain English-speaking people Japanese would be "easier" to learn than Spanish, if he has no interest in said language but absolutely passionate about Japanese anime, manga, history or whatever.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Your "other factors" are just the motivations of the learner; but that was not an issue in play, and any question of willpower is present in any situation in which someone is attempting to achieve something.

My other factors are actually a lot more important than the "difficulty" of a language. We're not talking about exponential differences, i.e. it's not like Spanish takes let's say 1 year to learn, Polish 10 years and Hungarian 100 years. The differences are much smaller and motivation and passion play a huge part. You won't be able to spend hundreds or thousands of hours learning a language which you hate or don't give a shit about. That's why I'm saying difficulty isn't really an important issue, it shouldn't be the deciding factor.

Quote:

If you spend years learning a language and you can't speak it fluently (I could write a long article about what that really means) or read a book written for adults, you are doing something wrong and it's not the language's fault.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Or you got bad advice on the internet, or tried to learn it in a classroom setting, the way the idiotic credentialing "educational system" of the modern west attempts to teach it.

Sure, the biggest problem is the absurd methods the vast majority of people use. I'm glad you brought up Antimoon, his example shows how you can learn a language that is quite different from your native one using the right methods.

Quote:

Both are quite different from English but still European languages with Latin alphabets, so you should find a lot of things that are similar to English.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Hungary may be in Europe, but the Hungarian Language is not Indo-European at all and is utterly different from them. The Magyars are of Asian origin as is their Language. It shows in the language itself:

description:

Quote:

WIKIPEDIA: Hungarian is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mainly suffixes, to change a word's meaning and grammatical function. The suffixes are attached according to vowel harmony. The verbs are conjugated according to definiteness, tense, mood, person and number. The nouns can be declined with 18 case suffixes, most of which correspond to English prepositions. Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order depends on the topic-comment structure of the sentence (e.g. what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

This ain't High School Spanish.

I speak Hungarian, so I'm very well aware of that. It was a bit misleading, I meant it's been spoken in Europe for a thousand years and there are a lot of words coming from other European languages, whereas Thai or Chinese would have much less. I know, it's not anything like Spanish or French but still more than nothing.

The case system is quite blown out of proportion though. Written like that it makes it seem much worse. It's a bit like saying English has 22 verb tenses. Hungarian has one present, one future and one past. Now you could freak out how much more complex verb tenses are in English.

Quote:

Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order depends on the topic-comment structure of the sentence (e.g. what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).

This is the biggest joke of all. In English there's a strict word order which you have to learn, in Hungarian a certain word can emphasised by changing its position. It really isn't anything special. I could bring up much harder aspects of easy languages like English or Spanish. I wouldn't highlight parts that look complex enough to prove your point without knowing anything about it.

Quote:

Surely it can't be much harder the other way around.

(05-26-2016 02:23 PM)scrambled Wrote:  

Usually it is; languages differ in their acquisition difficultly even considering only two languages in play. For instance, it has been observed that Russian speakers seem to pick up English faster than the inverse, probably because English is a relatively simplified language. Ukrainians can understand Russian better than the inverse; etc.

I said "much harder", I doubt there is a huge difference. I read that Japanese students really struggle with English because it works quite differently than their native language. If the only variable was the complexity of one of the languages, then English wouldn't be a problem for them.


Bottom line is: saying a language is hard gives people the best excuse not to learn it. That is one of the prime reasons why expats in China, Japan or in most countries abroad don't even attempt to learn the local language.

Also what I wanted to emphasise is how stupid choosing a language based on its difficulty is, especially if you want to move to said country. You don't choose a sport or hobby based on how easy it is. Or do you? Would you choose between surfing and origami based on how hard they are?

Also if Spanish is that easy, why can't American kids who learn it for years even speak properly? It's because their methods are tragically bad and they lack motivation. With the right tools and passion you can learn any language much faster than an American learning Spanish in a Spanish course (well, with the exception of languages that barely have any native materials - but with the internet these basically don't exist unless you want to learn Cherokee or something).

[El Chinito loco]

This language discussion is pretty interesting. It is generally true that learning a language is easier if it has many similarities to your native tongue.

As someone who is fluent in speaking one asian language (Mandarin) and has some limited comprehension of another (Thai) I will say the hardest asian language to understand and learn is probably Vietnamese. There's no other asian language even close to it. I've tried to learn some words but it's a motherfucker to pronounce correctly.

I've spent quite a bit of time there now and the tones are absolutely crazy to me.

Next hardest tonal asian language might be Cantonese to pronounce correctly. Even when you go mandarin ---> Cantonese it should be theoretically not hard to learn the speaking part but it is actually pretty hard.

[Glaucon]

I have serious issues learning German, but English was a breeze. I might try to learn some other language just to prove myself I can haha.

[scrambled]

(05-27-2016 09:49 AM)marty Wrote:  

It doesn't make sense. No language is "tougher to learn" than any other. It is tougher for some and easier for others. See below

Your two statements above contradict one another: no language is tougher, but they are tougher depending on who you are! (And yet--everyone is someone). You are now repeating a pointless abstraction that is irrelevant to our actual interest here as men trying to efficiently learn a non-native language.

You should contact the Foreign Service Institute, which gives diplomats 2-3 years of Japanese instruction (counting in-Japan studying) but only six months of French or Spanish; tell them, how wrong and foolish they are, because all languages are equal. Why waste years of superfluous studying, when all they had to do was ask you for your opinion on how language acquisition difficulty is only in our mind!

Quote:

In English there's a strict word order which you have to learn, in Hungarian a certain word can emphasised by changing its position.

This is grasping at straws; the word order comes about as complex languages are simplified, like Latin compared to modern Italian. The inflection/case system breaks down, and word order is required in order to make sense. It doesn't change the fact that English grammar is overall (the measure that really matters) far simpler than Hungarian. In my earlier response, I quoted a linguist who said all languages will beat you up, even a relatively less complex one. But yet, why do you now claim English is so difficult, when just a short while ago you claimed how easy it was to learn a language, after all, we all learned our native one when we were children!

Quote:

The other limiting belief I'd want people to get rid of is that a language is hard to learn. It isn't.

------
The rest of your comments are various straw mans that are off-topic, but one more I cannot help but add to:

Quote:

Also if Spanish is that easy, why can't American kids who learn it for years even speak properly?

Our educational system's faults, and the quality of students, has nothing to do with the relative difficulty of English speakers learning various foreign languages. You seem incapable of staying on point for a moment, and must stray to give misleading information, so long as you appear the expert.

[redpillage]

@marty - you probably assume I don't speak several languages. Well, I actually speak three fluently with several regional accents each and also am in the process of learning Russian. I also happen to read Korean but I don't speak it much - learning Hongul however took me a little over a week.

You're coming in here making a lot of assumptions and quite frankly I don't need to be lectured about my purported naïveté when it comes to the acquisition of languages. I spent the past few decades living abroad and am probably as cosmopolitan as they come. All the trite points you offered have been beaten to death by various online advertisers and resellers attempting to get people into learning various languages and more importantly - paying for courses.

One item however I agree with you - ALL languages are difficult (or easy - depending your perspective). The big difference is the learning curve leading to perfection. As Scrambled already pointed out - certain languages have a steeper curve than others but I believe that the complicated ones flatten out later down the line. It's the inverse with English which is easy as fuck but learning all those brilliant expressions and idioms will take you a decade at least. Whereas basic communication will take you only a few months in Spanish it'll take you potentially years until you can hold a proper conversation in Korean or Japanese, Russian - or Hungarian. If you've got a shitty memory (like me) then simply acquiring new vocabulary will cost you more effort - on the other hand grammar was always fairly easy for me as I have a very analytical mind.

In summary - yes, it depends on your background - I don't even know why we have to debate that. But no matter what language you study - all of them require a shitload of hard work. It really should not be under estimated as there are so many cultural things you have to learn as well and which are in intricate part of understanding the local population. It's a complex topic and opinions differ. If it's easy for you to learn new languages of all sorts - damn it - good for you! Go on and learn as many as possible. For me it's brutally difficult as I wasn't born with a good memory. But I do it anyway because it opens doors and I love to blend into various societies and cultures. If you want to be a global citizen and enjoy just a fraction of what the world has to offer then speaking at least three languages is a must. A fourth is my goal right now - I'm trying my luck with Russian but it's slow going. Perhaps a Russian girlfriend may help ;-0

[redpillage]

(05-27-2016 10:42 AM)Glaucon Wrote:  

I have serious issues learning German, but English was a breeze. I might try to learn some other language just to prove myself I can haha.

Well - you are in good company ;-)

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

[Geomann180]

(05-27-2016 04:12 PM)redpillage Wrote:  

(05-27-2016 10:42 AM)Glaucon Wrote:  

I have serious issues learning German, but English was a breeze. I might try to learn some other language just to prove myself I can haha.

Well - you are in good company ;-)

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

That was beautiful and made me laugh a good bit.

Thanks for that.

Or, "Danke dafür!".

G