Thread: Languages

Originally Posted by maxorator

There are no genders in Estonian.

Same with Indonesian. So in Indonesian there aren't any "he" or "she", rather "the person". IMHO the most difficult language would be Japanese. The kanji is too much to handle (I can only memorize 50 of the hundred of thousands), expressing emotion with enders like "ne" or "yo", etc. But I guess that's the beauty of it.

Originally Posted by g4j31a5

Same with Indonesian. So in Indonesian there aren't any "he" or "she", rather "the person". IMHO the most difficult language would be Japanese. The kanji is too much to handle (I can only memorize 50 of the hundred of thousands), expressing emotion with enders like "ne" or "yo", etc. But I guess that's the beauty of it.

Yoruba is somehow the same. There are no genders and no difference between singular or plural ( he = o and she = o, I = mo,they = o ), verbs are not conjugated, etc...

So the only way to know who they are talking about when listening to a conversation is to get the name of the person, or indirectly, because they might say something like "she was wearing a skirt" which in most cases would be a girl.


Its a funny language really, for instance "I'm going to the market" is: Mo fe lo si aja.
Which literraly translated means "I want go to market".

Also the same word can have mulitple meanings depending where you put the emphasis on ( like a house is ile and a bathroom is ile as well ).

Originally Posted by g4j31a5

IMHO the most difficult language would be Japanese. The kanji is too much to handle (I can only memorize 50 of the hundred of thousands), expressing emotion with enders like "ne" or "yo", etc. But I guess that's the beauty of it.

Japanese kanji is derived from a subset of Chinese. So I'd say Chinese is the hardest language to learn actually. kanji (漢字) literally means "Han characters", and the Hans are the largest Chinese group in the world.