The German language - Page 2

Originally Posted by Connemara

I'm equally interested in Italian, which actually may be the better choice. Opera, tailors, and the fact that I have family there are making me think hard about taking it.

Originally Posted by Joel_Cairo

As someone who works in the Acquisitions division of Harvard Library's Germanic Department, I come across most of the northern European languages on a daily basis. Speaking Norwegian and German fluently, its easy to decipher Danish, Swedish and Dutch, Icelandic is considerably more difficult, but doable. When I get a shipment from Hunagry or Finland, I pretty much just fake it.


That said, dutch is the craziest sounding shit I've ever heard. Dutch seems to have a pronounciation exactly like English's, which I attribute to the long history of back-and-forth between Holland and England. When you see a Dutch word, you can phontecially figure it out and you'll be right (they may enunciate differntly, but they pronounce the constituent parts the same.) Dutch seriously sounds to me like a native english speaker making up a germanic language as they go along

Originally Posted by tiecollector

Dutch is the most similar language to English and when watching TV in hotels, there was always subtitles and some sentences looked to similar to English in how they were spelled and stuff that I could almost understand the Dutch MTV or whatever crap they had on.

To me it all sounded like FEEgahn FIgahn FLUgahn FAHGgahn.

Originally Posted by seanchai

Is Russian offered? I'm having fun with that, though it's hard as hell to speak well unless you live there for awhile. And if the oil markets hold up and you're so inclined, it could be a useful tool to have if you want to go into international business.

Originally Posted by kwiteaboy

I might suggest Norwegian. It's very fun to speak and pretty straightforward to learn.

Originally Posted by MCsommerreid

If you want a purely useful language learn something like spanish, hindi, arabic, japanese, or mandarin. Probably russian and korean could go on that list as well. If you're in certain parts of the US spanish would top the list, and would probably be a breeze with your background in latin.

If you want something fun learn anything you darned well please, but german, italian, greek, russian, french, farsi, or any of the above languages.

As a linguistics major I'm going to attempt to learn the basics of as many as I can, and become fluent in two or three. Probably spanish, german, and if I can find a place offering it hindi. Mandarin scares the pants off me, or I'd take that.