which language is easier to learn?

[emf]

hallo every one.im try again from china.

im speaking quite fluent english,and i wanna learn another language.

now im tryin to learn french, but it seems quite hard. cos the prounouciation is quite different from english. like the word"tiger".
in english we say /taige/ but french would be/tighe/
i think it may coz english influences me too much.
so waht language do u think is the most near to enlish? in terms of pronouncition and grammar and spelling and other things?
thx!

I'd say that how easy is a language for someone depends on what is his native language and what other languages he has learned.

For a Greek, among the main languages it's easiest are Italian or Spanish (and Portuguese I suppose), then French, then English, then German. So, I'd put English between French and German. From what I've read from other replies, it seems that it's easier to German.

French pronunciation is different from English pronunciation, but so is German. The advantage of French is that you can learn the rules of pronunciation and then you can pronounce everything you read, unlike in English, where you have to learn both the spelling and the pronunciation of each single word, in a way you have to learn 2 languages. No, pronunciation is not the difficult part of learning French, it's something you can master within weeks and finish with it. French Grammar, however, is more difficult than English, which is quite easy.

PS. BTW, while the English speakers say "It's Greek to me", the Greeks say "It's Chinese to me". The English think that Greek is difficult because of its alphabet, which, however, you can master in a couple of days, it has only 24 letters and some are similar to the Latin ones.

[seasoned]

try again,

Dutch is OK, but you would probably find German to be just as easy. The one **I** found easiest to learn was, ironically, DANISH. German has declension, and an unusual word order, AND THREE genders, but is otherwise EASY! Words don't change based on context, and writing is PHONETIC!

BTW Danish has TWO genders, NO declension, and only about 3 dipthongs(for want of another term) that break phonetic rules.

Spanish has 2 genders, and is probably generally considered the easiest for an engish speaker to learn. It ALSO has about the same number of speakers as English. German has fewer, and Danish has fewer still. The interesting thing about Danish is that Norwegian looks almost IDENTICAL! It is like they just changed a few characters and split up a hundred years ago or so. You can actually communicate with EITHER! Swedish is a bit harder, but STILL very similar! Unfortunately, finnish IS quite a bit different.

But don't just pick a language because it is easy. You ALREADY have at least 2 of the most popular languages under your belt. BOTH are in the top 5, and SOME say they are in the top TWO! If you learned spanish, Hindi, and Arabic, most would agree that you would know all five. Unfortunately, spanish and english are the only ones in the top five with the same basic alphabet, so you would have to learn 2 more alphabets to be litrate in all the top five languages. Luckily, that would mean you would REALLY only have to learn one new alphabet to learn every other language that has 100 million or more speakers.

BTW, YEAH, I KNOW that all the alphabets are a bit different. Danish is probably one of the most complicated, with like 6 new characters that are VERY easy to learn. I believe spanish has only two new characters. The ll which sounds like yah(i.e. llama is pronounced yahmah) and the n with the tilde that sounds like ny (so nino sounds like neenyo, tilde is over the second n).

Steve

[seasoned]

BTW the Germans say "It looks like spanish to me" to say something is complex. Don't ask me why.

Steve

[Maïwenn]

I found Danish pretty easy as well ... When you've accepted that what you pronounce is never what is written down

But why 6 new characters ? I can see only three : å, æ and ø, that are not difficult to handle...

[seasoned]

OK, I may be mistaken. I don't have a danish dictionary handy.

the ae character sounds almost like a lng a and short e run tgether.
The A with a ring sounds like a sharp long o.
The o with a slash sounds almost like uh.

The HARD part(though not VERY hard) is letter cobinations like dd

The hard part I had was the accent. I had trouble believing anyone spoke that way, but it DOES kind of grow on you. BTW several people complimented me on it, so I guess I did pretty well.

Steve

[pc2]

Spanish is closer to english than french ? Wow people, I am learning interesting things in this forum ! I have always thought that german or dutch would be much easier to learn for an english native speaker than spanish or french. Anyway, all languages can be difficult or easy : it depends on how interested you are in them.

yes, very well said. whether the language is very easy or very difficult, nothing matters if one is interested. take, for example, Albert Einstein. he had dislexia and was very bad at school, but his interest for Maths and Physics has lead to the Theory of Relativity, which totally contradicts the Newtonian idea of each body being absolute, a new idea of gravity being a space-time geometry curvature (very hard to imagine), and the idea that light is made of photon particles.

[pc2]

BTW the Germans say "It looks like spanish to me" to say something is complex. Don't ask me why.

Steve

that's probably just an expression. or, maybe, most Germans really find Spanish difficult, because it does have its complexities compared to German (stress, verbs...), as German has its complexities compared to Spanish (declensions, which Spanish doesn't have).
but it's more likely to be just an expression.
here in Brazil, for example, the same expression is said as "It looks like Greek to me" to express complexity or unintelligibility. actually, in our opinion, Greek is quite easy for Portuguese speakers, but most Brazilians don't have the least idea of what Greek looks like (except, of course, for the biological terms). so, it's just a senseless expression.
here in Brazil we say: "será que eu tô falando grego?" = "am I speaking greek by any chance?" to someone who doesn't follow the orders.

[ElieDeLeuze]

The person asking is Chinese. So the easiest language for him to learn is an other language from the Chinese group. He may consider Corean or Japanese for the links in vocabulary (especially corean) and writing (japanese).

There is NO language close to english, especially if you are looking for a language pronounced like english. As for vocabulary, knowledge of english is a great help for learning french. English is of no help what so ever when learning scandinavian languages or dutch. German would help, but the person asking does not speak german.

English does not make any other language easier to learn, with the exeption of french vocabulary because of the huge number of french words in english. But there is more to french than this shared vocabulary.

[Runa27]

As a native English speaker, I can say that I have found Spanish and Japanese to be easiest so far, however, I must qualify both with the following:

1. I grew up in Florida. For years, I've had some Spanish-speaking neighbors, and in fifth and sixth grade they made us watch a couple of educational videos to try and teach us (very) basic Spanish, so I had had a small level of exposure to it before I ever decided to take classes in it in high school and college.

2. Same with Japanese, only more so; I'm what is in the U.S. sometimes known as an "otaku" (anime/manga nerd), and have very frequently watched Japanese shows and movies subtitled into English since about the age of 12 or 13. Thus, I actually have an instinctive "feel" for the pronunciation and rhythm of the language, of the general sound of it (this is sort of funny, considering my Spanish vocabulary and understanding of Spanish grammar are both considerably greater than my understanding of Japanese grammar and vocabulary, owing to the fact that Spanish, being much more useful and much more available in Florida, is the only one I've actually gotten the chance to take classes in).


Additionally, Japanese has what to an outsider may very well seem like an INSANE system of writing... in that it has not one, but FOUR of them (however, they're used for different things) - romaji (being that you've learned a lot of English, this should be fairly familiar to you; it's basically a way to write Japanese using the European alphabets, basically the same letters as in the English system, except some versions of it also include diacritical marks), hiragana (a 46-character phonetic system used primarily for native Japanese words), katakana (another 46-character phonetic system, except it's used primarily for either GETTING ATTENTION LIKE CAPS IN ENGLISH DO, or for non-native words), and kanji (basically, a similar kind of system to the Chinese writing system - in fact, it's partially based on a simplified version of the Chinese system - with each character meaning a whole word, phrase or concept, and sometimes being able to be read with multiple different meanings and pronunciations).

However, as I just pointed out, there are reasons to think they're not as scary:

*Kanji won't be used very much early in your studies (and since it's largely based on simplified Chinese, since Chinese is your native tongue, it might not be that hard at all), and there are only a couple of thousand or so characters that are common enough for even native Japanese students to be forced to learn. ;) A LOT less than Chinese, I'm told, and also, a small handful of these characters (such as "no") also are used in either katakana or hiragana as well, so a few of them, you'll have already learned by the time you get around to learning kanji!

*Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic (unlike English!), and the symbols are, in my experience, fairly easy to learn to write (especially katakana), and have a tendency to follow patterns, making it even easier to learn them; the language very rarely has a sound or word that doesn't end in a vowel, so almost every single character in both systems is really a combination of a consonant sound and a vowel (like "no"). They're also organized into groups of five for the most part, all based on their beginning sound and the vowel sound (for instance: a, o, i, u, eh; ka, ko, ki, ku, keh, and so on). So you can learn them in bite-sized chunks, as it were. :) (Also, from what I can tell, they usually teach you hiragana first, and then when you're comfortable with the phonetics of the language, then they teach you katakana).

*Romaji is similar to a writing system - for English - that you already are very familiar with, except that, despite there being different systems for "romanization", it's actually more regular and more phonetic than English writing is, by far.

Additionally, I think Japanese has one of the easiest "sounds" to master; and for a Chinese-speaker, I would imagine this would be even more true. It has no tonals and a lot of freedom when it comes to inflections; it has very few difficult-to-master consonant sounds (and the hardest ones for an English speaker are actually the ones, I think, that are a lot closer to sounds in the Chinese language, at that); and it has very simple, easy vowel sounds; also, the language is VERY vowel-heavy, which I always find easier somehow than languages with a tendency to use consonants more often (German is very hard to pronounce for me, for instance, compared to either Spanish or especially Japanese). Also, Japanese has imported a LOT of words from other languages, especially English and (so I've heard) a few from Chinese, as well, which should make it a little easier to retain more colloquial vocabulary.

However, I can't say anything about the grammar, let alone call it "easy"; I'm so very early on in my studies that I don't understand more than the very basic sentence structure. Also, of note is the fact that Japanese is FAR more nuanced than English is, with different layers of "politeness" and respect that for some can be difficult to keep straight.

I know of 5 different personal pronouns in Japanese that are roughly equivalent to the English "I", for instance, and I know for a fact I don't know all of them yet; these are all based on a combination of the sex of the speaker, the age of the speaker, the respect they're giving to the person they're talking about, and to an extent their personality (examples: "watakushi" is explicitly feminine and very polite; "boku" is boyish, and used only by young boys and - occasionally, I've heard - by particularly daring and tomboyish girls, especially "butch" lesbians; "ore" is meant for adult males; "watashi", however, is relatively gender-and-age nuetral).

And that's also not getting into the small myriad of honorifics; the difference between "-chan", "-kun" and "-san" alone can cause a person to seriously offend another if they're not careful ("-chan" for instance, is usually used with and between young girls and children, most usually, as I recall, ones that the speaker knows well or is assuming familiarity with. Used with a near-stranger or adult male, it can be seen as talking down to them or being rude by way of assuming an awful lot of familiarity, if not both). The levels of self-classification and classification of others is somewhat complex and yet very important in Japanese, and anyone thinking of learning it really needs to keep that in mind (personally, this makes me want to become fluent in it even more, because you can get some amazing nuances from it that you simply can't get in more "neutral" languages such as English or Spanish).

Of note, probably, is the fact that Japanese entertainment and such is increasingly popular nowadays, so good translators are always high in demand, and there are always a lot of products to watch or read to enhance your skills or practice (like I said, I learned all of my pronunciation from watching subtitled anime! And believe me, I can babble in such a way that if you don't know pretty much any Japanese grammar or vocabulary, you'd honestly think I was fluent. :P Actually, that's a pretty good way to learn to pronounce a language, come to think of it, seeing as that's actually how we learn our first language to begin with). Also, the Japanese are often just as eager to learn foreign languages (including English), so you may even be able to find a pen pal quite easily.

Now, on to Spanish:

The pronunciation is fairly easy. There only a few remotely difficult consonsants, and only five vowel sounds. The vowels are easy to learn, and if you can pronounce English fairly well, Spanish for the most part won't be too much harder (I find it far easier to pick up than French, for starters!). My only concern in this case would be the r's, which unlike Japanese, would probably be difficult for a person used to only Chinese and English to pronounce, as both the r and rr have a slight (or very pronounced) rolling of the tongue, and this can be difficult even for native English speakers to learn sometimes. However, you'll find that if you pronounce the r's a little like an English "r", most Spanish speakers will still understand most of the time. :)

From an English-speaker's standpoint, the Spanish grammar is relatively easy (even though some of it is a little reversed from the English-speaking perspective) to learn, for instance, where in English one says "the blue shirt", the order in Spanish would usually be "the shirt blue", but that's so consisant, simple and common that it becomes fairly easy to remember. The verb conjugations, though, can be considerably more complex than English (in fact, many persons or tenses in English verb conjugations are identical or nearly so in a lot of cases where they aren't in Spanish), but if you can use the present tense and a few appropriate modifiers (like "tommorow", "yesterday", etc.), you can get by very easily (the weird thing is the "Imperfect tense", which is usually referred to as some kind of past tense, even though it's not; it's really a tense that implies "always have and always will" and "can't even remember when I started doing it, and can't see myself ever stopping doing it". Most Spanish teachers that aren't native Spanish-speakers that I've had so far seemed downright awful at teaching how to use this tense, but once you understand how it's used, it's not so bad). Also, as far as I can tell, there are far fewer irregular verbs in Spanish compared to English, and many of the existing irregular verbs still follow patterns (such as "venir" and "tener" having the first-person-present-tense conjugations "vengo" and "tengo", for instance).

There are only a few major tenses (I, familiar singular you, formal singular you, plural you/they, we), and these are not, unlike many other Spanish words, gender-divided; only divided by the number of speakers and in the case of the second person singular pronouns, the familiarity/formality of the speaker with the person they're speaking to. As far as pronouns go, Japanese beats Spanish for nuance, but Spanish beats Japanese by far for being easy to remember.

Spanish also has a notably HUGE number of cognates with English, and in fact has a tendency also to import and sort of "Spanish-ify" foreign words, especially Spanish. For instance, "panqueque" (pronounced sort of like "pankeikei" - apologies if my phonetics are off, as I don't know IPA very much at all), that means "pancake"; "computadora" is "computer," and "pantalones" is "pants". And even words that aren't necessarily cognates in the true sense still sound or look an awful lot like their English counterpart; "sports" is "deportes" in Spanish, for instance. "Rojo" is "red", "gris" is "grey", and "azul" is blue (specifically - so my current Spanish teacher says, and he's a native Costa Rican Spanish speaker - that sky blue or "azure" color), "hamborguesa" is "hamburger."

Also, because Spanish is is Romance (Latin-derived) language, learning Spanish can help you learn or remember of a lot of Latin-derived English words; for instance, "ferreteria" is "hardware store/department", derived partly from the Latin word for "iron" - that actually helps me remember when I'm reading or listening to something science-y and they mention the word "ferreous", which of course, had the same Latin root. Also, I always remember "pisciculture" means raising fish, because "piscina" means "pool (as in, swimming pool)" in Spanish, and other Spanish words having to do with fish have largely the same root word.

Additionally, it can help you increase your more "cosmopolitan" English, if you will, and better your slang usage in English, because Spanish has REALLY started having a huge impact on English, especially American English. Foods aside, a lot of Spanish words have common into relatively common usage in English, such as "huevos" as slang for testicles (it actually means "eggs", but apparently, that's slang for testicles even in Spanish), or idioms such as "mi casa es su casa" ("my home is your home"), or words such as "gracias" ("thank you"), "adios" ("goodbye"), "amigo" ("friend"), "carrida" ("darling"), "macho" ("manly"), "hombre" ("man", usually used either rudely or to refer to macho-ness in English), "nada" ("nothing", usually used for emphasis, as in the phrase "Nada, zip, nothing!"), "viva..." (idiomatically used to say "long live...!", used in the same context in English in phrases like "Viva Las Vegas"), the list really goes on and on and on... and on. Spanish is also commonly used in place names in the U.S., especially in the south and midwestern states, such as the cities of "Las Vegas", "San Diego", "San Francisco", and also, in the state of "Montana"'s name ("montana" is Spanish for "mountain"), and in some rivers' names, such as the Rio Grand(e).

Oh, and Spanish is VERY regular with spelling. There are only a couple of kinds of words that can be spelled more than one way, and most of those I think it's still one of two ways (for instance: you wouldn't neccesarily know if "reflecciones" or "reflexiones" is correct; the latter is, but both would be pronounced the same), and vowel sounds are always spelled the same; aside from a few diacritical marks (for instance ~ over an "n"), the spelling system uses the same characters as English, except far more phonetic and intuitive and regular and just plain easier (for the record: aside from the ~ over an "n" making it a ny sound - as in, "Espanyol" instead of "Espanol" - all diacritical marks are primarily used as accent marks over vowels, just to indicate additional stress in cases where it needs to be noted). Granted, the phonetics are sometimes a little different (rr in Spanish is rolled more than r; ll is pronounced as if it were an English "y"; in cases where a q or g is followed by a u, the u is silent; j is what an English speaker would call an "h" sound, whereas "h" is silent, etc.), but they're consistant and easy to learn.

So, I would probably most recommend Spanish, though I have to warn you about the r and rr character pronunciation being kind of hard. Also, if French gave you trouble, you may want to keep way from learning Spanish from people who are from northern Spain or from places (such as Costa Rica) that were colonized primarily by people from northern Spain, as there's a slight hint of French in their accents; personally, I think it's beautiful, and you only really here the French-ness at all just a tiny bit in words that begin with, say, ll (such as llegar), however, since you explicitly stated you had trouble with the French g/j/whatever, I figured it was worthy of note. The Mexican accent, for instance, is a fairly easy one to learn, with none of those subtle Frenchy bits, even if it's a bit less soft (and in my opinion, just slightly less pretty, but then, I'm biased, because my favorite Spanish teacher has a Costa Rican accent, and it's lovely :P).

Does that help at all?


-Runa27

[ElieDeLeuze]

Runa,
Japanese ist NOT based on simplified chinese. At all.
Japanese grammar is NOT easy for anybody as soon as you have other contact woth Japan than manga.
Japanese ist NOT only what is written in manga.

[Runa27]

Runa,
Japanese ist NOT based on simplified chinese. At all.
Japanese grammar is NOT easy for anybody as soon as you have other contact woth Japan than manga.
Japanese ist NOT only what is written in manga.

Then I'm sure you'll be QUITE happy to know that those things? Are NOT what I said, thanks for putting words in my mouth, though! (By the way, "ist" is NOT an English word. Neither is "woth".)

1.) WTF? WHERE did you actually see me say that Japanese was "based on simplified Chinese"?? I most certainly did NOT saying anything of the sort, thanks. What I SAID was basically it has some loanwords, and implied that some words in Japanese are somewhat derived from the same roots as some Chinese ones (which is absolutely true. "Manga" comes from the same root as a Chinese word, as I recall, for instance; on a sidenote, it's also related to the Korean word "Manhwa", from the same root). I also noted that kanji (NOT "Japanese") largely comes from (usually simplified) Chinese characters, which is ALSO true. And how you could pretend either that it's not (considering that the word "kanji" actually means "Chinese characters", according to every single source I've ever looked at, and considering I have seen examples of kanji where the original Chinese version of the same character was shown as well for comparison, or noted in other ways) or that me saying that kanji has a lot of characters based on simplified Chinese characters (and by that, I mean that the kanji itself is often a simplified version of a Chinese character, of course) = saying the entire language is "based on simplified Chinese"... I have no idea. That's rather akin to taking my saying "Spanish has a large number of cognates in common with English" to mean "Spanish is based on English". Me noting the influence on it does NOT = saying it was "based on" it. It just doesn't make sense to take it that way, and why you did, I'm actually having quite a bit of trouble figuring out. :\

Oh, and since you failed to read my post the first time, how about reading it now? My description of KANJI (NOT the entire language):

basically, a similar kind of system to the Chinese writing system - in fact, it's partially based on a simplified version of the Chinese system - with each character meaning a whole word, phrase or concept, and sometimes being able to be read with multiple different meanings and pronunciations

I also said, of the pronunciation:

it has very few difficult-to-master consonant sounds (and the hardest ones for an English speaker are actually the ones, I think, that are a lot closer to sounds in the Chinese language, at that)

The sound I was thinking of is usually romanized as "r", and sometimes an "l", but is really somewhere in between those and often (somewhat inaccurately, I think), said to sound similar to the "Spanish d" (there's actually very little the Spanish "d" has in common with that sound, actually, in my opinion. The mouth, for the Japanese sound I refer to here, goes more vertically open, and there's more tongue-flick in it, or at least, the flicking of the tongue against the pallette or whatever it's called is much quicker, subtler, and the area of tongue that horizontally hits the whatever-its-called seems to be slightly smaller than in the Spanish "d", plus, the tongue curls in a little more than it does on the Spanish "d", it seems like). The reason I noted this and mentioned Chinese in the same breath is because I have spoken to Chinese people who still had heavy Chinese accents, and have heard them pronounce their "r"s remarkably similarly to the way the Japanese would. Mind you, I'm sure it's not identical, but my point was that it's closer (or seems to be closer, at least) in sound to Chinese in some ways (including that sound) than it is to English (though as I noted, there aren't tonals like there are in Chinese).

Again: How that implies the entire language being "based on simplified Chinese", I have no idea.

2.) Where the hell did I say it was "easy"? Answer: I DID NOT! So why you're reacting as if I said it was, I have no idea. Sorry, but that's how your post makes it sound, as if you're denying something that (once again) I never actually said, nor even implied. Thanks to most learning paths currently available, I'm still learnign the writing system; I'm not far enough into my studies to have more than a basic grasp of the grammar at best and said as much. However, I did note how it was very "complex", which I think is a good description in and of itself, and I DID note that there were many personal pronouns and honorifics and layers of ettiquette in the language that some apparently find difficult to keep straight - again, how this suddenly = me saying it's "easy", I have no idea. (However, I should like to note that for some people, it may very well be "easy". Maybe it's the Wikipedia editor in me, but that seems very biased for you to put it that way. How "easy" it is to anyone depends on the person, their language-learning skills, and their willingness and desire to remember it. I have found people that find basic Spanish grammar to be "not easy", for instance, who as a matter of fact, seem to find every language's grammar to "not be easy", but that doesn't mean everyone is going to have the same difficulties, and it's really not good to act is if they would. I won't deny that, coming froma Western perspective, indeed, Japanese grammar has a lot of complications that aren't found in say, English or Spanish, however, how easy or hard the grammar actually "is" will differ quite a bit depending on who is learning it. I say this because, you know, I already said it was "complex", which you would think would actually cover the base of "if you find complex grammar systems to be hard, you may have some trouble with it"). Granted, I did forget to mention the particles (such as "wa", which points back to the subject of the sentence), which are used a lot, and which are practically insane IMO, but I was a little sleepy and forgot to bring them up. (I will say this though: so far, I find some parts - such as the particles - difficult, and others - such as honorifics and pronouns to an extent, and the fact that the modifier goes before the modified like it does in English - to be fairly easy. So, not ALL the grammar is as nasty as one might think, so long as one has the genuine desire and interest to learn it).

Actually, wait! How about just reading what I actually wrote?:

However, I can't say anything about the grammar, let alone call it "easy"; I'm so very early on in my studies that I don't understand more than the very basic sentence structure. Also, of note is the fact that Japanese is FAR more nuanced than English is, with different layers of "politeness" and respect that for some can be difficult to keep straight.

Again, shoulda mentioned the particles there and did not, but note that I actually said that I "can't... call it "easy"." Again, why you're reacting so vehemently, as if I had said just that, I have no. Idea..


3.) I'm going to quote you here again to show just how bloody offensive this last comment of yours is, and why:

Japanese ist NOT only what is written in manga.

a.) I know that, seeing as despite what you may think, I am not a moron.

b.)I only mentioned "manga" once (I actually mentioned anime considerably more, what with noting that I soaked in the "sound" of the language from it. And if you don't believe that you can at least learn to pronounce a language from watching enough films in it, e.g. hearing the sound of it a lot... then remind me to introduce you to my old Spanish teacher's best friend, who apparently learned to pronounce English properly through Simon and Garfunkal songs), when I was mentioning what kind of "nerd" I was; just because I happen to like Japanese comics and animation (actually, I like all kinds of comics and animation, for the record, regardless of country of origin) doesn't mean I don't realize there's "more to" the culture. Again: what kind of moron do you think I am? Apparently, a big one. Thanks. I feel so... respected as a human being. (I'll admit my interest in the culture was first piqued by anime and manga from there, but that's hardly the be-all and end-all of my interest in the culture, especially considering I'm thinking of someday becoming a translator and/or English teacher over there. Long way off, obviously, but it's something I'm considering, and I wouldn't consider something that extreme if I thought "manga" was all there was to the culture, thanks).

c.) Once again: How about looking at what I actually said?:

like I said, I learned all of my pronunciation from watching subtitled anime! And believe me, I can babble in such a way that if you don't know pretty much any Japanese grammar or vocabulary, you'd honestly think I was fluent. Actually, that's a pretty good way to learn to pronounce a language, come to think of it, seeing as that's actually how we learn our first language to begin with). Also, the Japanese are often just as eager to learn foreign languages (including English), so you may even be able to find a pen pal quite easily.

In other words, I said that watching and listening to entertainment in the language is a good way to learn how to "pronounce" it. Which is 100% true. Why else would those silly "Muzzy" videos exist? Why else would we have been forced in my Spanish class to watch so many Disney movies dubbed in Spanish? Hearing plays a huge part in learning any given language, except for the various sign languages. The fact that a lot of material is available in the language subtitled nowadays that one can use for that purpose is what I was noting.

Also: anyone who thinks you can't learn anything about a culture's modern day-to-day side by watching that culture's entertainment has never tried watching "Excel Saga" with the pop-up translation/cultural notes on, never tried glancing through the translation notes of "Azumanga Daioh", and has never watched "Shall We Dance?" (original Japanese version of the film, not the Richard Gere version). There are tons of little tidbits you can pick up, or things that can pique your interest into looking further (for instance, I learned a lot more about shinto and Japanese shrines after seeing all those priestesses in anime made me decide to look into it further).

-Runa27

[ElieDeLeuze]

Don 't insult people here. Have a nice day.

[Latinus]

To answer an argumentation by three sentences which, apparently, stick to some details is a form of contempt.
If you don't have the decency to take the time to answer such a post, it would be better to not answer. By this way, you will avoid to wound someone's feelings and you will preserve yourself from insults.