What have you given up on?

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Multiturquoise
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Multiturquoise » 2016-10-11, 18:59

(so) Gave up Somali because of the extreme difficulty of the language, but I'll eventually study it again.
(pms) Gave up Piedmontese because of a lack of resources in/about it and not being able to speak enough Italian to learn it. I hope I'll learn more Italian and get back to it.
(sah) Gave up Yakut because of the extreme difficulty of the language. There are resources about that language in Turkish, but I didn't have much time to study it and I eventually almost forgot it all.
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Luís » 2016-10-11, 22:23

france-eesti wrote:[flag=]et[/flag] Gave up Estonian because of the Partitive case :doggy:


but I'll be back!!!!! :twisted:
(for you [flag=]et[/flag])


Why the partitive in particular? :P
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Osias » 2016-10-11, 22:42

Luís wrote:
france-eesti wrote:[flag=]et[/flag] Gave up Estonian because of the Partitive case :doggy:


but I'll be back!!!!! :twisted:
(for you [flag=]et[/flag])


Why the partitive in particular? :P

I tried to read the wp article about it and it seemed a very strong reason to give up.

I don't know how even the kids from Estonia learn that thing. But again, my language also have some things like "personal infinitive" even illiterate people here use without noticing.
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby france-eesti » 2016-10-12, 5:18

Well partitive was too much of a struggle, to understand if the action has been made "completely" or just "partially". But I think Hungarian has the same :?

Hungarian also has personal infinitive, but it is not used in the same way as in Portuguese. But I was happy to meet it again :D
No, Portuguese main issue was Subjunctive future! Because I cannot get to explain it to people when I try to explain the 3 subjunctives (imperfect, present, future). I can formulate sentences easily in Portuguese but not explain them in French or English...
Not to mention the "mesoclise" (fá-lo-ei), this is very funny but frightened me a lot at first! Hungarian has something like this too (bészelhetek) except it's not an pronoun that is in the middle of the verb but the expression of "to be able to".

But okay - Estonian partitive - we'll see who the winner is in the end! You won one first battle but I'll win the war! :twisted:
(fr) Native - (en) Fluentish - (pt) Fluentish when I was younger - (hu) Can sustain a conversation with a patient and kind magyar or order some beer and lecsó in Budapest - (it) On Duolingo ma posso ordinare uno Spritz ed antipasti in un ristorante :blush:

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Osias » 2016-10-12, 14:39

Oh, yes, I see gringos misusing the subjunctive (or not using when they should) everywhere, even French people with perfect pronunciation and otherwise perfect grammar.
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Akihiro » 2016-12-24, 13:51

I haven't given up on it completely but I am about to. That language is Chinese. My native language is similar to Chinese in writing. So I can guees what it means when it's written in Chinese. Chinese grammar is also not so hard to learn, However, its pronunciation is really difficult as there are SO MANY ways to pronunce it. ( It is far more than my native language. ) I hope I can continute to study Chinese...

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Osias » 2016-12-24, 17:31

You mean Mandarin?
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-24, 18:04

Come on, kanji have WAY more pronunciations in Japanese than in Mandarin! :lol:

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby mikemike18 » 2016-12-24, 21:05

I wouldn't say I have completely "given up" but I guess I'm holding off until later with a few.

[flag=]fr[/flag] I still speak French at a pretty basic level (A2?) but I got there essentially from studying by myself for a few months back in 2014 because I was going to Switzerland and France for a few weeks. Ever since, I haven't had a real need or desire to continue. I will probably resume one day if/when I live in a French speaking country. I'm considering grad school in France actually.

[flag=]ja[/flag] I took Japanese for a year in high school while I was already studying Spanish. I was the only student in my high school to take two languages at once haha. However, my teacher was not very good (He was not Japanese, made us only use Romaji, and he taught us the most useless archaic vocabulary). I ended up teaching myself all of the writing systems and well.. everything. But then I gave up because I moved out of Hawaii and Japanese was a huge commitment.

[flag=]la[/flag] I took Latin for a semester in high school (They only offered it for a semester to seniors and the class was called "Roman Studies.") I loved it and found it super interesting but I ended up forgetting mostly everything because it's not a language you really speak with other people. I found it difficult to practice while I was already juggling other languages.

[flag=]he[/flag] After I graduated high school, I made an Israeli friend and decided I would visit Israel and learn Hebrew (yeah right). I ended up using gift cards to buy an online course and I learned the alphabet and a lot of grammar. Once I started college, I completely lost my momentum and I started Arabic so that ended pretty quickly. I want to return to Hebrew after I reach a level in Arabic that I am happy with.

[flag=]eo[/flag] Last year in the summer I decided to study Esperanto because it was reportedly the "easiest language" and I was home for a month with nothing to do. Low and behold, that was not a good enough reason because after that month I unfortunately stopped studying. Who knows if I even remember half of what I learned?

I also recently tried starting with German but after careful thought, I decided I should probably just focus on perfecting the languages I've already fully committed to for the time being, until I move back to another country where I need to learn the language.
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Akihiro » 2016-12-25, 3:58

vijayjohn wrote:Come on, kanji have WAY more pronunciations in Japanese than in Mandarin! :lol:


Well, the most difficult part of learning Chinese is its pinyin. At first, I was optimistic about mastering them, but once I started to learn the, I found them much harder than I had expected. I have three friends from China and they are really nice persons. As they speak English well, I always use Englis when talking with them. I decided to study Chinese, whenever I speak some easy Chinese phrases to them, they usually don't seem to understand. I was once asked what language it was. But I want to keep good relationship with them, so I will try hard to study Chinese!

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-25, 4:03

What is it about pinyin that seems hard to you? I'm curious. :hmm: Do you mean that it's the tones of Mandarin Chinese that you find hard?

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby OldBoring » 2016-12-25, 5:02

From my experience, then it's not that Chinese characters have multiple readings (only few characters have them, and much fewer than Japanese!), but that Mandarin phonology is very difficult for a Japanese speaker, with all those consonants and vowels that don't exist in Japanese. A Japanese speakers also perceives Mandarin as varying a lot in "pitch accent". :P

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Akihiro » 2016-12-25, 15:00

OldBoring wrote:From my experience, then it's not that Chinese characters have multiple readings (only few characters have them, and much fewer than Japanese!), but that Mandarin phonology is very difficult for a Japanese speaker, with all those consonants and vowels that don't exist in Japanese. A Japanese speakers also perceives Mandarin as varying a lot in "pitch accent". :P


It it ture that Japanese language have a lot of different ways of pronuncing kanji, but few requires some special accents, intonation or pronunciation unke English or Chinese. Chinese requires certain accents or intonation when it's spoken, and if we make mistakes there, I don't think we can make ourselves understood. Japanese is in a way a very flat language as for pronunciation, whereas Chinese has a lot of pitches which makes me feel difficult to learn. But I have an advantage that I can understand kanji, so I think I can keep learning from now.

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby OldBoring » 2016-12-25, 16:20

So vijayjohn was right that you meant tones. I think like every language, your pronunciation will not be perfect at first, and even with some pronunciation mistakes you can make yourself understood with the context. On the other hand, if your interest is only to be able to read and write Chinese, it's not necessary to learn the readings of all the characters. I've met a lot of Japanese students in China who just do fine with reading Chinese (because they already know kanji) even not knowing the pronunciation of half of the characters. Same goes for the Chinese trying to learn Japanese.

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Akihiro » 2016-12-25, 23:15

OldBoring wrote:So vijayjohn was right that you meant tones. I think like every language, your pronunciation will not be perfect at first, and even with some pronunciation mistakes you can make yourself understood with the context. On the other hand, if your interest is only to be able to read and write Chinese, it's not necessary to learn the readings of all the characters. I've met a lot of Japanese students in China who just do fine with reading Chinese (because they already know kanji) even not knowing the pronunciation of half of the characters. Same goes for the Chinese trying to learn Japanese.


Yes, there are a lot of Chinese people learning Japanese here. I have three friends from China and they help m a lot study Chinese though I just meet them once a week. We often talk a lot about cultural issues and it's so fantastic to learn about Chinese customs and culture!

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-26, 4:21

I kind of empathize. I used to have a hard time with Mandarin tones when I was younger, too (and I'm sure I still have trouble with tones in a lot of other languages!). I think I had to get some audio-visual materials of some sort that seemed good enough and where they really tried to explain things like this. It took me a long time to get used to those tones and tell which one was which.

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Luís » 2017-10-08, 21:13

German will probably have to go.

I keep on having to study it (for several reasons) over the years, but I'm always stuck at the A2-B1 level. I guess I just don't have the motivation. There are other languages out there that interest me much more. But then, German is actually useful. I know about the sunk-cost fallacy, but it's still hard to abandon yet another language... :cry:
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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby הענט » 2017-10-09, 14:17

Luís wrote:German will probably have to go.

I keep on having to study it (for several reasons) over the years, but I'm always stuck at the A2-B1 level. I guess I just don't have the motivation. There are other languages out there that interest me much more. But then, German is actually useful. I know about the sunk-cost fallacy, but it's still hard to abandon yet another language... :cry:


"Life is too short to learn German". - Oscar Wilde

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-10-09, 14:39

"When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese."--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: What have you given up on?

Postby Meera » 2017-10-11, 19:11

At this point Hindi is the only language I have not given up on.
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