宇崎ちゃん

Whichever is the hardest depends on your persona. I know a good amount of Japanese and I'm currently learning Mandarin Chinese. In Japanese, grammar and politeness can be considered hard, while speaking and vocabulary can be considered easy. In Mandarin, tones are the hardest part, but the grammar is very easy. I don't have any experience with Korean myself, but I've heard that Korean is a bit similar to Japanese when it comes to vocabulary and very similar when it comes to word order. However, I can't confirm this myself. When it comes to reading, I think Korean is the easiest because it has only 1 alphabet, compared to the 2 alphabets + character set in Japanese or a character set in Chinese. When it comes to speaking, I would give my award to Japanese. For listening you would be leaning more towards Chinese.

Unless you consider North Korea, where anything that's even distantly foreign is banned. And I have also been invited to both LINE and Skype by Japanese people before who told me they can't speak English and needed me to explain them some online instructions in Japanese. And this wasn't just 1 or 2 of them, it has been a whole list of people! Something closer to both of us would be France. Lots of people in France either only speak very basic English or no English at all. Only an obvious minority speaks English fluently there.

My point is that all languages have something easy and something hard. It wasn't meant to go like "fuck this shit, everything is easy", that would be Benny's task.

You hear it a lot when learning a new language: "it's difficult" and "it's easy". But how seriously should you take this? I'd say not at all! Read more on my language blog.

Not really, it seems so because you're a native English speaker and you got used to reading English. If you would ask an Arab to read English text when he or she just started to learn it, he or she would say the exact same thing, except that he would say "Arabic" instead of "English". Every foreign language you learn, you start off reading it letter-by-letter. Once you get used to it, you'll automatically read it word-by-word. Taken roughly from IWillTeachYouALanguage, language learners think in words, native speakers think in sentences. Edit: moved this topic to "Study Arabic".

Practise is king. You can as well do CTRL and + to zoom in, then the text will become bigger too. But best is to practise at its usual font size, you won't get accustomed to it otherwise and therefore you'll always need enlarged font to read it. This is a problem, considering you won't be able to enlarge the font used in a newspaper, menu cards or whatever else.

Heh, first man in a topic with 4 posts before him, you won't see this happening so commonly. I don't have any children myself, but I'm born and raised in the Netherlands while both parents were Polish immigrants (one unplanned immigrant and one refugee to be more precise). Therefore, I learnt Polish from my parents and Dutch from the outside world. Me and my sister spoke both language our entire lives (she currently lives in Japan by the way). My little sister born 8 years later was different. She could understand Polish her entire life, but refused to speak it until 4 years ago. This was because by the time she was born, mother got a different boyfriend (a Dutch person), who could be really mad if somebody else spoke a language he didn't understand. He taught her that she shouldn't speak Polish because she was born in the Netherlands and thus she should only speak Dutch forever. She finally changed her mind after our visit to Poland 4 years ago and finally started to speak Polish. It's Polish pronounced very badly and mixed with Dutch grammar, but at least she's trying and that's really cool.

Which is actually too bad it won't. Because feedback is really crucial when it comes to learning anything new, if you won't get any feedback (other than an automated one), you can imagine yourself repeating the same mistakes over and over again, until those mistakes will permanently stick in your brain. I honestly can't imagine myself learning a language without anyone correcting my mistakes.

@cheers100 No, I'm not aware of this. Sorry about that.

@anna3101 and @Trellum The main downside of Dutch is the countless amount of exceptions to many rules, that's why the word order is often very different. Somebody else who's probably no longer visiting this forum any more asked about "de" and "het", it's a very common question I hear from lots of Polish natives. But the said truth is, those 2 articles don't have any rules for the most of the time. One rule would be: if the next word ends with "je" (which makes the word feel smaller, like "meisje" (girl), tafeltje (little table), boompje (little tree), etc.), you most certainly use "het". Otherwise, "de" and "het" is entirely used based on how you feel it's correct. For example, "de man" sounds natural to me and "het man" doesn't. But another Dutch, Flemish or Surinamese person could either agree or disagree with me.

Those are actually amazing scores! I know you did the A2 exam (if I remember it correctly?), but getting a 10 for something is still rare over here. Yes, that's the right word.

If you're talking about "daarom" and "omdat", do you remember how I talked about "want"? I often suggest foreigners to use "want" instead of the other 2 if they are below B1 level. This is why: English: I am home, because I am addicted. Dutch with "omdat": Ik ben thuis, omdat ik verslaafd ben. Dutch with "daarom": Ik ben verslaafd, daarom ben ik thuis. Dutch with "want": Ik ben thuis, want ik ben verslaafd. Admitted, the sentence is a bit bullshit. But it still demonstrates the different word order of 3 sentences that mean exactly the same thing.

You could use the US-International keyboard as I already suggested, it covers all west European languages in 1 layout. Then you can add a couple of east European languages under your "English" keyboard and press CTRL + Shift to switch between layouts. So your wish already came true before you wished it.

You can PM to me though this forum, or otherwise use the email address found in the README file.

If you happen to have a Windows PC, I can suggest you to use my own app I designed for learning alphabets: Alpha.

I prefer Anki, mainly because I can create flashcards myself too. The big plus side about it is that I can choose what I learn, so I always learn vocabulary and/or grammar that is relevant to me. Because when I start learning a language, why should I put a lot of effort in learning how to say "Happy New Year", while I won't be saying it for almost a whole year? When I get passed the intermediate state, then I would consider learning how to say it. This is because when you're a beginner or an intermediate in the given language, your brain will only remember what you need at that moment. Once you become an 'expert' on that language, remembering rarely used vocabulary will become much easier.

I once found a nice universal script called Linephon. It's a constructed script, so there is no way to type it sadly. A script I was fascinated about during my childhood was one from Pokémon: Unown. This one exists as a font type and I still remember the whole alphabet (because it's Latin, but styled).

Ireland is the closest one I can think of. In some of the Caribbean islands that are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands English is officially spoken too. Although it's a city and not a country, and although it's just a defacto example, I could also consider Amsterdam to use English as their second official language. Other nations are South-Africa and India, due to their participation in the Commonwealth. Hong Kong is another example due to being a formal British colony for some time.

I listened to product reviews on YouTube over and over again, until I fully understood it.

@lushlala Let's say, the Dutch generally have a mixed feeling about it. On one hand they let you be whoever you already are, but on the other hand they complain about it. It confuses me too sometimes.

Native speakers of certain languages tend to be so proud of their language, they keep saying they speak the most difficult language ever. If you ask a Polish person what's the hardest language, they'll say Polish. Same if you ask it a Hungarian, it's Hungarian. Or a German: it's apparently German that's the hardest language ever. However, speakers of Romance languages and English seem to be the other way around: they are so proud of their language, they keep saying they speak the easiest language ever.

Don't let it fool you too much though. Although Belgians and Dutch people can communicate with each other really well, there may be some misunderstandings between the 2. I experienced it at one point when talking to a Belgian, the sentence was pretty basic but I can't really remember what it was.

It's not entirely true. Yes, your computer may be able to correct your spelling, but it still won't be able to correct your grammar. And a computer would neither help you prevent from going out of context.

@czarina84 My advice is to just set up the US International keyboard, it's a keyboard layout that's already available in all modern operating systems. All you'll need to do is this: " + o = ö ~ + n = ñ ^ + e = ê ' + a = á ` + u = ù Right alt + s = ß And so on. I can imagine you will find this annoying as a native English speaker, but it'll become very convenient over time.