Who can talk the goodest?

[Ceris]

English is not your friend.

[Good Do'urden]

Im french btw Ceris .... if you are looking for a job i can hire you as my personal secretary np !

[Ddrakon]

Originally Posted by Good Do'Urden

Im french btw Ceris .... if you are looking for a job i can hire you as my personal secretary np !

French is also my native language, but I don't use it as an excuse to type or speak like a retard.

English really isn't a difficult language to learn.

[Yoda]

Originally Posted by Ddrakon

French is also my native language, but I don't use it as an excuse to type or speak like a retard.

English really isn't a difficult language to learn.

English is easier than French, but still if you have only few English lectures under your belt and/or that you are very tired you can make huge mistake and end up with a very hard to read post.
Moreover, each langage has its own way of thinking. And you don't learn to think in English inside French schools. When I get tired to tends to copy/paste english words into a French sentence, and of course it isn't easy to understand for someone else (especially when some grammar errors kick in in).

[apolyon]

All of the strictly based latin languages are infinitely easier than English. The biggest reason is that they have a standard set of grammatical rules which are rarely deviated from. English is not, and you can read paragraph 4 for more elaboration on that. We're the half-bastard language you get when you mix of old continental germanic with bits and pieces of the romantic languages and a salt/peppering of the norse mumbo jumbo.

Italian/Spanish/French all share common roots and methodology ... this is part of the reason continental europeans are so multilingual. The other reason is that they're all very very close to each other and depend on each other.

For example: I spent a semester in oxford a while back. On spring break we toured Italy and were lucky enough to have someone with us who spoke Spanish as a native language. Spanish/Italian are close enough that one could speak spanish to the one and the other italian right back and they could pretty well understand each other. Granted the italian guy probably spoke spanish as well, but as a unilingual person with a small smattering of french i was quite impressed by the exchange.

English is very hard to learn unless you learn it early. Romantic folk have a hard time with Germanic/norse roots. German have difficulty with the romantic root unless otherwise schooled in the romance languages beforehand. Sometimes it's easier to learn entirely new language rules than somthing which is kind of like your own, but not really like it at all. All of this doesnt even count the fact that English has more minute and case specific rules than any other language. Getting turned around is very easy to do if you haven't lived in an english speaking country or gone through very advanced education.

It doesn't bother me too much when people mess up their English. It's a hard language to learn. We Americans and Brits just take the fact that we're powerhouses for granted. If england/america were not such huge world players and traders in the worldwide economy, english would not be the most widely spoken language. Thankfully for our laziness and egocentrism, we are ...

[Yoda]

well, I got only 1H lecture of italian and 3H of Spanish, so I can't speak for those langages. But for my personnal experience (French, German, English, old Latin), I think there is a noticeable difference between learning a langage and being able to express ourself in this langage.
To be able to express yourself well in a given langage you need to get at least partially the way of thinking of the langage (living in the country being the best way to go). But for learning a langage, that's true that fewer exception a langage has, the easier to learn it is. So I agree that English may not be the easier. But French, with its famous rule "there is always an exception, even to this rule", isn't that easy either. After, for the other langage, it's a question of "how many rules can you learn and apply on the fly". Latin being a good exemple for that: no exception (within the accuracy of my memory), but so many rules and tables that it becomes quite difficult to handle if you don't put enougth focus to it. German is in the same league (even the exceptions are almost rules , but the way of thinking isn't that easy to get).
That's why I think English is easy to learn, because there is so few rules and exceptions that you can learn it quite rapidly. But it's true too that you simply can't master English because when you face a new word you may not be able to know how it conjugates (if it's a verb) or how it prononces. Which ins't the case with German, and in a lesser extent French. Actually you don't even need a dictionnary if you are a really good German speaker because you may already know all the roots that have been glued together to create this word.

[Arathena]

I hope the sapper went to a twink. Else it was a REAL dumb druid.

Originally Posted by Yoda

Actually you don't even need a dictionnary if you are a really good German speaker because you may already know all the roots that have been glued together to create this word.

Verb conjugation and definitive article / pronoun declension are kinda rough in German for the native English speaker, I noticed. And while it's true that you can string together nouns to make new ones easily in German, this has its downsides. Primarily that it makes technical German sound like the bastard love-child of Alice in Wonderland and Cat in the Hat. Whimsical, ongoing, and way, way too metaphorically descriptive.

Edit: I <3 Bbcode!

[Yoda]

lol, your description of newly-created German words is quite metaphoric too but rather true.
That's strange that you get difficulties with the declinasion, ormay I misunderstood you ? Because they are quite straightfoward as soon as you got the trick. But what is a pain in the ass in German is to guess if the noun is masculin, feminin, or neutral ; even Native-speakers get tricked sometimes with this question.

[Arathena]

It's a little of column A, a little of Column B, Yoda. While the masculine feminine and neuter designations seem totally random, such as das Maedchen, or the little girl, being a neuter noun, the combination of re-used declensions and the formal tense still screwed me up after seven or so years of study - I just couldn't get it. I mean, der is the masculine subjective, except when it also happens to be the feminine subjunctive is the kind of thing that wrecked me.

[Styal Fortis]

Learning to conjugate German verbs in the various tenses is kinda a task, at least for me and my friends =/. So is finding proper endings for nouns and pronouns.

Damn you dative case!

[AudioAltima]

Why are we having language discussions in "The Bunker" ??? This was a perfectly good/decent thread until the language police came in!

[Mendler]

Off with their heads for thread jacking!

Mendler

[apolyon]

shameless post count fluff

[Baurog]

Grats on 2k posts!!!!!

[Brutul]

you are halfway to being cool!