Comments | gaojun: Quiero aprender Español

gaojun

Quiero aprender Español

Oct 12, 2006 23:54

For the past few months, I've been flirting with the idea of learning Spanish. I took a semester of it in middle school, but I'd long since forgotten all of it except the numbers 1-10 and a few random nouns. I bought a DIY-type book-CD package, and after a little over an hour, I can count to 100, say the days of the week, months of the year and the ( Read more... )

Comments 10

enluya October 13 2006, 07:27:37 UTC

hehe, spanish and english have way too many similarities loh.
i think knowing chinese actually impedes my learning of japanese vocab a little. man...i wish there were more similarities between these two languages.

gaojun October 13 2006, 08:28:12 UTC

Really? But so much of Japanese vocabulary is just mispronounced Chinese! I'd imagine the grammar is the hardest part for you, because you have to get used to tense and other conjugations, and always putting the verb at the end.

enluya October 14 2006, 07:51:03 UTC

grammar isn't too difficult yet, hehe, but we learn a lot of random vocabs a week, it's hard for me to remember what's pronouced what since the chinese pronounciation always come to mind first when i see a kanji.

gaojun October 15 2006, 04:17:33 UTC

Yeah, I do that too. I read the kana to myself in Japanese, but when I see kanji, the mandarin pronunciation always pops into my head, especially when I can't remember the japanese pronunciation.

jacobrb02 October 13 2006, 07:53:08 UTC

yeah i took spanish for a year or two in high school, and i still feel like i can understand 80% of what i see written, and can speak it suprisingly well when i've had a drink or two.

it's definitely the easiest language for native english speakers to learn. i'm not sure if that holds for speakers of other languages, though.

gaojun October 13 2006, 08:26:32 UTC

I'm sure Spanish is even easier to learn if your native tongue is another Romance language, instead of a Germanic language like English. Apparently English grammar is closest to that of Dutch and German, but most of the vocabulary comes from Latin, via French.

jacobrb02 October 13 2006, 08:31:07 UTC

don't forget that which comes to us via snoop dogg

gaojun October 13 2006, 16:03:52 UTC

ah, yes. lol.

(The comment has been removed)

gaojun October 13 2006, 18:40:10 UTC

Well, technically Indians are Asians. And the language and the writing system are two separate things. Sanskrit's writing system, however complex it is, is still phonetic. Chinese characters are about 50 times harder than any other writing system because there are several thousands of characters whose pronunciations and meanings must be learned individually. If you've never seen a given character before, you'll be unable to pronounce it. Japanese is extra hard because it combines Chinese characters with a phonetic system, and you have to learn both.

Having said that, Sanskrit (or any of the Indian languages) as a spoken language probably is way harder than Chinese. Chinese words are short, the longest being about four syllables. Chinese has no tense, case, gender, or any other kind of conjugations. Words are pronounced exactly the same regardless of their position in the sentence. Chinese grammar is beautiful in its simplicity. But good god, that writing system is a bitch.

gaojun October 13 2006, 18:47:14 UTC

By the way, did you pick up a lot of Spanish on your trek through South America?