What is the most difficult language to learn?

[obler9]

Why obviously Lithuanian? I also think that the only difficult aspect of Hungarian is the vocabulary. Besides that, I think Hungarian is pleasantly refreshing to grasp.

Lithuanian has a rather complex noun morphology, probably more complicated than the east slavic one (Ukrainian, Russian, etc.). The first grammatical "strangeness" of Hungarian, from my point of view, is that this language is agglutinative (a typological characteristic that doesn't belong not only to my native language but also to my scholastic background: I have experienced fusional languages such as Latin and ancient Greek but I didn't experience agglutinative languages). Besides Hungarian has not only a vocabulary that is difficult to get (being a non-indoeuropean language) but also its phonetics sounds completely alien to me. For example, the Finnish grammar is not easy at all and Finnish isn't an indoeuropean language too, but I don't find the Finnish sounds as complicated as the Hungarian ones: on the contrary I should be able to pronunce correctly a lot of Finnish words without too much exercise... with Hungarian it should be not that easy...
By the way I have never tried to study the languages I mentioned as the most difficult to learn, so you can convince me that Finnish, Estonian or Russian should be more complicated to me. I can say without any doubt the European languageS that are the most difficult to learn (from the point of view of an Italian speaker) but I can't say without any doubt which one of these is the number 1 as regards its complexity, also because it's not your native language to choose here, but your personal mental structure.

[Lietmotiv]

OH! And when you get to Slavic month, you should do Macedonian (or Bulgarian).

A Macedonian language does not exist: the Macedonians speak Greek since Macedonia is a greek region. If you mean the language spoken in Fyrom (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) that's in fact just a kind of Bulgarian.

It exists. I wonder why such extremist attitudes are tolerated on this forum. Macedonians are a nation and Macedonia is a country; this fascist attitude of you (which is not unusual in Italy)doesn't help,but creates tension. I also wonder how good do you speak Macedonian and Bulgarian to say such a thing. Romanians also say Moldavian is Romanian,just like Bulgarians say about Macedonian,but that's all for political reasons .
As regarding Romanian,I wonder how can you spread such information. The 3 genders in Moldavian and Romanian are a Slavic feature of the languages.You cannot deny a fact.

[Sean of the Dead]

OH! And when you get to Slavic month, you should do Macedonian (or Bulgarian).

A Macedonian language does not exist: the Macedonians speak Greek since Macedonia is a greek region. If you mean the language spoken in Fyrom (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) that's in fact just a kind of Bulgarian.

It exists. I wonder why such extremist attitudes are tolerated on this forum. Macedonians are a nation and Macedonia is a country; this fascist attitude of you (which is not unusual in Italy)doesn't help,but creates tension. I also wonder how good do you speak Macedonian and Bulgarian to say such a thing. Romanians also say Moldavian is Romanian,just like Bulgarians say about Macedonian,but that's all for political reasons .
As regarding Romanian,I wonder how can you spread such information. The 3 genders in Moldavian and Romanian are a Slavic feature of the languages.You cannot deny a fact.

I agree, I can't believe none of the moderators have taken out the banhammer on him.
And if obler9 werenæt to be so IGNORANT *coughcough*, he would know it is considered a seperate language. Also, if he cared to read my post, he would have noticed I was talking about Slavic languages, and not the Greeks.

[loqu]

I see neuter gender in Romanian as inherited from Latin and not as a Slavic feature. Maybe the contact with Slavic languages prevented it from losing the neuter gender, but can anyone tell me how can a language 'gain' a gender by means of adstrate?

[obler9]

I see neuter gender in Romanian as inherited from Latin and not as a Slavic feature. Maybe the contact with Slavic languages prevented it from losing the neuter gender, but can anyone tell me how can a language 'gain' a gender by means of adstrate?

You have to consider Rumanian share different peculiarities with other Balkan languages (not only southern Slavic but also Albanian) being a prime member of the Balkan linguistic union and that the Rumanian so called "neuter" gender does not act like the Latin neuter gender.

If you want to go on to call the so called "neuter" gender of Rumanian NEUTER without specifying it is not a neuter gender but a group of ambigenous nouns, your attitude is anti-scientifical.

I suggest you to pay attention when you want to treat Rumanian and its diachronic relations with Latin: this issue is not so easy. What they call "Romanian" is an artificial language that was born due a recent linguistic reformation started a pair of centuries ago, whose purpose was the general latinization of the language spoken by the Rumeni. Just consider that maybe 35%-40% of the present Rumanian vocabulary is made up of borrowings from French and Italian, plus various neologisms taken directly from Latin. Behind this linguistic reformation (that seems to be a work in progress since the last changes within the Rumanian phonetics date back to the 90's) in the beginning there was the attempt to claim to be a "pure" people descending from Roman colonizers melted with Dacians, a Daco-Roman people whose existence and continuity is not confirmed by any archeological evidence (probably a daco-roman people did never exist), that had no Slavic ethnical influence (though before the linguistic reformation Rumanian probably was an hybrid Slavo-latin language, mostly Slavic), being the Slavs perceived as inferior to this supposed (fake?) Daco-roman entity.
The claim of this supposed Daco-roman heritage has been also a tool for a territorial claiming against Hungary: they said Transilvania could not be Hungarian because they were the Daco-romans who were there since the ancient times and the Hungarians arrived there just in the XI cent. (!!!!). Then, taking an advantage from the general collapse of the once great Hungary... they "take" Transilvania from Hungary and putted it in their new state named Rumenia.
Now, I don't want to say anything about the probable real ethnical origin of the Rumanians, because I don't intend to fight with anyone ...

What I want to tell you is: pay attention when you talk about anything inhereted by Rumanian from Latin because you can favour an old dated nationalistic pure PROPAGANDA based on fakes (also Linguistic fakes, and not only historical).

[obler9]

A Macedonian language does not exist: the Macedonians speak Greek since Macedonia is a greek region. If you mean the language spoken in Fyrom (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) that's in fact just a kind of Bulgarian.

It exists. I wonder why such extremist attitudes are tolerated on this forum. Macedonians are a nation and Macedonia is a country; this fascist attitude of you (which is not unusual in Italy)doesn't help,but creates tension. I also wonder how good do you speak Macedonian and Bulgarian to say such a thing. Romanians also say Moldavian is Romanian,just like Bulgarians say about Macedonian,but that's all for political reasons .
As regarding Romanian,I wonder how can you spread such information. The 3 genders in Moldavian and Romanian are a Slavic feature of the languages.You cannot deny a fact.

I agree, I can't believe none of the moderators have taken out the banhammer on him.
And if obler9 werenæt to be so IGNORANT *coughcough*, he would know it is considered a seperate language. Also, if he cared to read my post, he would have noticed I was talking about Slavic languages, and not the Greeks.

So, since you're so educated, you should be also full of ancient Macedonian inscriptions written in Slavic. Or maybe you have a quote on Alexander the Great speaking Slavic.
Macedonian language doesn't exist.

Don't dare to call me "fascist" saying this "attitude" is "not uncommon" in Italy. First of all you are Rumanian and your whole national history is probably a nationalISTIC antihistorical invention as well as your Language and your national name. You have been under a FASCIST dictatorship and when it collapsed it was followed by a COMMUNIST disctatorship. You grow up among nationalism and propaganda, I didn't.

Again, on the "Macedonian language". The Macedonians spoke Greek, and they still speak Greek. I've been in Macedonia last summer, and I saw a northern Greek region inhabited by Greeks.
You told me I am "fascist" and that I am "ignorant" but if I like the dictatorships so much, then tell me... why do you call VARDARSKA (the original name of the present day "Former Yugoslavian Republic of "Macedonia") by the name of "Macedonia"?
A Macedonian language doesn't exist, the Macedonians spoke and speak greek.
The inhabitants of the former Vardarska maybe can speak Vardarskan, a kind of Bulgarian.

Nice this alliance between Vardarska and Wallachia: the ones who stole the name of northern Greece and the ones who stole the name of Rome.

Is it fascist to talk about history and logic? lol
Just you would like to hide the truth.

[Lietmotiv]

First of all I am Moldavian I was born in USSR Moldova,so nothing to do with fascism. Romania was communist ,not fascist.
Italy was a fascist contry,remember Musolini who killed millions of Jewish people.Even Nowadays in the Italian Parliament there is the party called the Northern League which is a fascist party. Racism in Italy is something to cause concerns in all the civilized world(in which Italy is said to be,at least formally)
Second of all Macedonians are according to their wish the nation of Alexander the Great; they are free to use the name of Macedonia no matter what Bulgaria and Greece say. These people have their own language and their own History

[Boes]

Don't dare to call me "fascist" saying this "attitude" is "not uncommon" in Italy. First of all you are Romanian and your whole national history is probably a nationalistic anti historical invention as well as your Language and your national name. You have been under a FASCIST dictatorship and when it collapsed it was followed by a COMMUNIST dictatorship. You grow up among nationalism and propaganda, I didn't.

It's a good thing that Italy remained neutral in WW2. It's not like there was a man named Mussolini who set up a fascist government and who's grave is still visited to this day or that there is a modern variant called the Lega Nord. It's a good thing that Italy is only made up of honest, righteous and objective people. With their prime minister Silvio Berlusconi as the ultimate pinnacle of Italian virtues.

It's a good thing that because of this, Italians don't need to insult other nationalities to make them feel any better about their own.

Nice this alliance between Vardarska and Wallachia: the ones who stole the name of northern Greece and the ones who stole the name of Rome.

Don't forget those devilish Native Americans! They tried to steal their name from those poor Hindus in India!

[obler9]

First of all I am Moldavian I was born in USSR Moldova,so nothing to do with fascism. Romania was communist ,not fascist.
Italy was a fascist contry,remember Musolini who killed millions of Jewish people.

I was talking about dictatorships and not only about fascism. By the during the WWII Rumania was under? It was under a Fascist dictatorship allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
The Italian fascists didn't kill million of Jews...
On the contrary the collaborationistc government of Paris caused the death of much more Jews than Fascist Italy.
As regards Rumania, even the Nazi germans that went in Rumania were shocked by the brutality of Rumanians against Jews and Gipsies!! There are written testimonies about.
Roma gipsies have been ENSLAVED by your ancestors for 5 centuries.

[modus.irrealis]

Second of all Macedonians are according to their wish the nation of Alexander the Great;

Which Macedonians?

they are free to use the name of Macedonia no matter what Bulgaria and Greece say.

I have no problem with Slavic Macedonians identifying themselves as a separate ethnic group with their own language, but when it comes to the name, no one has ever explained to me why they should be the only ones referred to as plain Macedonians, especially when they don't even form a majority within (the region of) Macedonia. I know this is a lost battle now, at least for English, but I've never understood the justification for this usage.

But I guess in the end "Macedonian" is very much like "American." Plain American refers only to one part of the Americas, and I've defended that usage and don't really understand the complaints against it, just as evidently most people don't understand the complaints about using Macedonian to refer to only part of Macedonia.

These people have their own language and their own History

Personally, I think all ethnic groups, along with their history and standard language, are artificial and constructed rather than facts that are discovered, which I think explains this whole situation here, in that different peoples are claiming the same history (especially the same historical figures as their own) and that naturally creates tension considering how important historical narratives are to ethnic groups. I'm actually surprised that there aren't more situations like this around the world.

[obler9]

Even Nowadays in the Italian Parliament there is the party called the Northern League which is a fascist party. Racism in Italy is something to cause concerns in all the civilized world(in which Italy is said to be,at least formally)

Actually the Northern League is not a fascist party at all... Racism exists everywhere.
What about the way the other countries see the Rumanians..? Tell me...Would this supposed Italian "racism" shock you? And so why are Rumanians allowed to enter in Italy as well as every inhabitants of every country member of EU while GREAT BRITAIN has written specifical rules to limit the presence of RUMANIANS (of Rumanians, yes), in the UK? If Italy is "racist", what's the United Kingdom?

Do I need to remember you how the minorities (for example the HUNGARIANS) minorities are treaten in Rumania?

The Racism of Rumania is not well known because there are not many people on this world that really care Rumania and so people do not know enough about you, your history, the origins of your identity and language.
Why are you campaigning to force the Roma people to change their national name since it is too close to "Romanian"? Why? Their national name has nothing to do with Romania, "Roma" just means "Men". On the contrary you are the ones that named themselves "Romanians" claiming a strong relation with Rome though there is not any archeological evidence that can support your claims on the "Daco-roman continuity theory" and your neolatin language is the final result of a recent Linguistic reformation. So... you are the ones who should change their national name since it emplies such a claim and since the Romans were and are the inhabitants of an Italian city named Rome. Racism? What about the fact that you wrote your national history in accordance with a racistic point of view that describes the Latins as superior and the Slavs and the Hungarians as inferior (even though the slavic component is something so relevant in your real history)?

[loqu]

may we have a split where these two folks can rant about one another?

[obler9]

It's not like there was a man named Mussolini who set up a fascist government and who's grave is still visited to this day or that there is a modern variant called the Lega Nord.
Yes, by 20 guys every year against 58 millions of Italians.
But show me the relation between Mussolini and the Lega nord.

Nice this alliance between Vardarska and Wallachia: the ones who stole the name of northern Greece and the ones who stole the name of Rome.

Don't forget those devilish Native Americans! They tried to steal their name from those poor Hindus in India!

Oh, oh... you're smart.
But the Native Americans were named "Indians" by a foreign civilization, while they did never claim of being Indian or related with India. This "joke" is an insult to the Native Americans.
The inhabitants of Fyrom and Rumenia claim of being something they are not also by their name. Did I need to remember you the original english name to name the so called ROmanians is RUmanians but the Rumanians, during the Chausescu rule (Chausescu, you know, thsat nice guy), campaigned to change it into ROmanian in order to make it closer to ROMAN?

[Boes]

Nice this alliance between Vardarska and Wallachia: the ones who stole the name of northern Greece and the ones who stole the name of Rome.

Don't forget those devilish Native Americans! They tried to steal their name from those poor Hindus in India!

Oh, oh... you're smart.

Don't let my superior intellect discourage you from further comments.

But the Native Americans were named "Indians" by a foreign civilization, while they did never claim of being Indian or related with India. This "joke" is an insult to the Native Americans.
The inhabitants of From and Romania claim of being something they are not also by their name. Did I need to remember you the original English name to name the so called Romanians is Romanians but the Romanians, during the Ceausescu rule (Ceausescu, you know, that nice guy), campaigned to change it into Romanian in order to make it closer to roman?

No dear fellow, I wasn't making a mere joke, I wrote down an analogy. I find it ridiculous that you state that people are 'stealing names'. You see the point was, that many peoples have names, that don't (entirely) suit them (often according to "others"), but that you can't change what they are called that just because of your own (little fringe) theory.

Indians aren't the same as Indians, but they're still called Indians. Romanians aren't the same as ancient Romans (and neither is anyone else on this world) but they still have an exonym/endonym that derives from it.

You can either accept that or go on fighting with your Romanian windmills. Frankly, I don't really care what you do, though I must say the latter will probably be more amusing.

[TaylorS]

OH! And when you get to Slavic month, you should do Macedonian (or Bulgarian).

A Macedonian language does not exist: the Macedonians speak Greek since Macedonia is a greek region. If you mean the language spoken in Fyrom (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) that's in fact just a kind of Bulgarian.

It exists. I wonder why such extremist attitudes are tolerated on this forum. Macedonians are a nation and Macedonia is a country; this fascist attitude of you (which is not unusual in Italy)doesn't help,but creates tension. I also wonder how good do you speak Macedonian and Bulgarian to say such a thing. Romanians also say Moldavian is Romanian,just like Bulgarians say about Macedonian,but that's all for political reasons .
As regarding Romanian,I wonder how can you spread such information. The 3 genders in Moldavian and Romanian are a Slavic feature of the languages.You cannot deny a fact.

LOL, Balkan nationalist BS, LOL! the "Macedonian" and "Moldovan" ethnicities were manufactured by Tito and the USSR respectively for political reasons. and the "Macedonians" have a nasty habit of claiming Alexander the Great was a Slav and other such BS.

[TaylorS]

I see neuter gender in Romanian as inherited from Latin and not as a Slavic feature. Maybe the contact with Slavic languages prevented it from losing the neuter gender, but can anyone tell me how can a language 'gain' a gender by means of adstrate?

You have to consider Rumanian share different peculiarities with other Balkan languages (not only southern Slavic but also Albanian) being a prime member of the Balkan linguistic union and that the Rumanian so called "neuter" gender does not act like the Latin neuter gender.

If you want to go on to call the so called "neuter" gender of Rumanian NEUTER without specifying it is not a neuter gender but a group of ambigenous nouns, your attitude is anti-scientifical.

I suggest you to pay attention when you want to treat Rumanian and its diachronic relations with Latin: this issue is not so easy. What they call "Romanian" is an artificial language that was born due a recent linguistic reformation started a pair of centuries ago, whose purpose was the general latinization of the language spoken by the Rumeni. Just consider that maybe 35%-40% of the present Rumanian vocabulary is made up of borrowings from French and Italian, plus various neologisms taken directly from Latin. Behind this linguistic reformation (that seems to be a work in progress since the last changes within the Rumanian phonetics date back to the 90's) in the beginning there was the attempt to claim to be a "pure" people descending from Roman colonizers melted with Dacians, a Daco-Roman people whose existence and continuity is not confirmed by any archeological evidence (probably a daco-roman people did never exist), that had no Slavic ethnical influence (though before the linguistic reformation Rumanian probably was an hybrid Slavo-latin language, mostly Slavic), being the Slavs perceived as inferior to this supposed (fake?) Daco-roman entity.
The claim of this supposed Daco-roman heritage has been also a tool for a territorial claiming against Hungary: they said Transilvania could not be Hungarian because they were the Daco-romans who were there since the ancient times and the Hungarians arrived there just in the XI cent. (!!!!). Then, taking an advantage from the general collapse of the once great Hungary... they "take" Transilvania from Hungary and putted it in their new state named Rumenia.
Now, I don't want to say anything about the probable real ethnical origin of the Rumanians, because I don't intend to fight with anyone ...

What I want to tell you is: pay attention when you talk about anything inhereted by Rumanian from Latin because you can favour an old dated nationalistic pure PROPAGANDA based on fakes (also Linguistic fakes, and not only historical).

It's my understanding that the Romanians are the descendants of Latin-speakers from the Roman provinces of Moesia and Dalmatia that ended up where they are now as a result of the migration of Slavs into the Balkans

[KingHarvest]

I don't particularly understand why the Romanian neuter is described as not being a true neuter or acts differently from Latin. In Latin, the neuter resembled the masculine in the singular and resembled the feminine in the plural, just like in Romanian.

[Lietmotiv]

It all depends on how you perceive the issue; I am one of those who is against the reformation of the language which occured at the end of the XIXth century-beginning of the XXth century; it all started with the Latin alphabet introduction ,alphabet which replaced the Cyrillic one. There are evidences that Romanian had had not a 'very large' but a 'large' number of Slavic words(still it was not a fully Slavic language).
I think everybody agrees that Romanians are not a true Latin population(I also agree),but a mix(in this part of the world all the nations are a mix) of Thracian/Dacian,Slavic,Kuman(and other migrant populations); But it's certain that in a way or another ,Romanians are indeed connected to the Dacians ; the oldest Romanian words,such as 'Brânza' are of Dacian origin(by the way,the words is also in Russian,and the dictionaries admit it was taken from Romanian.- Брынза (от рум. Brânză — «сыр») — рассольный сыр, изготовленный из овечьего молока.-
Therefore,while the Latin component of the Romanian nation is still a doubt,the Dacian one cannot be fully ignored


Asfor Moldova,well Moldova wasn't a part of Romania until the XXst century. There has always been the Kingdom of Moldavia,with its own political,economical structure,but with a language very close to Romanian. Nowadays,a part of that Kingdom is in Romania,the other is represented by the Independent state of Moldova

[sa wulfs]

I imagine Romania is nothing special and, like in every other land, their inhabitants are a mix of a bunch of different peoples, and the Romans didn't replace the local population at all, aside from the elites. Of course Romanian has leftovers from Dacian - Spanish has leftovers from Celtiberian too, but that's hardly significant and it doesn't say much about the identity of modern Spaniards.

In short: lol nationalism

[Formiko]

No "Indian" I've ever met (my grandmother, my dad, my cousins, etc) have ever been offended by the moniker Indian. We usually spell it NDN to differentiate it for our politically correct friends