poftim

You've got ten letters with diacritics which doesn't strike me as excessive. I suppose the six different types of diacritics is on the high side, but I don't think it matters. Any language you create is bound to be unusual in some way or else it would be kind of pointless. If you want to see serious diacritic action, look at Vͯ̊̑ͤ̃̓̇̓͑ͭ͋̋͌̉̇ͯí͋̀͗͒e̒̃̀ͦ́t̄̄̓ͩ̆̊͆̇͌̾̋̐̉́̔̍ͩn͂̈́͌̈́͊̽̚ā͒̽̍̎ͤ͗̏ͪ̽͒̂̎͌ͥm̾ͫ̋͛ͮ̈̆ͤ̓͂̓eͩͦͫ͆̂̇̆̏ͧͤs͗ͬ̋̒̿̈́̃̆ͧ̒͒̊e̋͊ͪ͂̒ͣ͆ͭ͐ͫͪ̈ͩ̓̒̌̋̚!

Hungarian must be up there. I was in Budapest for a few hours yesterday and on most of the signs there was just nothing to go on. Hungarian has several dozen noun cases I think. I'm currently in Timișoara in Romania and today I met an American who has lived in Budapest for ten years but only knows a few words of Hungarian. Totally believable.

Nice! Have you ever been to the conlangs page on Reddit? It's thriving, and mostly frequented by youngsters like you. I'm sure you'll get lots of responses there.

Thanks! I'm not Romanian but I'll be going to Romania for the first time in just a couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll be there a while. I'm quite excited! I now realize how un-obvious it must be for English learners to know when to use the definite article. (Why is it "English learners" and not "the English learners"? I honestly don't know the rules.)

I like the Romanian equivalent of this, așa și așa. Just like the sound of it. A Romanian word I find funny is dușman which means 'enemy'. It's pronounced 'douche man'!

Blaveloper, Interesting. Romanian has a case system too that it inherited from Latin and that most other Romance languages have since lost. There are five cases in Romanian, but two pairs of them have identical forms, so there are only three forms to remember. For someone like me it's still a feat of mental gymnastics to produce the correct form on the fly. The three genders and all the different plurals are a complicating factor. I think Hungarian has something like 17 cases! My idea of a nightmare!

Blaveloper, When you say there's no "the" (definite article) in Polish, how do you distinguish between "cat" and "the cat"? Do you change the word for "cat" in some way like in Romanian? Or does the whole concept of a definite article simply not exist in Polish?

Wow, where do I start with Romanian? frumoasă = feminine form of beautiful - it just sounds beautiful to me! bufniță = owl fluture = butterfly (I like it as much as the French word) zgomot = noise a zgudui = to shake a zgâria = to scratch ("zgârie-nori" means skyscraper, literally "scratches the clouds") zbor = flight (I like the zg- and zb- words) poftim (yeah, I know it's my username) has at least three meanings: (1) the equivalent of voilà, (2) pardon, (3) an invitation, e.g. "take a seat". And "poftim" amused me the first time I heard it - some words just do - so I use it as my username everywhere now! The formal word for "you" in Romanian is dumneavoastră, which is quite a mouthful! I also really like barbabietola, the Italian word for beetroot.

Romanian, the language I'm learning, has no word for "the" at all. Instead you change the ending of the word. Cat = pisică The cat = pisica (the accent disappears) Dog = câine The dog = câinele Chair = scaun The chair = scaunul Coffee = cafea The coffee = cafeaua (four vowels in a row: nice!)

It won't be the same for everybody in the UK. And it was quite a long time ago for me now. So maybe "The cat sat on the mat" wasn't the very first sentence I learnt, and someone much older or younger than me probably had something quite different.

Sahar, I went to school in the UK. We certainly did a lot of nursery rhymes, but the emphasis there wasn't on reading or word forms but on speaking, listening and copying the teacher's gestures. The words were usually accompanied by actions. With "The cat sat on the mat" I remember the teacher saying that "the" has a tall letter, a short letter and an in-between letter, and that "m" has two humps while "n" has one. Words for animals were among the first we ever learnt. In English they tend to be simple three-letter words: cat, dog, rat, pig, cow. I wonder how that differs in other languages. In Romanian, animal words are a bit harder: cat = pisică, dog = câine, rat = șobolan. So maybe they teach those words a bit later.

lushlala, I have pretty much the same problem with lack of confidence as you do. I prefer it actually when there are no other native English speakers around. If there are other people with English as their first language, I'll sometimes be embarrassed to speak the foreign language in front of them, or else they'll just take over and I'll end up not saying anything. Don't know whether I should be advocating this on a forum like this, but in my experience alcohol does help!

As this is Linguaholic, I'll throw Malayalam out there: a palindromic language. Yep it's cool that "stressed" backwards is "desserts". I think those are the longest pair of words in English that work like that. I've heard "semordnilap" for a word that spells another word backwards, but I doubt that's an official term.

We don't need to guess; the figures, or good estimates at least, are out there. But I think there's some confusion as to whether we're talking about (1) native speakers, (2) all speakers, whether native or as a second language, or (3) second-language speakers only. (1) is the table that djlearns posted. Native speakers only. Mandarin is way out in front with Spanish second and English third. (2) still puts Mandarin in the lead, but English is clearly in second place, well ahead of Spanish, thanks to everybody who speaks English as a second language. Subtract (1) from (2) and you get (3), just the second-language speakers. Here English is the winner. In fact more people speak English as a second language than as their mother tongue.

Baburra, The difference between "advice" and "advise" is clear, and best summed up by the picture in linguaholic's post. The two words are not interchangeable. If a student wrote "I received some helpful advise" it would get the red-pen treatment from me. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job properly. Language does evolve. Give it 50 years and perhaps the two words will be interchangeable. I certainly won't be teaching English then!

According to Wikipedia, there's a pretty clear top three in terms of total number of speakers: Mandarin, English and Spanish in that order, with Arabic and Hindi in a virtual tie for fourth place. As far as non-native speakers are concerned, English is number one by some distance, so I think we can safely say that English is the most taught language in the world.

As has been pointed out, price and prize are two different words with distinct meanings. To complicate things further, there's also prise (pronounced identically to "prize") which means to force open, as in "I had to prise open that jam jar with a knife." Advice is a noun (to give advice) while advise is a verb (to advise somebody). That's the case in both American and British English. They're also pronounced differently ("advise" rhymes with "prize"). Two other problematic pairs of words that are worth mentioning are "licence"/"license" and "practice"/"practise". In British English, licence is a noun ("I've finally got my driving licence") while license is a verb ("the restaurant is fully licensed"). In American English, license is used for both the noun and the verb. "Licence" and "license" are pronounced the same. In British English, practice is a noun ("I'm out of practice") while practise is a verb ("I need to practise my listening"). In American English, practice is used for both the noun and the verb. "Practice" and "practise" are pronounced the same. So a British doctor has licence to practise whereas an American doctor has license to practice. None of this has anything to do with the "-ise"/"ize" spelling difference which is really another topic. Blaveloper is 100% right on that point though.

In English: "The cat sat on the mat."

Yes if you don't use a language you lose it pretty quickly. But the good news is that it also comes back pretty quickly! So the answer is to practise as often as you can (30 minutes a day would be better than an all-day blitz every second week) and be exposed to as much real-life German and Dutch material as you can, as others have said. An online language exchange partner would be great.

Yeah, our Bosnian teacher demonstrated that it was possible, but she was very good at it. There's no way (yet) I'd be able to do what she did. The fact that my Burmese student knows some English makes it much easier to teach him without knowing any of his language. It's still quite hard, even so.

You absolutely can do this. Back in February I did a short English teaching course. At one point a teacher from Bosnia, who spoke very good English, came in and gave us an impromptu half-hour lesson in Bosnian. English was totally verboten or whatever the Bosnian word for that is. She used pictures of faces as well as her own facial expressions and mimes. The lesson started off with just "Hello. How are you?" and gradually built on that. I can still remember how to say "I've got a headache" in Bosnian now! The trick was lots of repetition, lots of exaggerated gestures, and always building on what we did before. The point of the exercise was to show us that you can teach a language without knowing any of their native language. I've since been teaching English to a Burmese refugee even though I don't know a word of Burmese, although he did know some English (not a lot) before I met him. I don't know of any courses that deal with this, but they must be out there somewhere.

I love words, and a new language opens up a whole universe of new words. "Zgomot", "copiii" and "oaie" are all common words in Romanian, which I'm learning now. They're very different from anything in English or any language I've tried to learn before. My target language isn't especially popular, and it's a nice feeling to be doing something a bit different. I've had to figure a lot of it out myself - no night classes or anything - and that's been an interesting challenge. It's a bit like solving a puzzle. Most of all I like the feeling that I'm progressing. I'll read a news article and my reaction is "aaarghh, I don't know this word!" but then I think of all the words I *do* know. I'm still getting the gist of this, right? A year ago I wouldn't have had a clue.

I use number plates (license plates) for this. Where I live, number plates are in ABC123 format, though they used to be in an AB1234 format and there are still quite a few of the old ones kicking around. So I can practise numbers into the thousands, and the alphabet too. Now I can read the numbers off in Romanian as they whizz by. It's also important to know *how* numbers are said in different situations. Number in full? Individual digits (one two three four)? In pairs (twelve thirty-four) like the French do with phone numbers?

It's certainly useful (and fun!) to learn swear words in your target language, even at an early stage, but actually using them should wait a little I think. It's really hard to know when it's appropriate to swear until you've been around the language a while, and until then your swearing risks being comical (which might be OK) or offensive. I've definitely heard non-native English speakers blurt out the F-word at inappropriate times - I guess it's the first "expressive" English word you learn!

Interesting topic. As people have already said, this is already happening to an extent with English. It isn’t supplanting other major languages (yet) but it’s becoming the common language of business, technology and popular culture. English has a certain kudos that French used to have. When I read an online article in Romanian about tennis, say, I’ll sometimes see occasional (often grammatically incorrect) English phrases sprinkled throughout the otherwise Romanian text. Tennis is a world sport, so the authors expect their audience to be worldly and sophisticated, and what better way to say to the reader “you’re sophisticated” than to write “you know it’s the true”? If English does eventually displace other languages, there will be several Englishes, not just one, because different parts of the world have huge cultural differences and I don’t see that changing any time soon. In fact there are many different Englishes already. Here in New Zealand, Maori words like ‘mana’ and ‘whanau’ have been assimilated into the language because they’re culturally important concepts that have no real equivalent in ‘standard’ English. Somebody suggested that a common language would unite people. Perhaps it would. I certainly think that learning other languages helps to unite people. In continental Europe people commonly learn two or three foreign languages, including of course English. In the UK you typically learn just one, from the age of 11, and there’s the sense that you’re only learning it to pass an exam because in the real world everybody speaks English. This idea that Brits don’t need to learn other languages sets them apart from other European nations and fosters an “un-European” identity, a feeling that helped swing the referendum towards the Leavers in June. Personally I think being immersed in different languages is the coolest thing, so I wouldn't want to see it! Others might disagree.