6. Characteristics

 

 

1. Language Characteristics

Okay, and now we are going to talk about the characteristics of languages.

We are going to talk about different language families as well as different languages like Arabic, Mandarin, to actually introduce you a little bit to how these languages might look like.

Bear in mind that it's not gonna be enough.

If you want to learn these languages, then you will have to do your own research, get that textbook that I have mentioned so many times and read about this.

This is more to actually introduce you to that, to give you a basic image of how it looks like, and so on and so forth.

So, please don't expect a lot of details here.

And there's one thing that you need to understand.

If you want to learn languages quickly as I do for example, or as some polyglots do, you don't need to know everything.

You need to know basic things so that you understand how languages work, and so that you know how to expand on different notions, and so that you grasp different notions quickly.

It’s not like you have to know each and every language and its grammar from soup to nuts.

It's not needed.

You need to have a basic background, basic understanding.

Romance languages, we are going to start with that.

Romance languages are quite popular, and I think that most of you have already had that at school because French and Spanish are usually languages that are taught at school in the USA and in other places, and for that, I think that these languages will not actually give you a lot of problems or of hard times, and since we have already talked a lot about them before, when I was actually giving you examples of French and Spanish, all that actually made me decide to talk about these languages very briefly.

And that's also gonna be the case with Germanic languages since they're kind of similar to English, not so much with Germanic.

With the Germananic and the Scandinavian languages, we're gonna talk about that, but it's not gonna be very thorough.

Slavic languages also, we are not going to talk about that a lot because I know that these languages are not so popular and chances are that people won't really want to actually study them, so, we are just gonna actually talk about that briefly as well.

Arabic, as you can see, I’m not gonna talk about the family as a whole, but only Arabic there, the main, the classical I would say, or the standard Arabic and Mandarin.

So, one of the dialects of Chinese, not all dialects, not Tibetan family, just Mandarin.

These are just two very unique languages from our perspective and that's why I want to actually talk a little bit about them, and we are not gonna expand on different dialects, there's no point.

Okay, Romance languages.

Let's first take a look at the tree, very quickly.

Latin.

Latin is at the start here, and we know that these languages they actually derived from Latin.

Classical Latin - the Latin was used by more educated, more wealthy people at the time.

 Vulgar Latin - people that were less wealthy, less educated and so on.

Obviously, I’m generalizing that, it's not perfectly how it was, but it's more or less that.

From the Vulgar Latin, from spoken Latin, we have different branches.

And what's actually interesting for us is that we have a branch with the Romanian language here, as you can see, it's a different branch, with Italian in a different branch, and we also have French, Spanish, and Portuguese in a different branch.

So, Romanian is gonna actually be quite different than these languages: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

However, for example even though Italian and these three languages are in a different branch, they're gonna be quite similar.

Actually, the most unique language here, out of these four, is gonna be French.

And that most likely has to do with the fact that it was actually spoken by the Gallic community, or how you pronounce that in English and so, maybe it went into its own turns into its own directions.

I'm not sure about that, but it's not very important for us at the moment.

But mostly Portuguese, Spanish, Italian are gonna be very similar to another, French is gonna go in a different direction, somewhat into English direction I would say, maybe it also has to do with the fact that actually, French was used on the court, on the English court for like why these languages started to mix.

I’m not sure about that, but I’m gonna tell you that French is gonna be a little bit different than Portuguese, Spanish and Italian and you will see examples.

So let's talk about these examples quickly.

As you can see I’ve prepared different words here, and you know that I do study French and Spanish, but bear in mind that I’m not perfect here, so, my pronunciation might not be perfect.

With languages like Italian, Portuguese, actually, expect even worse.

I’ve never studied these languages, so, I will try to pronounce these words, but it's gonna be far from perfect.

And also Romanian language, I’m not gonna even pronounce that, not going to even try.

However, you can see that these words are quite different, right? Especially at the start.

Later on, it gets more similar to these two and so on and so forth.

But this, actually, is showing you the domain is gonna be a little bit farther than these other languages.

Let’s start with the French.

So, the word “once” in French is pronounced “une fois”. As you can see, first of all, we have a very strange sound - "y" It's not "u", it is a different sound than “u”. "U" is represented by a different letter, here we have “y”, “Une fois”, so we have different letters that don't usually represent the sound “w” here and we also have the letter “s” at the end, which is not pronounced.

And that's what happens a lot in French, that you don't pronounce the letters at the end.

In Italian, it's gonna be simple - “una volta”. So, you have a way more, I’d say, way more simple pronunciation.

Obviously, if you are an English native speaker, and you have never studied any other languages, then some of these letters are not gonna be so obvious for you.

It’s not gonna be very obvious for you, but for most of the people and for English native speakers that have studied at least a little bit other languages, it's gonna be simple.

Because in English, the spelling is not always very regular and so for that, it might be a little bit more difficult to pronounce languages like Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, whereas usually, for most of the languages, as native languages, people are speaking natively languages, these languages are going to be very simple to pronounce because these letters are used a lot for these sounds.

They're very commonly used like that.

So, "una volta". In Spanish - "una vez". We don't pronounce the sound "z" here.

Some people might want to pronounce that like this.

It's going to be a mistake.

It's "s". It's always "s" in Spanish - "una vez". And Portuguese - "uma vez". I’m not sure if you actually pronounce that with the "s" or the sound "z". That is to verify, but you can definitely see, that these three languages are quite regular in terms of pronunciation, whereas French isn't.

Next word - "children". 'Enfants". So, let's start.

We have a very strange sound for some people.

Not a lot of languages have nasal consonants.

Then we also have the letter "t" and the letter "s" at the end, which is not pronounced.

"Enfants". Okay, so, if you want to learn French you will have to learn what to pronounce, and what not to pronounce because the endings in French are not always pronounced.

Italian - "infanti/bambini". So you can see that these words are very similar, that they are definitely cognates, but in Italian, it's way more simple to actually read that.

In Spanish - "infantes/ niños". So, "niños" is way more widely used, but "infantes" is still there, and again, it's very simple - "infantes". Portuguese - "infantes". It's something like that.

Again, I’m not perfect here, that's not my point.

I want to show you the pronunciation that differs in between languages where you will have to put more or less time.

That's my goal here.

Portuguese - simple, Spanish - simple, Italian - simple, French "enfants". You can judge it yourself.

"To blow". "Souffler". This is actually where we have the sound "u". Not (bad pronunciation) but (good pronunciation). And, at the end, we don't pronounce the letter "r". And it's not also pronounced (incorrect pronunciation) but it's (correct pronunciation). It's a different sound.

You remember, French has different sounds for the letter "e". (Different variants of "e" in French). Because of that, you have to distinguish that, and here, you'll have to know the pronunciation rules.

That, at the end, if the letter "e" is followed by the letter "r" it's gonna be pronounced like "e", but you also have to practice their articulation, and distinguish the sound - "e" and "y" and "ə". So, two different tricky things here.

 Italian - "sofflare". Simple, nothing to analyze.

Spanish - "soplar", simple.

Portuguese - "soprar", simple.

Again, not perfect here, but you get the idea.

This three - simple to pronounce, not a lot of difficulties in terms of articulation.

 In French, we have both.

"To sing" - "chanter" Nasal consonant, and at the end we have the sound "e". In Italian - "cantare". In Spanish - "cantar". In Portuguese "cantar". Now when I think about it, the sound "r", might be a little bit difficult for English native speakers because if you are English from great Britain, then you don't pronounce the letter "r". It's like (pronounces water with a British accent). Something like that, or for example you say "here", but you don't really pronounce the letter "r". And if you are from the United States, then you say (pronounced with an American accent): water, Mark, train.

You pronounce that but in a different way.

You actually don't touch your palate.

I think that's how you actually call that in English, straight for that.

So in American English you don't do that, and that's actually what you have to do here to pronounce that sound because it's not (incorrect pronunciation), it's (correct pronunciation). And sometimes in Spanish, it will have to be even vibrated (pronounces an example). We had that example.

So, there is a difference between (incorrect pronunciation) and (correct pronunciation). It might not be so simple for people to learn to articulate.

Portuguese "cantar". We have talked about that.

Again, I’m not perfect I’m going to repeat that every time.

"The best" - "les meilleurs". So you can see, many different letters, strange sounds, you get how it works.

In Italian - "il migliore". So in Italian, I think we don't really pronounce the letter "g" in situations like that, I might be wrong, but I think it's supposed to be pronounced "il migliore". So that is what you would have to learn, most likely.

In Spanish "los mejores". So here, you would have to learn that the letter "j", which in English is pronounced as "dʒ" as in "jam", in Spanish is not.

It is pronounced as "x" "Los mejores", "jardín", "jugar". It's a different sound.

In Portuguese - "os melhores", something like that.

I think that the "l" in Portuguese is a different phoneme than other languages, than for example in Spanish, in French, you would have to verify that, but I think that this letter is a little bit different, it's a different "l" or maybe that was just the accent of the person that actually reads Portuguese on Google translate, but I think that it might be a different phoneme, or at least a different allophone because it sounds very unique.

"Os melhores", it's like a deep "l". If it's a different phoneme, then you'll have to learn how to articulate that or another form, then also, you might wanna do that.

"Beautiful" we have "belle", we don't pronounce the letter "e" at the end.

We have "bella", simple pronunciation.

Spanish, we have "bella" which is not very used.

A lot more of that we use: "hermosa", "bonita", "linda", but you can see that you read everything the way you see that, with the exception of this word because you don't pronounce the letter "h" in Spanish, you never do that (correct pronunciation). That might be troublesome for some people to actually get used to, but it's not a big deal.

In Portuguese - "bella", "formosa", "bonita", "linda". This kind of pronunciations.

There is a simple conclusion that you see here.

That French is always gonna be difficult in terms of articulation, pronunciation.

It's a little bit like Scandinavian languages, for example Swedish.

You have, maybe not a difficult articulation, but you have a lot of letters that usually represent different sounds.

And in French, that's the same.

You have letters that usually represent different sounds or you have letter clusters.

You have three letters that represent a single sound.

And that is gonna be a thing to overcome, for that is going to be a problem that you will have to overcome, whereas in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese we are not having that problem.

Maybe the last one here - "in the mouth", "dans la bouche". We don't pronounce this ending, and we don't pronounce this ending - "dans la bouche". "Nella bocca", something like that.

Spanish - "en la boca". Portuguese - "na boca". Simple pronunciation - difficult pronunciation.

Also, here we have the sound, "ɑ̃", might not be simple for people to pronounce so we can say that is a difficult articulation as well.

So that is pretty much or when it comes to the pronunciation, the articulation the phonetics, and now let's talk briefly about similarities.

I would say, a more grammatical topic.

First of all, all these languages have articles.

Definite and independent articles.

And for people that don't have that in their native languages, it's gonna be very difficult.

Here, we have that, there's no way to overcome that.

However, an interesting thing to note that Latin used to have free articles, whereas today, French, Spanish, Portuguese - they only have two articles - feminine and masculine, but Romanian still has three articles.

And it's difficult because you never know whether the word is masculine or feminine, so you don't know what endings to accord later on to other words, and you don't know whether you should end it with this letter or that letter.

In Spanish and Italian it's gonna be better because you pronounce everything, but in French, for example, you pronounce these endings in a strange way.

It's not like you don't pronounce that, it's like you can't ignore that, but it is, I would say, very difficult to learn how to accord endings in French just by listening to that.

In Spanish, you can develop that naturally, but in French, it takes way more time.

I’m not going to go into details.

Those that actually study French know why it's difficult to actually acquire that properly.

But really, French is gonna be just overall the most difficult Romance language to learn.

Maybe Romanian as well, no idea how Romanian works, so I’m not gonna tell you, but definitely French is gonna be more difficult than Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

And don't trust people who tell you that it's not the case, that for example, Spanish is more difficult than French - it's not.

Personally, I would take French and move to the second group when we think about the FSI research, that we have talked about before.

Okay, the articles.

So, also two grammatical genders, it's connected.

You understand that, I think.

Difficult conjugation - that is also an important thing to point out here.

I know that there might be languages that are more difficult, in terms of conjugation, but here, when we talk about more popular languages, when you talk about families like Slavic language family, Germanic, Scandinavian, Romance family - these languages, more popular languages usually have an easier conjugation.

Romance languages are gonna be the most difficult here.

Especially Spanish, I think, because in French, you don't always have to, I mean, especially, if you only want to speak in French, and you don't really care that much about writing, then you actually don't really have to conjugate a lot.

Let me give you an example.

I will conjugate the verb "to speak" now.

Je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vouz parlez, ils parlent.

As you have noticed, probably, we only have three different forms.

Parle (parles, parlent sound exactly the same), parlons, parlez.

And so you only have to learn those three words.

"Parlons" and "parlez" are always going to be regular, so you won't have a lot of problems with that in French.

Obviously, in the past tense and in the future tense you will have different endings.

It's not gonna be, for example, like in Chinese where you just say "tomorrow" and that indicates the future tense to some extent.

No, here you have to actually use different endings to show, that you speak in the future tense, and so that is gonna take time, but in French, it's gonna be a little bit easier than in Spanish.

In Spanish you have a lot of irregularities, you have to pronounce every single person, and so for that Spanish is gonna be the most time-consuming in terms of conjugation.

It's not the end of the word, although, at the start, you might feel like it's gonna take ages.

It's not.

You'll have to get used to that, you'll have to get used to patterns, we have talked about that.

And I think that, for example, if you want to do the 10-day challenge, you'll need to maybe, spend one day for the present tense, or two days, and then two days for the past tense, and the future tense is gonna be actually simple here because you can use the tense that is composed with an auxiliary verb, and so you'll have to conjugate a lot there, but the past tense and the present times you will have a lot of irregular verbs.

Those are important and you can't really omit them.

So for that, Spanish is gonna be troublesome.

French, if you want to write, then those forms, for example, of the verb "to speak", they're always gonna have different forms.

When you think about the writing.

But when you speak it, they actually are pronounced the same.

So for speaking, French is gonna have a little bit easier pronunciation, I would say.

I mean, conjugation, but for writing, it's gonna be the pain in the arc.

Italian, I'm not sure, I think the time is a little bit easier than Spanish from what I have seen, but I’m not gonna tell you 100% here.

Romanian - no idea, and Portuguese neither, but I can assume that they're also going to be more difficult in conjugation and then, for example, Germanic languages, like German and Dutch, they actually have very simple conjugation, and I don't think that Portuguese and Italian are going to be easier than that.

High grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence.

So this basically means that we have regular spelling.

With exception of French.

So, as I said, if you are an English native speaker, that has never studied languages, you might struggle a little bit with that, but, usually, we have a very regular spelling, everything is simple here in terms of pronunciation.

We've got an exception of French difficult articulation, difficult pronunciation, difficult rules, a lot of rules, you have to put the time to learn that.

No declension.

Here, we have no declension, no case inflection, we don't have to worry about that, and that's good information for us because it means that these languages are actually good candidates to do this challenge.

Tenses.

Tenses are difficult, and it's actually an interesting thing to point out here, because you might not know that in English you have a lot of different past tenses to choose from.

In Romance languages it works similarly, but, for example, in Slavic languages, you usually have only three tenses.

One for the past, one for the future, and one for the present, and you don't have to choose any tense.

In Spanish, for example, if you want to say that you have done something today, then you say "He comido", which means "I have eaten". But if you want to say that you did that in the closed time frame, then you use a different tense.

"Comí ayer" - "I ate yesterday", and it works similarly in various Romance languages, when it comes to these tenses and there are also some calques to English here and there.

It's not gonna be the same, but you can actually help yourself with that.

So, for example, if you have already studied some of these languages, if you have for example studied Italian, then the grammar in Spanish is going to be very simple for you, because it's gonna work quite similar.

But you still have to know whether you want to use this tense or that tense, and it's never simple.

In Slavic languages, you don't have to think about that.

Next thing - the word order.

 Here we have the SVO pattern.

That is also very good information for us, because we don't have to think about the word order a lot.

In Germanic languages, it's not gonna be so simple, and we will talk about that.

In Germanic languages, you will have to really think about the word order.

This is pretty much all that I wanted to cover when it comes to Romance languages.

Now you have a basic idea of how these languages work, and what's difficult there and what's simple there.

But overall, Romance languages are going to be good for the 10-day challenge with the exception of French.

French - I wouldn't do that, we have already talked about that.

It's gonna be possible, but for what price? You have to think about it this way.

If you only want to study those 10 days, and you don't want to improve later on, then you can also choose French, and maybe try to write things down phonetically, but French is going to be annoying here.

If you want to write things down phonetically, then you'll also have to get a tutor who will explain to you grammar, tense, and so on.

You will have no exercises and the grammar in French is not so simple, so it's not gonna help you.

It's possible, but it would not be the best option.

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese  - perfect.

These are just perfect.

One of the best languages that you can choose.

Now we are going to talk about a Germanic language family, although here, I’m not going to cover every language.

We are going to look at German and at Swedish.

Swedish is going to represent that Scandinavian part because Norwegian and Danish are quite similar to Swedish, actually.

Danish has a little different pronunciation I would say but mostly, these languages are gonna be quite similar.

So Swedish is gonna represent that, the other languages are gonna have a similar structure, and German is gonna be quite similar to Dutch.

Dutch is actually a language that is between English and German It's gonna be similar to English and German.

So Dutch is gonna be kind of represented by German here, and Swedish is going to represent Norwegian and Danish.

Bear in mind that there are going to be differences, but they're going to be subtle, especially here.

First of all, vocabulary.

Let's talk about how these words look like, and whether the pronunciation is gonna be easy or difficult.

So, English - "apple". In German - "Apfel". Quite simple.

If you think about those letters, they are usually representing sounds like that.

As you can see, German is, at least at first glance, simple when it comes to pronunciation In Swedish it's going to be something like "äpple". I’m not perfect here, I have never spoke Swedish, but you can see that this letter is gonna be pronounced a little bit like the sound "e". So you will have to learn that, it's not gonna be a big deal but in Dutch you can see that the apple is actually pronounced "appel". It's a very similar pronunciation to the English "apple". Next, we have the word "bear". In German, it's gonna be pronounced "Bär". So we will have to learn that this letter is actually representing the sound "e". In Swedish, it's going to be björn". To my ear, it's something between "o" and "e" and I can tell you that this is not going to be a very simple phoneme to articulate.

You will have to practice that a little bit at least.

But in Dutch, "bear" is pronounced "beer". So, like "beer". This is not gonna be a problematic thing, for now.

Next word - "beech". In German, it's "Buche". In Swedish it's "bok", so the "o" is pronounced as "ʊ" (like "book"). And in Dutch, well, I’m not really sure.

I think it's like "beuk", something like that.

English - "blood". In German "Blut" In Swedish "blod" and in Dutch "bloed". So you're probably starting to see that Dutch is not going to be simple, when it comes to pronunciation.

This is actually pronounced "bloed". Board, Brett, bord.

This is a difficult word to pronounce.

And in Dutch "boord". Similar to English.

Board, Brett, bod, boord.

"Book", "Buch", "bok", and the last one "boek" So again, you can see that the pronunciation in that one is gonna be a little bit complicated.

"Church", "Kirche", "kyrka" So this is apparently the sound "sh" - "kyrka" Something like that I’m not perfect here.

And "kerk". This might be simple to pronounce for people.

And the word "day", "Tag", "dag", "dag". Now once we have talked about these words, I think you have the basic idea.

German is gonna be simple in terms of pronunciation, Swedish is gonna have a lot of new letters representing the sound that we know, but we have to learn which letter represents which sound.

And Dutch is gonna be somewhat irregular, I think.

That's actually the first impression that I have here.

Dutch is gonna be more difficult in terms of pronunciation.

Swedish is gonna be also difficult, it's going to be a little bit like French, but you will have mostly irregular rules and German is just going to be simple.

Dutch is going to be a little bit like English, I would say.

It's going to be less regular with rules.

Swedish is going to be like French.

There are a lot of rules, a lot of new letters representing phonemes, a lot of strange letters representing sounds, but it should be regular.

So these languages are not gonna be the easiest in terms of phonetics.

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese are gonna be better on that matter.

Here we will have to invest some time, definitely more than a day for Swedish, and definitely more than a couple of days for Dutch.

So if you want to learn these languages, you might consider writing phonetically, but what I would do is just give it some extra time, for example, like three days for Swedish to practice the pronunciation for a start, to get some basic idea and then try to actually do the challenge and learn and actually consolidate phonetics in the meantime.

At the same time Dutch.

It just gonna be difficult.

I can already tell you that this language, without even looking at it, I can tell you that it's gonna require more time and I wouldn't choose Dutch for the challenge.

It's gonna be possible, but it's gonna require a lot of work.

Obviously, you could write words phonetically, but it's not going to be worth it.

Conjugation there is simple and the language is similar in its structure to English, so that would be definitely easy for you, but I don't think that you will be able to learn all those rules and also words, and grammar in those 10 days.

Maybe you will, but not with the best results, I think.

It would be way better to actually invest a little bit more time, maybe like two, three, four days before the challenge to learn rules a little bit.

Obviously, you don't have to know how to pronounce every single word correctly, but having a basic idea of how it works, sometimes helping yourself by the usage of the phonetic transcription, but being able to read in that language is gonna be helpful.

This is not a language like Chinese or Arabic where it's really difficult to learn the writing system.

I think it's just not worth it.

Maybe if I were to learn Dutch I would use phonetic writing for phonetic notation just because I really understand the grammar here, and so for that, I will just do calques a lot.

I would do calques from German and English, and I would just learn words by the way they sound, but it's only because I know how this language would work.

I know how the word order would work here and other things.

I know how the conjugation would work because I’m just  experienced with language that is similar to this language.

If you are not experienced, then using phonetic notation here is just gonna give you a lot of problems.

So that is also gonna depend on how much experience you have because, if you actually do have that background, if you have already studied a language like that, then you just have to fill the gaps in the vocabulary, but the grammar is already there, to some extent - obviously.

So that is also the choice that you will have to make.

Swedish is a lovely language to study and actually, when I was doing research about this language, I realized how cool it would actually be to study this language.

It's very friendly, I would say the pronunciation is not the easiest but all the rest is very nice, besides the word order.

But you don't have to conjugate verbs.

Great language, we'll talk about that in a second.

German - easy pronunciation but it's gonna have difficult grammar.

So that is definitely gonna be an obstacle.

Now, let's talk about characteristics.

German - simple pronunciation and articulation.

I have mentioned that, we have quite a simple pronunciation.

We have some rules to learn but it's not a big deal, and articulation - there are some sounds that might not be simple for everybody, for example, the word "Mutter" is ended with the letter "r" but it's not going to be pronounced (incorrect pronunciation), but (incorrect pronunciation again). By the way, now I realized that I actually made a mistake with pronunciation in German.

It's not supposed to be pronounced (incorrect pronunciation) but (correct pronunciation), I think.

I don't know this word even in English, and maybe that was the problem because "u" (the sound y) is where you have there those two little dots on the top.

Here it's not (incorrect pronunciation), but (correct pronunciation). It's a strange word, because I know that there is a word "Bücher", I think it means "little books" in German, it doesn't matter.

So, simple pronunciation, articulation, as you can see, not all the time, but most of the time it's gonna be simple.

Whereas in Swedish - difficult pronunciation, because we have those rules, like in French, that we have to learn.

It's gonna be quite regular from what I have heard, so it's not gonna be that much of a big deal like, for example, in Dutch but it's gonna take some time.

But rather simple articulation.

There are gonna be some sounds, Scandinavian languages do have a lot of phonemes, but it's not gonna be a big deal.

It's gonna be easier, than, for example, Arabic about which we are going to talk about in a second.

Here, conjugation - easier than in Romance languages.

That is what I want you to know.

Conjugation in German, and also in Dutch, is going to be very simple.

And I was actually surprised, when I started to learn German, about how easy it was.

There are some irregularities, but usually, the conjugation in German is gonna be easier than in French, in Spanish - in my opinion at least.

 In Swedish - no conjugation, in Norwegian - no conjugation, in Danish - no conjugation.

Just like in English.

So, that is a great candidate for this challenge because, if you don't have to learn the conjugation, it's gonna be, I mean, for one thing, you will save a lot of time, for another thing, you will just be able to create sentences without that much thinking, without putting a lot of energy into that.

So having no conjugation is a great thing, and that is one of the reasons why English is so popular.

No conjugation means that you don't have to think a lot when making sentences, and that's what makes a great challenge candidate.

Articles.

German - three articles to choose from - masculine, feminine and neuter.

Before the noun.

They before the noun here.

Obviously, that is how it usually works but in Scandinavian languages, it's gonna work a little bit differently.

We'll see.

So, we have three different grammatical genders here, and I can tell you that there is pretty much the same chance for each.

So it's not like you can guess one, and most of the time you will be correct, no.

In German, it's really hard to actually use a proper article, which is a pain in the arc because, if you use an incorrect article, if you confuse them, for example, take the masculine word as feminine, then you will also mistake the declension, and that is just very difficult in German.

That's why, if you actually choose German for the challenge, you will have to accept the fact that you will do a lot of mistakes with articles and declension.

There is no way you will be able to learn that in just 10 days, so it's actually better not to invest time in that.

That is what I did.

I didn't put time here, I did those mistakes and I accepted them.

That is just a choice that you will have to make.

If you want to learn a language in 10 days, you will just have to ignore some notions.

We have only two articles in Swedish and this is gonna be great here.

They used to have three articles, but they changed that, and now they only have the neuter and utrum.

I’m not sure how you pronounce that in English, sorry for my pronunciation.

But what's important here, is that utrum represents both the masculine and feminine article.

And it's actually used most of the time, like 80%, something like that.

So you don't really have to use the other article, you just use that, and most of the time you are correct.

So you don't have to put your brain energy here, you'll have to invest your brain energy into thinking about what article to use.

That is a great thing.

In Romance languages, you can ignore that but it will be incorrect.

You can't ignore everything.

Here, you don't have to ignore that, you can just use this article and it's gonna be quite fine.

You don't have to think about conjugation.

So the only thing that you have to think about so far, is the pronunciation.

So you might have already come to the conclusion that Scandinavian languages are going to be great because that's also how it works with other Scandinavian languages as well.

You have to keep in mind that there are different dialects that might work differently, but I’m not sure if it is the case with articles right now, but it doesn't matter.

You can choose, but it doesn't really matter.

If it's the case, you can choose a dialect that uses two articles.

Great language to learn and you can learn it very quickly, and I think that the next challenge that I will do, will be either with Swedish or with Chinese.

You will see why Chinese in a bit, but Swedish is also gonna be great for the challenge.

No conjugation, no thinking about articles, just a great thing.

German - simple tenses.

So we have talked about that, we know how it works, it's maybe not the easiest thing, it's not like in Polish, you sometimes have to choose the past tense in German but it's very simple.

Also, the forms of the past and the conjugation are gonna be simple in German.

In Swedish, you also have simple tenses.

You have some but since you don't have to conjugate them, it's not that much of a deal.

You have to choose a proper tense, as you do, for example, in Romance languages, or as in English but it's not that difficult.

It actually works very similar to Spanish.

So if you have some some background in Romance languages, it will help you with tenses in Swedish.

Declension - German have a declension, as I have mentioned.

It's gonna be very difficult.

It's just gonna be difficult - you never know what articles to use, so you never know how to inflect cases.

That is a big obstacle here.

Swedish - no declension.

It used to have that, but they got rid of it because no one used it.

Great thing for us, great language to choose .

Subjunctive - German has subjunctive, I’m not really sure how it works exactly because I have not studied that in those 10 days.

It was something that I decided that is not going to be useful enough, so I decided not to invest time in that.

But I know that has subjunctive or stuff that works like subjunctive.

In Swedish, you don't have that.

I know there are some very small exceptions with words that are very old or expressions that are very old.

But other than that, you don't have that.

So that's also great news for us.

Word order.

Difficult, unstable work order.

This is the same thing here and here.

That is the only difficult thing that actually keeps me from learning Swedish.

Because the pronunciation I am already experiencing that, so I think, that I would actually manage to learn that very quickly.

But the word order, I actually struggled with that in German.

So usually, there are different combinations.

Depending on the sentence, you will have a different word order, but usually, when you make sentences, for example, in the past tense, it will look like that.

"I read the book". "Ich las in Buch" So for now, the word order seems very natural.

"I read a book" in Swedish is going to be "Jag läste en bok", something like that.

Pardon my pronunciation.

So you can tell that the word order in these two situations is very natural.

But here is where it changes because in Germanic languages, in Scandinavian languages, in German, I think, also in Dutch, you always have to put the verb as the second word in the sentence.

So, if you want to start with the word yesterday, then we have to change the word order.

"Yesterday, I read a book". "Gestern las ich in Buch". So we can see that we no longer have the pronoun here, before the verb, but the verb is actually before the pronoun.

It always has to be second.

"Gestern las ich ein Buch" And that's also the same thing in Swedish.

Again, pardon my pronunciation.

"Igår läste jag en bok". "Igår" - "yesterday", "läste", not sure how to pronounce that but you can see that the verb is before the pronoun, "jag en bok". So it changes the same way it does in German, so the verb always has to be second in a sentence.

So if you want to make a sentence like "Yesterday, a week ago, tomorrow", you will always have to make sure that you have the verb in a proper place.

If you, for example, have compound sentences, that is also gonna work in a very different way, and actually, all the Germanic languages, they're gonna have a different word order, when it comes to compound sentences with slight differences inside.

Some are gonna have a different verb at the end I’m not gonna go into details, but usually all the Germanic languages, they work similarly.

They all have this strange word order and the y're mostly just small details that change.

So, difficult word order.

So right now, we can see - in German we have difficult articles, declension, and difficult world order.

In Swedish, we only have a difficult world order and difficult pronunciation.

So Swedish and Norwegian, they are gonna be definitely easier than German here, but as you have seen I was also able to speak German after those here, don't make a language impossible to speak.

That is how it works with every language.

You can communicate, it's just about how many mistakes you'll do.

Here, I was confusing articles, declension by choice.

And I was mistaking word order also, even though I tried not to confuse that.

And despite that, I was able to express myself.

So that is what I mean.

That you can learn pretty much every language in 10 days but sometimes you will do more mistakes, sometimes you will do fewer mistakes , but you will be always able to communicate and hold a  conversation, a long conversation.

Sometimes people will just have to understand a little bit more from context, and it will sound rusty, but you will always be able to hold that conversation.

And one more time - Swedish, Norwegian great languages to study.

Might want to put some time to learn pronunciation, but later on, without thinking about conjugation, without thinking about articles - it's just going to be simple to speak.

You will just do it at ease.

One of the best languages to choose for the challenge.

And now let's talk about Arabic a little bit, and we are going to talk about the most universal, the standard Arabic, that is usually spoken at school and universities.

So we are going to talk about different dialects here.

However, note that Arabic actually has a lot of dialects and they do vary.

So if you actually want to choose that language, then you might also consider which dialect you are going to learn.

That is going to be a problem here because, for example, with Chinese, the Mandarin dialect is very widely spoken.

Whereas in Arabic you have a lot of different dialects that actually are spoken by a very similar amount of people, so it's not so simple to choose.

I actually present you Arabic here, not to make you study this language or maybe the other way around - actually prevent you from studying this language, I actually want you to take a look at how this language works because I think that will   really broaden your understanding of languages.

So this is, in my opinion, the most difficult language to learn in the world.

From the perspective of a Polish native speaker, from the perspective of an English native speaker, French and so on.

If you are in this Arabic language family, if you, for example, speak Hebrew, then maybe it's gonna be better for you.

But for other people or languages that use the Roman alphabet, and so on, it's gonna be difficult.

And there are plenty of reasons for that.

First of all - writing.

So now, I will just briefly explain how the writing system works in Arabic.

It is not the most difficult writing system, Chinese and Japanese are gonna be more difficult, but it's definitely not gonna be simple.

The Russian alphabet surely is better here.

It's going to take less time.

The Arabic alphabet is quite complex, actually.

You have 28 letters I believe.

They are not difficult to write, as you can see, they don't have a lot of details like Chinese, so that's a good thing.

However, they have different variations.

Depending on the position that given letter has in the word, it's gonna look like that, like that, or like that.

As you can see, it changes.

And by the way, in Arabic, you always read from the right to the left.

So that also might be troublesome but only at the beginning.

I know that you can really get used to the way it works very quickly.

So, we have new letters, we have letters that actually change their form a little bit, depending on the position they have in a sentence, and you also have to read from the right to the left, like in the manga.

And this is already a lot.

I would say that this is what would make me choose that phonetic notation for a start.

I wouldn't invest time into learning that, unless I would really want to be advanced, eventually, and really study this language properly.

But if I just wanted to communicate, have basic conversations like I did in German, then I would just write things down phonetically.

However, it's not gonna be so simple here, like, for example, in Chinese and you will find out why it's so simple in Chinese later on.

But here it's really difficult to use because this language has very difficult grammar.

It has everything - it has declension, it has a lot of different forms, it has conjugation - it may be not the most difficult conjugation in the world, but it has all of them, and it's all in that language, and it's all hidden behind these letters.

So using the phonetic notation is gonna exclude using books, and that's gonna be a problem.

So you would really have to have a tutor here, that would explain things to you, and it's gonna be possible, but it's gonna be harder than with other languages.

That is the language that I think, I would actually struggle with.

One of the very few languages that I think, I could actually struggle in terms of the challenge.

And again, it's not about being bold here, but as I said, you will be able to communicate with pretty much all languages.

Sometimes you will do more mistakes sometimes you will do fewer mistakes but this language obviously you will be able to communicate but it's just so overwhelming, when you think about it.

You have difficult grammar, difficult letters difficult articulation, a lot of things to do.

You really don't know where to start.

Situations that happen in this language, are really strange.

You don't have many languages that work like that So I would say, that if you want to choose Arabic for the challenge, you have to do it wisely.

You really have to get the language partner, it's gonna be difficult.

I would rather recommend, that you first choose different languages and then, maybe once you get more experienced, you do that with Arabic because it's gonna be very easy to fail here.

It's gonna be really difficult because of all the nuances this language has.

So now let's talk about those nuances a little bit.

Even if you learn the alphabet, you still don't really know how to pronounce most of the words.

That is a problem.

It has a regular spelling, it's not a problem, it's not like you have situations like in English, where sometimes a letter represents one sound, or a different sound - no.

Here, it's very stable.

One letter represents one sound, roughly speaking.

Because there are some consonants that represent vowels here but mostly it's very stable.

So that is good, but you have a distinction between long vowels and short vowels.

And the long vowels are represented by this letter, so this can be a consonant, but this can be also a vowel, as you can see.

It's actually the sound (pronounces sound). So (the sound) can be seen both ways, as a consonant (the sound) as in, for example, "llegar" in Spanish, but it can be also seen as (the sound). This is the sound "w" but it can be also used as the sound "u", I believe.

And this is the vowel "a". So that is what you have with the long vowels.

You pronounce them, and they are a little bit longer, you actually stretch them a little bit.

With short vowels, that you have a lot, you don't have that kind of luxury.

In Arabic, you don't write short vowels.

You pronounce them, but you don't write them, usually.

There is an exception.

If you are starting to learn this language or you are reading Koran, which has to be simplified, because even though the language hasn't changed a lot, we have talked about, that it still uses a very old vocabulary that is actually used in a different manner today, and there must have been some changes and so for that, it has to be a little bit simplified.

So those situations - reading Koran and starting to learn this language, they both require some help.

And so for that, we have the help of those little things that you can see here on the top and on the bottom of this text.

So what are these? These are basically the ways that you actually mark short consonants.

So this one is actually called "fatha", and it's basically what represents the short vowel.

Why did they actually write consonants? Sorry about that.

It's actually what represents the short vowel "a". The sound "a". So every time you have the sound "a" in Arabic, the short sound "a", it will be written likethist.

In the simplified version of writing.

Every time you have the vowel "i", the short vowel "i", not the long vowel "i", It will be written like this, on the bottom, in the simplified writing, which is, again, not the way you write all the time.

Most of the time you don't have that.

And when you have the sound "u", then you have this little thing on the top, you can see that somewhere here.

But usually, you'll have it.

This is the way the normal text looks like.

So, for example, if you are starting to study, and you are in, for example, the first year of university, your textbooks are gonna actually cover that.

And for some time, you will see words having those, but later, on they will disappear, and you will have to know what the vowels, certain words, have, just by heart.

You need to know those vowels by heart.

You don't have many vowels in this language, but you have to know those words by heart.

You see a word and you have to guess those short vowels, to some extent.

Or if you know that this word is the word "Arabic", then you already know what kind of vowels it should have.

But if not, if it's your first encounter, if you're, for example, reading a new book, studying your language by reading, and you see a new word, these things are no use, and you don't know how to pronounce this word.

And you have to check that.

So that is a problem, that is a big problem.

More than that - the articulation.

This language is gonna be difficult because of articulation, and I will try to do my best to show you why, but it's really difficult and I’m not gonna be pronouncing these sounds properly, but I hope that I will, at least, give you a basic idea of why these are difficult.

So we don't have a lot of phonemes here but we have some that are difficult to distinguish.

So the phoneme (pronounces "t") or the phoneme (pronounces "t"), actually, is very common.

There is nothing strange about that but we also have consonants that are actually called emphatic consonants and this is where it all gets tricky.

Because normally, you pronounce the letter "t" in languages like (pronounces "t"). Something like that, whereas here, you can have both the sound (pronounces "t") but you can also have this sound (pronounces "t"). Something like that.

You can have the sound (pronounces "d") and you can also have the sound (pronounces "d"). It's very hard to articulate that properly, so again, you might wanna check how it really sounds when spoken by Arabic speakers, but that is my sort of impression of that.

The sound "s" - (pronounces "s") and the empathic form (pronounces "s"). Something like that.

So that is gonna be very difficult, it's gonna be difficult to articulate.

You will have to distinguish these two sounds because these are phonemes.

So depending on having this sound or that sound, the word will change its meaning.

So we will have to actually distinguish that when people will be speaking.

And there are also other sounds that are going to be difficult here.

For example, this sound.

This is a little bit like the French "r". It's something like (pronounces "r"). We also have this sound, I think it's like the smooth edge, it's like (pronounces "h") So these two are not gonna be simple to pronounce neither.

Emphatic consonants.

You also have emphatic vowels, I believe, and they are also difficult to pronounce.

These things, just a lot of difficult sounds, difficult sounds that you don't usually have in languages.

Very difficult language.

Let's talk about its characteristics more.

So some things are gonna be good here, but most of the things are gonna be bad news.

Firstly, regular spelling.

So as I said, you know what letters you have, they usually represent the same sounds, it doesn't vary.

But you don't really know what vowels you have most of the time.

So it doesn't really help a lot.

Difficult articulation, we have to talk about that so you know how it works.

Difficulty with vowels, that is what I have already mentioned.

The thing that those short vowels are not shown in a text.

Declension - you also have a declension, you have case inflection.

It's not as bad as in German or Slavic languages because in many situations, you actually don't have to pronounce the endings.

I think that the only situation, that you really have to pronounce them, most of the time, is the accusative.

But for the rest of the cases, you don't really have to pronounce the endings when you use the pausal form.

It's called pausal form and it's just a way of speaking about pronunciation of the endings.

And so for that, you actually ignore declension to some extent, and it's correct.

So the declension is not gonna be that difficult here, when it comes to speaking.

When it comes to writing, it's gonna be difficult.

But it is there, and accusative is there, and it's always gonna be worse than in languages where you don't have that at all.

Just keep in mind that it's not as bad as in German or Slavic languages.

One article - so that is actually also a good thing because we only have to distinguish the definite article and the lack of an article.

So, if you don't have an article, then it's basically indefinite, so it's quite simple from this perspective.

That is actually good news.

However, words have grammatical genders.

We have a single article as, for example, in English, but you have more grammatical genders.

And you have to accord different parts of speech as you have to do in Spanish, for example, or French, and so on, and so forth, so that is difficult.

That is one of those things that are difficult, I consider it difficult.

And that is gonna be interesting.

Vocabulary is highly based on trilateral roots - three consonants that reappear in different derivatives.

Example - "he wrote, she writes, writer, writing". So as I said, vowels are rather less important in Arabic.

However, consonants are very important.

They're actually the things that you focus on the most when you memorize words.

Because words in Arabic, as well as grammar, are very highly dependent on those roots.

So, for example, you can say (example) in Arabic.

I’m not sure what it means right now, but you have three important consonants there - "k", "t" and "b". And these consonants will be used to create a future tense, a present tense, a past tense, I think that was actually in past tense but I’m not sure, it doesn't matter.

This will be used to use different modes, it will be used to actually create derivatives, like that, you can change "he wrote, she writes, writer, writing". A lot of different forms will be actually built with the same root.

So that is actually helping you a little bit but it's a completely different way of looking at words.

And you will have to get used to that a little bit.

If you think about cooking, for example in Spanish, the verb "to cook" is "cocinar". "The cook" is "cocinero", "I am cooking" - "estoy cocinando". So it also works like that in other languages, but here I think it's just taken to the extreme.

So everything is based on those letters.

Sometimes you have to add different prefixes, and so on, and so forth, different particles, but those three consonants, they will, most of the time, actually reappear, just maybe in a different, for example, sequence.

But they are gonna be there all the time.

If you'll actually choose to learn Arabic, then know that you should learn the past tense at the start, because it has the most neutral form, without any things added to it, without any affixes.

And then present tense and future tense are gonna require those little additions I would say, those little elements that you have to add.

So the past tense, is actually the tense that you actually start with, when you are learning this language.

It isn't present tense like with other languages, and then you add those elements to that.

The future tense is simple, you only have to add the future particle to the verb.

Well, simple is actually an overstatement here, because, it's true, you only have to add the particle, but I think you still have to conjugate the verb, maybe in the present tense, I’m not sure how it works.

If you know, if you have studied this language, you can tell me whether you actually add this particle to a single form or you still have to conjugate that in the present tense.

I think that's how it works.

If so, then it's gonna be difficult.

If not, then it's going to be a little bit better.

But still, it's not the worst situation, if you only have to conjugate in the present tense, because then you only have to learn the conjugation in the present tense, and in the past tense.

And, you don't have to think about the future tense that much.

So overall, we could say that tenses are simple here and you don't have to choose between different tenses as you do in Spanish.

You'll only have to learn forms in the present tense and in the past tense and the future is gonna be okay.

But when you think about all the different things that you will have to overcome before that, and about the vowels that you won't be able to read, then it's gonna also become difficult.

That is just how it is, I’m sorry.

No infinitives - so that is one good thing, that you don't have infinitives, you always start from the third person singular, so you get more used to that person and that is actually what helps you a little bit.

The word order - that is also not the best thing.

Usually, in standard Arabic, the one that is usually studied by foreigners, you have the word order: verb, subject, and object.

So it's not very natural word order, I would say.

You first have to think about the verb and then sometimes you will be hearing this word order, sometimes you will be hearing that word order, it will just get very perplexed and it will be just harder for you to learn by listening.

And at the end, this is actually what I have mentioned already, no need to choose between different tenses.

So we have simple tenses, as we do in Slavic languages, you only have to learn the present tense and the past tense, the future is gonna be simple if I am correct here.

So that is a good thing.

But if you think about all those things, about the writing system, about the lack of short vowels, about the articulation, about all the grammar that you have here, it's a very difficult language.

It's gonna be hard to actually learn, it's gonna be hard to pull off, especially if you don't know how to write and read by using the phonetic notation.

You will really have to get yourself a language tutor, or language partner that will explain everything to you.

Learn those words phonetically, if you want to do it in those 10 days.

It's gonna be possible, but it will be very overwhelming.

So that is the hardest language, in my opinion, right now, that is there.

Obviously, there are gonna be languages that are less popular, that I don't know how they work, that might be more difficult, but Arabic... I mean, I was really impressed by how difficult it is.

The articulation, the way they write, that they don't actually write vowels, it's just a difficult language.

And the easiest language that you can choose for the challenge, is Chinese.

Mandarin Chinese.

So if you remember well, we actually have Chinese here.

one of the easiest languages that you can choose if you only want to learn how to speak.

There is no flexion in this language, you only have pausals that you have to add one by one.

But let's actually look at it precisely.

So what makes Chinese require so much time is the fact, that it's a very simple language, but it requires a lot of time.

It requires a lot of time because it has a never-ending writing system.

Every word has its own character, most of the time, roughly speaking.

And so for that, you have to learn a lot of characters.

So these characters are gonna be very detailed.

And so for that, you can already imagine that it's gonna take ages to be able to write in this alphabet.

And you don't have hiragana and katakana like you had in Japanese, no.

We don't have that here.

We only have the main alphabet.

It has its simplified form, and you can see that, here but it doesn't really change a lot.

So, I wanted to talk a little bit about the alphabet.

I don't want you to learn the alphabet.

If you really want to speak and don't care about being really proficient in the language.

But I still think that understanding how this alphabet works, will make you understand languages better and will open your mind a little bit more.

So as you know, we actually have three options here - we have Chinese traditional, simplified, which I’ve mentioned, and Japanese.

Japanese is based on Chinese and will also talk about Chinese a little bit here.

So traditional Chinese has characters that are very detailed, you can see that her.

Maybe you can already tell, that this character is actually a resemblance to a wire to some extent.

It means electricity.

And I have already told you that, but that is actually what I have noticed right now, that this is very similar to that.

When learning these characters, if you want to learn these characters, you really have to think about images.

Try to memorize them from this perspective, try to imagine that it's just a given thing, using the mnemonic techniques, and so on.

This looks a little like a wire, so you would be able to memorize that a little bit better if you actually conceptualize that wire, and if you connect that to this word.

Its simplified form is... and by the way, actually, there are different cities in China that use either this one or that one, I’m not sure which is which but it's mostly dependent on the city.

Simplified version looks like that.

So it's way more simple.

But in Japanese, in Kanji, you still have those difficult characters.

So, I don't know if you still remember Kanji, that alphabet that works the same as in Chinese, not the one that is based on syllables.

Japanese and Chinese are gonna share pretty much the same characters with some differences, which we'll see, but they're gonna be very similar here.

The next character - "buy". Maybe you could conceptualize, I don't know a back here, but the simplified form is way different, so it would also require a different image, I guess.

In Japanese, it looks the same.

Sometimes they differ a little bit like here, for example, you can see that.

Later on, you can see more differences I think, for example, here - the word "translate". So this one is definitely different than that one, but we are not going to analyze all those characters.

I just wanted to show you that you should memorize them this way, by actually conceptualizing different images and help your brain.

Well, maybe one more thing that I want you to know here, is that, if you want to learn these characters you should really remember about the correct order.

It's not like you write these things randomly, you have to always follow the order.

Otherwise, you will actually do characters that won't be proper.

It's very important that you always do it in proper order: one, two, three four, and so on, and so forth.

So that is pretty much all, about writing.

It is gonna take a lot, a lot of time.

You have a lot of characters.

In Japanese, you have more than in Chinese, because in Chinese you have tones, but you still have a lot of characters.

So, what I would actually recommend is to go for the phonetic notation.

And not only for this challenge.

If you're learning Japanese, then you have the hiragana, which is a little bit easier to learn, and there you might actually want to consider that.

But in Chinese, even if you want to be advanced, I think I wouldn't go for the alphabet.

Maybe later on, but honestly, you don't really need that.

If you want to be advanced, at least orally, at speaking, you don't really need that.

And why? Why don't you need that? Why in all the other languages, you need to be able to write to really be advanced and be proficient, and in Chinese not? Well, that is probably the last thing that I want you to understand, after this program - that the biggest obstacle, when you write things down phonetically, is that you get lost in grammar.

You have no tools to learn grammar but here, in Chines,e there's almost no grammar.

You have a very stable word order.

Not like in German, not like in Swedish: subject, verb, object.

Every word has its fixed place.

Creating sentences is like building with lego, adding blocks one by one.

So it's always going to have the same place, the same word order.

No past tense, no future tense, and I don't mean not having different past tenses to choose from, no.

No past tense, no future tense.

You only use adverbials of time.

So, for example, to say something in the future tense, you just use the word "tomorrow". To say something in the past tense, you say "yesterday", "two days ago". That is how the past tense and the future tense works here, if we could call it a future tense or a past tense because that's really not the case.

So no tenses here.

No articles - we don't have articles here, no grammatical genders.

We don't have masculine, feminine words.

We don't have to wonder about articles, we don't to wonder about tenses, we don't have to conjugate verbs.

Also, there is no flexion, no declension, you don't change any root of the word, you don't add any endings due to the conjugation or declension, you don't have plural forms, you don't have to accord words to one another.

You have a very simple language when it comes to speaking.

Imagine that.

Just imagine not having to think about the past tense, the future tense, articles, genders, endings.

You don't have that.

Not thinking about the word order.

It's amazing, right? There are gonna be difficulties, obviously.

If you don't use characters, then you have to use google translate and different tools and learn by listening and by writing things down phonetically.

Obviously, you have the alphabet that is called "Pinyin". It works the same way and there are gonna be some resources with that, for example, you will be able to find a list with words, maybe some basic grammar will be explained in that, but you don't have a lot of that, so that is gonna be a little bit more difficult if you actually don't know characters, but it's way better, it's still better than learning all those difficult characters.

Tones - so when you think about difficult articulation in Chinese, we talk about tones.

It's like with the sound "ś" and "s" in Polish.

For people that are not natives, it will be difficult to distinguish these two sounds.

And it's the same here.

It will be difficult to distinguish different tones, and also to articulate them differently, because you are not used to that way of creating the language.

There are few languages, mostly dialects of Chinese that use tones and that's just a different way of speaking.

You don't really have those tones.

You have languages with like different accentuations and so on, but tones, they work in a very particular manner.

So the tones are going to be difficult, you will really struggle with them, but people will be able to understand what you are saying from the context.

So this is one of those things that you can actually accept, that you will do mistakes like, for example, I did with the declension in German.

Classifiers - I won't talk about that but that's maybe the only thing that is difficult here, when it comes to grammar.

It is not super difficult, like, for example, declension, but it is there.

I’m not gonna go into details, but just to point out that there is one difficult thing when it comes to grammar, and that is basically it, without that I would say that Chinese has no grammar.

But the classifiers are there and well, they are going to take some time.

But if you are interested in this language, if you want to learn Chinese, then you can do your own research about that.

So this is all that I wanted to talk about in this part.

Now you have a very basic understanding of how different languages work, how different families work, what's easy, what's difficult, and where.

And that hopefully will help you with languages, that will help you on your linguistic journey.

Thank you for listening and good luck!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Slavic Language Interview

A summarized interview with my friend Hannah.

Hannah is from Belgium and she studies Polish, Czech, and Russian.

 

Hannah, what languages do you know?

- I speak Russian, Polish, Czech, and English. I studied them all at university. Czech used to be my strongest language for a long time, but recently I have really improved my Polish, and I would say I feel the most comfortable with it now.

 

Why did you choose to study Polish?

- I started with Russian actually. I first studied Ancient Greek and Latin, and since Slavic languages have a very similar grammar to these two, I thought it might be a good idea to go for it. I also wanted to study something that would be "less common". So the first was Russian, then Czech, and then Polish.

 

What are some similarities and differences between these three languages? Can you give us some examples?

- First thing, the tenses work the same.  You don't have to think whether the tense you use is correct or not. There is one past tense, one future tense, and one present tense. That actually saves you a lot of time. Overall, they tend to share a similar grammar, but the conjugation is way more regular in Czech and Russian than it is in Polish.  On the other hand, in Czech and Russian, you have to pay a lot of attention to the accentuation, and that is rather difficult. If you put the emphasis on a wrong syllable, it might change the meaning of the word. It is definitely less strict in Polish where I actually speak the way I would in French, and people can understand me without bigger problems.

 

And what is difficult in Slavic languages?

- Declension, despite the fact that I studied Latin. It is just difficult to memorize all those forms and apply them when speaking.

- Long consonant clusters.  It's really hard to articulate them properly, and sometimes you can't understand what people are saying because they tend to articulate them in a not so precise way. The letters just end up blending together and it's hard to "recognize" words.

- However, sometimes Slavic languages can be easier than Romance languages. For example, the sequence of time - I sometimes fail with that in French, and I am a native speaker. Polish is definitely less complicated here.

 

Do Slavic languages have articles?

- They have grammatical genders, but not articles - so there is no distinction between definite and indefinite worlds, you get it from the context.  And yes, you have to change the endings according to the gender, but it's quite regular. You only have to remember which endings represent masculine words, which represent feminine words, and which represent neuter words. For example, words that are usually finished with the letter "o" are neuter. The ending "a" represents feminine words and so on. Frankly, it is way more regular in Slavic languages than it is in  Romance languages.

 

And how did you learn declension at the university? Did you use any special methods?

- Every unit in our coursebook focused on a different case, for example, the first one was about hobbies, and to do exercises we had to use the nominative case. The next unit was about clothes, and we had to use a different case there. That is pretty much how it went.

We basically learned each case one by one and had some time to get used to them. It was usually taking us 2 or 3 weeks to finish a unit, so we could say that I had 3 weeks for each case. 
It was a good way to start.

 

Which one of these languages would you recommend the most?

- It's hard to say, Russian might have the most interesting literature,  Czech sounds really nice, and Polish has a special place in my heart because of my roots.