I honestly think not even the people working on the standard (c++ 20) fully understand the full scope of the language.
It is massive, it is full of hidden gotchas, and even just templating could be its own esoteric language.
That is not even touching on compiler quirks, flags and platform specific hacks.
Says someone who hasn't reviewed 35-40 year old critical infrastructure code to "update" it.
I will admit that it is not that hard at first, but when you take into account the stuff that was done back then to get things to work the way it still does today, you'll easily go down a rabbit hole to nowhere.
I still have a printout of the source code for a version of UNIX, and there is a line that says, "You are not expected to understand this." And that is 100% correct.
Depending on where and who's COBOL code you review, there might be a LOT more of these phrases all over IF it is even documented to begin with.
Worst code I got was about 200 pages of simulation code with only two comments in French and all the variables were French abbreviations so I had no idea what they were for initially without reading it to see what it was doing.
My spouse got his start as a cobol programmer back in the day, and he still gets requests from companies who need him to update their infrastructure. He obvs knows all the other tech things too and does consulting for companies. Cobol isn't his bread and butter, but no one learns cobol anymore, and sometimes they need him.
I’m Cambodian, it’s only happened once when I realized they were speaking Khmer instead of Viet and I was so excited to eavesdrop. They were talking about what they were going to make for dinner the whole time and said I had nice feet lmao
Which is weird because Khmer isn’t tonal, Vietnamese is highly tonal, and Thai while not in the same language family is tonal too but not quite as much as Vietnamese. I think the similarities lie in a lot of shared vocabulary from Pali that Vietnamese doesn’t have. And Khmer/Mon loanwords in Thai
Unless you got horrendously disgusting nails they’re probably just talking about their kids or getting lunch.
Source : My mom’s a Vietnamese nail technician
I'm always threatening my nail lady I'm going to take Vietnamese so I can learn what they are saying.
She told me it wasn't that interesting at all! Rose's son was trying to date a Chinese girl, but he was turned down. He met a Hispanic girl and was dating her now. They were in the same computer science class.
English english is insane. There are different rules for groups of words depending on where the originated. Also some rules are completely arbitrary and defined when scholars decided some rules where needed. Americans have simplified a lot of this which drives a lot of Brits crazy. But English changes rapidly and evolves due to so many cultures adapting it to make more grammatical sense.
The English had a Latin phase where they tried to latinize words that weren’t Latin based to make them sound more official. This has caused many problems. They saw words that were close and made them similar to the Latin ones (such as iland to island to make it like isla) but didn’t know at the time that Germanic and romantic languages have common origins in Protoindo European)
Americans stripped some of that stupidity away. Many times if there is conflict between American and Uk English the American version is older
English is a weird language where the current version has no rhyme or reason for a lot of things. If you go back to read stuff before the new Latin fad it looks incomprehensible but as soon as you start trying to sound the words out it’s like “ohhh this makes sense” because stuff back then was more in line with phonics
To add to that our written language lost important letters such as the thorn that makes a Th sound because it was easier for typeset. The thorn was shaped like a funny Y so on signs they’d just use Y
In older versions of English it was never pronounced “ye” it was always “the”
It's a rough combination of youth vernacular, general apathy towards spelling and grammatical errors, the prevalence of second-language English, and posting from a phone.
People can't even type out coherent sentences anymore. Makes Reddit into gibberish. I feel like I'm being gaslit by the entire language.
> youth vernacular, general apathy towards spelling and grammatical errors, ~~the prevalence of second-language English~~, and posting from a phone
Remember old reddit where people would shit all over poor grammar and spelling? People would delete and resubmit posts if there was a spelling error in the title... How far we've fallen...
I agree! I would love to read all the Books from The Journey to the west
This one does have some translations, but I don't trust that much when you translate 4 whole books into one
Actually, it’s pretty boring. The first chapter is great, and then it becomes repetitious. I’ve never been able to finish it.
Novels have never been the mainstream of Chinese literature. Essays and various types of poetry are where you get the brilliance.
(source: I teach Classical Chinese literature in a university in Taiwan)
Poetry is something that I also would love to get into, but I imagine that it would be a little harder since I'm not native and it looks like a lot more can be lost during the translations of poetry
But you just gave me a great idea, I'll look into Chinese poetry now. You, sir, got me curious. Thanks!!
Have fun, but yes, a lot is lost in translation: aside from the structure, I don’t think it’s easy to translate the resonances, where Poet A is implying something Hermit B did five hundred years earlier.
In Chinese, you can have a complete poem in twenty words / syllables.
One right which I am very interested in is Kenja no Mago/Wise Mans Grandson which has anime with eng dub and sub which usually means they are planing on translating the novels as well.
But sadly it is not happening for some reason and I liked the basic but fun premise of it. And sadly the few fan translations just stop around where the Anime ends or get removed by their creators for some reason.
I admittedly don't know Chinese, but if going by which is harder to translate via machine to English, I'd say it's Japanese.
Politeness levels, onomatopoeia, same word being written either in kanji or kana depending on target reader level, many many homonyms that may not come with kanji to easily differentiate(*), kanji words that have alternative readings depending on context, subtle conjugation differences, dialects, stylistic choices in kana/kanji used (like writing everything in katakana to indicate robot speak or that it is a foreign language being spoken), lack of spaces between words/particles (also a feature in Mandarin), pro-drop language (topic/pronouns are omitted if can be inferred from context, although Mandarin also has this feature).
So becoming instantly fluent in Japanese would save more effort, in my opinion. Though Japanese translation has come a long way.
(*) On a now-defunct Japanese language forum a person asked for help translating the kana used in an old video game dialogue (no kanji whatsoever), particularly the verb "utte" in regards to an item. Bunch of people translated it as "to shoot" (as in, "shoot the item") but only I noticed the context (inside a store) and corrected that the verb is "to sell".
I play an online game that has a feature to translate chat messages from any language. There is a lot of Chinese, Japanese and Korean players. Korean and Japanese very often makes no sense after translation. Chinese on the other hand always perfectly translate to English.
Japanese is easier to learn if you can't speak a tonal language. Source:learned Chinese from English and way harder than Japanese in every way. Would rather automatically know Chinese and then learn Japanese in less than a year
Man, I’ve learned plenty. Just learn Sanskrit there’s a vast corpus to read, same with Greek and Latin. You can learn all the laryngeals you want, but there won’t be anything to read. I mean, you’ll find it easier to learn the daughter languages once you memorize the transformations, but I still say don’t do it. Signed, someone who minored in PIE linguistics for their PhD.
Fellow ancient world and linguistics nerd, I salute you! I have no actual intention of mastering PIE lmao, I'm a Classics student and nine months of basic PIE was quite enough. I'll stick with Ancient Greek and Latin, maybe hitite in the future. I only said it because poster above talked about ancient lost languages and PIE is - as you know obv - the most well known and studied of proto-languages.
Unfortunately I'll have to deal with laryngeals again next year in History of Latin but until then I'm happy to spend the summer pretending they don't exist.
It’s ok, laryngeals aren’t real, they can’t hurt you.
Edit: for real you should learn Sanskrit though. This is not advice I share frequently with the hope someone might actually take it. It is harder than Greek or Latin, but that’s kind of fun, and then you’ve got an extraordinary amount of things to read.
It's sad tho that the government sold it to make it a tourist attraction and less than 5% have been excavated. And it's on basically hold now. For probably 20 years or so.
We can read hieroglyphs. The ultimate prize would be protoindo European. Secondary ones might be Linear A. During the Bronze Age collapse the Greeks kind of lost the ability to read and write. The Greek dark ages lasted 400 years. When they came out of it after hundreds of years it was the boom of knowledge we call Ancient Greece. The foundation of Greece is sitting right there but we cannot read it. Pieces of literature such as the Iliad and odyssey closer to what they originally were are unknown. Those two works were passed on orally for many generations until they were written down again
They went from one of the greatest civilizations on earth to full stupid to one of the most innovative civs on earth but the full stupid era prevents us from understanding what is true and what was a myth
The United States has three lmao, there is PSE, SEE, and ASL
Edit: I was misinformed by my professors, ASL is the language, the other two are communication systems
Mandarin native speaker here and I think I'm fluent in English (got 101/120 on TOEFL).
I think these may be the reasons why English speakers find Chinese hard to learn (written simplified/traditional Chinese and Mandarin, the primary dialect of Chinese people use):
1. **There is no such thing as an alphabet**: Chinese is not composed of a small amount of letters like English is. Chinese are made up of characters, where there are tons of thousands of them, each with a different shape and different structure. Usually we only use a subset of all the characters possible as that would be enough for pretty much everything, but that's still a lot compared to English letters, let alone each has a different shape. This makes writing Chinese not easy.
2. **Tones**: In English the tones used to pronounce a word does not change the word itself, but in Chinese, different tones can have completely different characters mapped to them.
3. **Confusing Rules Regarding Which Words to Use**: for example, Chinese has two versions of the word "two:" 二 and 两, and when to use which is a thing that I cannot explain clearly tbh😂 I just use my ears and say whether or not it **SOUNDS** good
These are maybe I think the most important reasons why Chinese is deemed hard to approach by English speakers... none exhaustive list for sure
Agree with all of this. English and Chinese are just two extremely different ways of approaching language. I teach native Chinese speakers (mostly mandarin) and their biggest struggle with English is the sentence structure and grammar rules. Chinese grammar isn’t that hard, but the characters, pronunciation, and word choice can be tough for English speakers because that’s not how their brains are wired.
By the way, I was taught er is for when you just want to say the number two like in a phone number or address, but liang is for when you’re actually counting stuff. But I’m not a native Chinese speaker so I’m not sure how accurate this is.
I edit English language manuscripts by Chinese scientists and I am always blown away by their grasp of English. Often I have a hard time explaining why their phrasing doesn't "maintain native tone," because it's usually just a case of "this sounds more like how a native speaker would say it, but your way is not technically wrong."
Also the most widely used language after English.
21 countries where it's official and a bunch of others where it's unofficial. If you want to travel it's the best choice.
I live in Southern California. Spanish would be the most useful in my day to day life *by far*. Also, I love traveling through Mexico, and would love to visit several places in south/Central America. I work in an industry with a lot of Latinos, and I’ve picked up a good amount just through osmosis, but now I am actively trying to be a decent Spanish speaker, because I feel like I should know more than fairly basic things and really off-color insults.
I live in a very multicultural city and tell everyone I meet learning English the same thing: forget everything your english teacher stressed about proper grammar and syntax. No one cares in english. It's not french, its not a romantic language, every english native uses terrible grammar often. As long as people understand you thats all that matters.
I'm not sure that's entirely true, to be honest. I think there are *certain things* people don't care about, but there's a lot of stuff that people *do* care about that's also so second nature to you that you never consider it.
Yup
Commonly Ignored Grammar Rules in Speech
Double Negatives (e.g., "I don't know nothing")
Who vs. Whom (e.g., "Who did you give it to?").
Starting Sentences with Conjunctions (e.g. "and," "but," or "because.")
Incomplete Sentences are pretty common (e.g., "Went to the store yesterday")
Ones that natives typically follow:
Subject-Verb Agreement (e.g., "She is" vs. "They are").
Pronoun Usage for clarity (e.g., "He gave it to her").
Maintaining consistency in verb tenses in a single thought (e.g., "I went to the store and bought some milk").
Article Usage (e.g., "a cat" vs. "an apple").
Just knowing the language is only about half of it though.
There’s way more to software engineering like knowing design patterns, databases, deployment etc.
Yeah - Knowing every detail of a language can be useful but being a good programmer is much more than that. There's an entire way of thinking and problem solving using programming tools that isn't part of the language. It's the difference between being able to write a readable sentence and being able to write beautiful prose.
Assembly would be sick, not very useful and will probably not land you a job, but every nerd (programmer) will think of you as the chosen one. You can be the prodigy child your mom always wanted😂
Assembly is actually very well paid and souggt after. Many apps are re-written in assembly after all features are done, if performance is important. Also useful for reducing cloud computing costs
What application is rewritten in assembler? Never heard of any case. In some circumstances it can make sense to rewrite some functions in assembler because the compiler didn't get the optimizations right. But generally speaking the assembler generated by the compiler is better than what people write themselves
Good for you, I'm surprised to see Irish here as a choice.
Please keep it alive and in your interest, Duolingo can be fun to help learn and try for some general conversation wherever you can.
Is fear Gaelige briste ná Bearla cliste.
Edit: cupla focail
Yes! Such a beautiful language that has so many descriptive words. My Spanish friends friends say English is such a boring language when it comes to describing… if only I could proper tell them about gaeilge
We call a ladybug god’s small cow (bóín beag Dé) and a wolf “son of the country” (Mac tíre) it’s a lovely language and I wish it was spoken more in Ireland
I just started learning French in my late thirties — for work, but mostly for me. I wish I had done it sooner, but with access to modern resources (Duolingo, YouTube etc) it’s really fun.
In seriousness I found Turkish fairly easy to pick up (at least at a beginner level) vs most other languages I’ve tried to learn. The agglutination felt natural and commonsensical, the pronunciation was achievable and the writing is phonetic. If you actually want to speak it give it a crack.
For English speakers Turkish is initially tricky because the internal logic and grammatical structure are about as different as you can get, but the rules once you start to think essentially backwards are easy and there are zero exceptions when it comes to grammar and spelling.
I struggled with it as Finnish because some things are insanely close so it kind of trips me when speaking. But I can read OK having lived and worked in Turkey for a couple of years. I still get a chuckle with words like nakit, pusula and even Ankara which all also have Finnish meanings but as languages are not actually related meanings are entirely opposite.
Actually it's not so difficult (not easy, of course, but I mean, not so complicated as Chinese for example). Imo the main problems on entry level are the unusual sounds for English native and verb formation. But it's very poetic language and definitely worth to learn!
Good call. I didn’t meet a single long-term foreign resident in Georgia with a good grasp of the language, even people married to Georgians for years, so I think that says something about how tricky it is to master as an outsider
Latin. I know it‘s not spoken anymore but there are so many languages that derive from it. It would make it so much easier to learn languages like Italian, french and spanish.
I was looking for that answer, I would choose Latin too.
Not to mention that it also sounds really cool. You can mumble under your nose a recipe for scrambled eggs and people would think that you're casting some intricate spell.
FWIW, I speak a handful of romance languages and Latin is further removed than you might expect. It seems like there was a time period where the everyday Latin of ordinary people had diverged quite a lot from the formal written language, but before the romance languages diverged too much. There are lots of words and grammatical features they have in common with each other, but not with Latin.
I'd suggest diving in with either Spanish or Italian first and then if you pick up another one, you'll start noticing "Oh, if I start with the word in Spanish and apply these changes, I get the correct word in Italian 80% of the time" and so on.
I've heard that only 5-10% of all literature written in Latin has been translated into modern languages. If you were fluent, you might find some very interesting bits of undiscovered history / knowledge.
I would pick Korean so I could speak to my great grandmother, she speaks no English and I want to be able to say more than “hi grandma, bye grandma, love you grandma”
There are a million different greetings and variations of “I love you” that you can learn that are super short. My 5 yo calls his grandma and just to say good night.
Reading Korean letters are very straightforward. There is almost no exceptions on how the letters sound like. That’s a place to start.
Italian. Would be great to finally be able to talk with my inlaws after 7 years. Unfortunately looking forward to another summer where my Italian hasn’t improved and I’m just sitting there, trying to not look bored.
I really have to put in more effort
Your comment speaks to me. My wife is from north India and I’m from the south and between us, I’m fluent in both Hindi and Malayalam so I have a blast when I go to her place.
She used to sit around talking to me mostly at family occasions in my home. It got to her and she’s in an intensive Malayalam class and I insist on speaking Malayalam around her for immersion.
Now it’s actually much better two years later, when she can TALK to my granny and parents in our language. A lot of the differences melt away soon when that happens!
My inlaws are dutch and i tried for two years to get into learning it and what finally clicked for me was duolingo as it keeps pestering me to practice every day.
After one year of duolingo, i surprised them by suddenly starting speaking dutch at chrismas and they said it was the greatest gift i could have given them.
Beforehand, i tried to learn with a book and i couldn't get into it. Duolingo really clicked for me. They only require 5 or 10 minutes a day and i really saw myself making progress.
So maybe duolingo or babel might work for you ?
Japanese, for sure. It's completely different from the other languages I know, there's TONS of content I could watch and read without the filter of "localization".
Welsh.
I know enough to get by, but I'd love to be fluent in my ancestral tongue, and be able to understand what the people in Rhyl are giggling about when they see me.
I live in Canada and have employees who live in Quebec. Sometimes I feel bad that my French language skills are so bad, and that they have to speak English to communicate with me. I've gotten by for nearly half a century with terrible French skills, but it would have been good to have. Would have made visiting Quebec a lot more comfortable. Would have helped with the work that I do (adult learning, where we have to offer learning materials in both languages), and would have opened up job opportunities you might not consider. E.g., I believe at one point, you had to be bilingual to join the RCMP (the Mounties), but it looks like those days are gone now.
Something to really help my career, giving me a leg up in the kind of clients I can court.
Maybe Arabic, do some remote work for rich oil states? Or maybe Chinese or Japanese?
C++
#include
int main() {
std::cout << "I totally agree" << std::endl;
return 0;
}
I got about as far as printf("hello world!") ;
ah, yes, "printf"
Its at least C 😭😭
Print the fuck
I honestly think not even the people working on the standard (c++ 20) fully understand the full scope of the language. It is massive, it is full of hidden gotchas, and even just templating could be its own esoteric language. That is not even touching on compiler quirks, flags and platform specific hacks.
Machine code would be very cool.
Plot twist: you now speak C++ but this ability has replaced your ability to understand English.
Why talk among men when you can speak the language of the gods?
The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
I would have said COBOL. 💰💰💰
It ain’t that hard but be careful what you wish for
Says someone who hasn't reviewed 35-40 year old critical infrastructure code to "update" it. I will admit that it is not that hard at first, but when you take into account the stuff that was done back then to get things to work the way it still does today, you'll easily go down a rabbit hole to nowhere. I still have a printout of the source code for a version of UNIX, and there is a line that says, "You are not expected to understand this." And that is 100% correct. Depending on where and who's COBOL code you review, there might be a LOT more of these phrases all over IF it is even documented to begin with.
Worst code I got was about 200 pages of simulation code with only two comments in French and all the variables were French abbreviations so I had no idea what they were for initially without reading it to see what it was doing.
I probably wrote some of that code, my apologies
My spouse got his start as a cobol programmer back in the day, and he still gets requests from companies who need him to update their infrastructure. He obvs knows all the other tech things too and does consulting for companies. Cobol isn't his bread and butter, but no one learns cobol anymore, and sometimes they need him.
I took a cobol class in college as an elective because it was four hours and an easy A. I got my first two jobs after school doing cobol
nobody pays for cobol programmers they pay for institutional knowledge
The most Reddit response ever.
I was thinking python for immediate usefulness, but yeah. Maybe Spanish just because it is the second most common language where I live.
This one's not that hard, you don't even need to practice with someone who speaks it
Vietnamese so I could listen to the girlies talk shit when I’m getting my nails done
And then you realise they've been Cambodian all along
I’m Cambodian, it’s only happened once when I realized they were speaking Khmer instead of Viet and I was so excited to eavesdrop. They were talking about what they were going to make for dinner the whole time and said I had nice feet lmao
My husband is Cambodian and I’m trying to learn Khmer
Hopefully, the feet and looking for ingredients came up in different topics
"She has nice feet, they look like eggplants. What are you making for dinner?"
“She has nice feet…. So imma make pork knuckle soup for dinner….”
I think Cambodian and Thai sound very similar. Vietnamese sounds distinctly different.
Which is funny because Khmer and Vietnamese are part of the same language family, which is different to that of Thai.
True, I think it’s the intonations.
Which is weird because Khmer isn’t tonal, Vietnamese is highly tonal, and Thai while not in the same language family is tonal too but not quite as much as Vietnamese. I think the similarities lie in a lot of shared vocabulary from Pali that Vietnamese doesn’t have. And Khmer/Mon loanwords in Thai
Furthermore Vietnamese has a lot more Chinese loanwords than the other two languages do.
Thai and Laos are more similar I'd say, I'd go as far as to day that the Thai spoken in the North East could be considered a dialect of Laos.
Yes, they are actually both considered Lao
Unless you got horrendously disgusting nails they’re probably just talking about their kids or getting lunch. Source : My mom’s a Vietnamese nail technician
And quite frankly I feel like this stereotype is outplayed? Like why do people default to the fact that Asian nail ladies are talking shit?
Probably FOMO, I try to speak English as much as possible so my coworkers don’t think we’re talking shit about them
We rarely talk shit about y’all. It’s just auntie gossip 24/7
And I am here for it!!!!
Married into a viet family, can confirm. Lately it’s been talk on who has the best Pho recipes.
I'm always threatening my nail lady I'm going to take Vietnamese so I can learn what they are saying. She told me it wasn't that interesting at all! Rose's son was trying to date a Chinese girl, but he was turned down. He met a Hispanic girl and was dating her now. They were in the same computer science class.
That sounds really interesting like a day time soap opera.
Rose's son, you say?
I work with a Vietnamese guy whose wife is a manicurist. He confirmed that they mostly gossip about the customers
Maybe find someone who speaks it, like your friend's dad who once sold religious figures.
You saying, you want a piece of me?
I could drop you like a bag of dirt
Spanish
English or Spanish..
La primera persona en moverse es gay.
Ay caramba estaba caminando cuando miré tu mensaje 😔
Entonces eres gay :)
JA! Gayyyy
Ooooh! I got some of that!! “Something something person something is gay!”
I work in a trade in America. Spanish would absolutely come in handy the most.
English.. bc none of this shit I read on here makes sense
I am English - a lot of it is actually nonsense. You're understanding it perfectly well
Coloured me surprised. American btw. Edit I had to edit to add the u cause of auto correct
English english is insane. There are different rules for groups of words depending on where the originated. Also some rules are completely arbitrary and defined when scholars decided some rules where needed. Americans have simplified a lot of this which drives a lot of Brits crazy. But English changes rapidly and evolves due to so many cultures adapting it to make more grammatical sense.
The English had a Latin phase where they tried to latinize words that weren’t Latin based to make them sound more official. This has caused many problems. They saw words that were close and made them similar to the Latin ones (such as iland to island to make it like isla) but didn’t know at the time that Germanic and romantic languages have common origins in Protoindo European) Americans stripped some of that stupidity away. Many times if there is conflict between American and Uk English the American version is older English is a weird language where the current version has no rhyme or reason for a lot of things. If you go back to read stuff before the new Latin fad it looks incomprehensible but as soon as you start trying to sound the words out it’s like “ohhh this makes sense” because stuff back then was more in line with phonics To add to that our written language lost important letters such as the thorn that makes a Th sound because it was easier for typeset. The thorn was shaped like a funny Y so on signs they’d just use Y In older versions of English it was never pronounced “ye” it was always “the”
We also got invaded about a thousand years ago by the French, which explains a few more things
It's a rough combination of youth vernacular, general apathy towards spelling and grammatical errors, the prevalence of second-language English, and posting from a phone. People can't even type out coherent sentences anymore. Makes Reddit into gibberish. I feel like I'm being gaslit by the entire language.
> youth vernacular, general apathy towards spelling and grammatical errors, ~~the prevalence of second-language English~~, and posting from a phone Remember old reddit where people would shit all over poor grammar and spelling? People would delete and resubmit posts if there was a spelling error in the title... How far we've fallen...
Sheesh, no cap.
fr fr
Chinese or Japanese there are a lot of books in both languages I would love to be able to read since no one is doing any translation for them.
I agree! I would love to read all the Books from The Journey to the west This one does have some translations, but I don't trust that much when you translate 4 whole books into one
Actually, it’s pretty boring. The first chapter is great, and then it becomes repetitious. I’ve never been able to finish it. Novels have never been the mainstream of Chinese literature. Essays and various types of poetry are where you get the brilliance. (source: I teach Classical Chinese literature in a university in Taiwan)
Poetry is something that I also would love to get into, but I imagine that it would be a little harder since I'm not native and it looks like a lot more can be lost during the translations of poetry But you just gave me a great idea, I'll look into Chinese poetry now. You, sir, got me curious. Thanks!!
Have fun, but yes, a lot is lost in translation: aside from the structure, I don’t think it’s easy to translate the resonances, where Poet A is implying something Hermit B did five hundred years earlier. In Chinese, you can have a complete poem in twenty words / syllables.
Out of curiosity, what are these books you are interested in?
Three Body Penis
Its such a shame that netflix changed the original title for western audiences
Can't tell if you're joking or...? Was that the original title?
Four Body Penis
One right which I am very interested in is Kenja no Mago/Wise Mans Grandson which has anime with eng dub and sub which usually means they are planing on translating the novels as well. But sadly it is not happening for some reason and I liked the basic but fun premise of it. And sadly the few fan translations just stop around where the Anime ends or get removed by their creators for some reason.
I admittedly don't know Chinese, but if going by which is harder to translate via machine to English, I'd say it's Japanese. Politeness levels, onomatopoeia, same word being written either in kanji or kana depending on target reader level, many many homonyms that may not come with kanji to easily differentiate(*), kanji words that have alternative readings depending on context, subtle conjugation differences, dialects, stylistic choices in kana/kanji used (like writing everything in katakana to indicate robot speak or that it is a foreign language being spoken), lack of spaces between words/particles (also a feature in Mandarin), pro-drop language (topic/pronouns are omitted if can be inferred from context, although Mandarin also has this feature). So becoming instantly fluent in Japanese would save more effort, in my opinion. Though Japanese translation has come a long way. (*) On a now-defunct Japanese language forum a person asked for help translating the kana used in an old video game dialogue (no kanji whatsoever), particularly the verb "utte" in regards to an item. Bunch of people translated it as "to shoot" (as in, "shoot the item") but only I noticed the context (inside a store) and corrected that the verb is "to sell".
I play an online game that has a feature to translate chat messages from any language. There is a lot of Chinese, Japanese and Korean players. Korean and Japanese very often makes no sense after translation. Chinese on the other hand always perfectly translate to English.
Japanese is easier to learn if you can't speak a tonal language. Source:learned Chinese from English and way harder than Japanese in every way. Would rather automatically know Chinese and then learn Japanese in less than a year
Probably an ancient lost language. Would be great to have a clear idea of exactly what their thoughts were.
Protoindoeuropean, a language we know entirely by reconstruction as there are no actual testimonies left of it.
Man, I’ve learned plenty. Just learn Sanskrit there’s a vast corpus to read, same with Greek and Latin. You can learn all the laryngeals you want, but there won’t be anything to read. I mean, you’ll find it easier to learn the daughter languages once you memorize the transformations, but I still say don’t do it. Signed, someone who minored in PIE linguistics for their PhD.
Fellow ancient world and linguistics nerd, I salute you! I have no actual intention of mastering PIE lmao, I'm a Classics student and nine months of basic PIE was quite enough. I'll stick with Ancient Greek and Latin, maybe hitite in the future. I only said it because poster above talked about ancient lost languages and PIE is - as you know obv - the most well known and studied of proto-languages. Unfortunately I'll have to deal with laryngeals again next year in History of Latin but until then I'm happy to spend the summer pretending they don't exist.
It’s ok, laryngeals aren’t real, they can’t hurt you. Edit: for real you should learn Sanskrit though. This is not advice I share frequently with the hope someone might actually take it. It is harder than Greek or Latin, but that’s kind of fun, and then you’ve got an extraordinary amount of things to read.
A very practical answer
You’d instantly become the most popular person among historians from India to Ireland
To be able to read the glyphs of Gobekli Tepe would be quite a skill.
It's sad tho that the government sold it to make it a tourist attraction and less than 5% have been excavated. And it's on basically hold now. For probably 20 years or so.
Linear A was my first thought
Hieroglyphics or something lol
We can read hieroglyphs. The ultimate prize would be protoindo European. Secondary ones might be Linear A. During the Bronze Age collapse the Greeks kind of lost the ability to read and write. The Greek dark ages lasted 400 years. When they came out of it after hundreds of years it was the boom of knowledge we call Ancient Greece. The foundation of Greece is sitting right there but we cannot read it. Pieces of literature such as the Iliad and odyssey closer to what they originally were are unknown. Those two works were passed on orally for many generations until they were written down again They went from one of the greatest civilizations on earth to full stupid to one of the most innovative civs on earth but the full stupid era prevents us from understanding what is true and what was a myth
Sign language
Doesn't each language has its own sign language?
Yep
In my country there's two. Other one is signed Finnish and other one is (Finnish) sign language.
The United States has three lmao, there is PSE, SEE, and ASL Edit: I was misinformed by my professors, ASL is the language, the other two are communication systems
PSE and SEE are not languages but “Contact Systems” to bridge between ASL and English. Like “Spanglish” is for Spanish and English.
Noted
Not really each language. ASL is not English.
Sign language would be pretty handy
Stop dad
Mandarin
Mandarin native speaker here and I think I'm fluent in English (got 101/120 on TOEFL). I think these may be the reasons why English speakers find Chinese hard to learn (written simplified/traditional Chinese and Mandarin, the primary dialect of Chinese people use): 1. **There is no such thing as an alphabet**: Chinese is not composed of a small amount of letters like English is. Chinese are made up of characters, where there are tons of thousands of them, each with a different shape and different structure. Usually we only use a subset of all the characters possible as that would be enough for pretty much everything, but that's still a lot compared to English letters, let alone each has a different shape. This makes writing Chinese not easy. 2. **Tones**: In English the tones used to pronounce a word does not change the word itself, but in Chinese, different tones can have completely different characters mapped to them. 3. **Confusing Rules Regarding Which Words to Use**: for example, Chinese has two versions of the word "two:" 二 and 两, and when to use which is a thing that I cannot explain clearly tbh😂 I just use my ears and say whether or not it **SOUNDS** good These are maybe I think the most important reasons why Chinese is deemed hard to approach by English speakers... none exhaustive list for sure
Agree with all of this. English and Chinese are just two extremely different ways of approaching language. I teach native Chinese speakers (mostly mandarin) and their biggest struggle with English is the sentence structure and grammar rules. Chinese grammar isn’t that hard, but the characters, pronunciation, and word choice can be tough for English speakers because that’s not how their brains are wired. By the way, I was taught er is for when you just want to say the number two like in a phone number or address, but liang is for when you’re actually counting stuff. But I’m not a native Chinese speaker so I’m not sure how accurate this is.
I edit English language manuscripts by Chinese scientists and I am always blown away by their grasp of English. Often I have a hard time explaining why their phrasing doesn't "maintain native tone," because it's usually just a case of "this sounds more like how a native speaker would say it, but your way is not technically wrong."
this. [https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know)
spanish so i easily pass exams in spanish
Also the most widely used language after English. 21 countries where it's official and a bunch of others where it's unofficial. If you want to travel it's the best choice.
I live in Southern California. Spanish would be the most useful in my day to day life *by far*. Also, I love traveling through Mexico, and would love to visit several places in south/Central America. I work in an industry with a lot of Latinos, and I’ve picked up a good amount just through osmosis, but now I am actively trying to be a decent Spanish speaker, because I feel like I should know more than fairly basic things and really off-color insults.
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I live in a very multicultural city and tell everyone I meet learning English the same thing: forget everything your english teacher stressed about proper grammar and syntax. No one cares in english. It's not french, its not a romantic language, every english native uses terrible grammar often. As long as people understand you thats all that matters.
I'm not sure that's entirely true, to be honest. I think there are *certain things* people don't care about, but there's a lot of stuff that people *do* care about that's also so second nature to you that you never consider it.
Yup Commonly Ignored Grammar Rules in Speech Double Negatives (e.g., "I don't know nothing") Who vs. Whom (e.g., "Who did you give it to?"). Starting Sentences with Conjunctions (e.g. "and," "but," or "because.") Incomplete Sentences are pretty common (e.g., "Went to the store yesterday") Ones that natives typically follow: Subject-Verb Agreement (e.g., "She is" vs. "They are"). Pronoun Usage for clarity (e.g., "He gave it to her"). Maintaining consistency in verb tenses in a single thought (e.g., "I went to the store and bought some milk"). Article Usage (e.g., "a cat" vs. "an apple").
Probably the most useful programming language, whichever that is.
Yeah, this. Then look for a remote job with good salary.
Just knowing the language is only about half of it though. There’s way more to software engineering like knowing design patterns, databases, deployment etc.
only makes you a code monkey. There's much more to learn than just X language.
Yeah - Knowing every detail of a language can be useful but being a good programmer is much more than that. There's an entire way of thinking and problem solving using programming tools that isn't part of the language. It's the difference between being able to write a readable sentence and being able to write beautiful prose.
Having no experience coding this would just be the biggest freebie I could take.
Assembly would be sick, not very useful and will probably not land you a job, but every nerd (programmer) will think of you as the chosen one. You can be the prodigy child your mom always wanted😂
you'd be surprised how much assembly is still used. Most industrial machines for example. If you are good in assembly you'll never be out of a job.
You could make insane money as a malware reverse engineer.
Assembly is actually very well paid and souggt after. Many apps are re-written in assembly after all features are done, if performance is important. Also useful for reducing cloud computing costs
What application is rewritten in assembler? Never heard of any case. In some circumstances it can make sense to rewrite some functions in assembler because the compiler didn't get the optimizations right. But generally speaking the assembler generated by the compiler is better than what people write themselves
ASL My hand is kinda shit but I’m also pretty damn deaf.
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Good for you, I'm surprised to see Irish here as a choice. Please keep it alive and in your interest, Duolingo can be fun to help learn and try for some general conversation wherever you can. Is fear Gaelige briste ná Bearla cliste. Edit: cupla focail
First official language of the state. The Irish version of the law is referred to in any ambiguity.
Yes! Such a beautiful language that has so many descriptive words. My Spanish friends friends say English is such a boring language when it comes to describing… if only I could proper tell them about gaeilge
That’s very interesting. I feel like there’s twenty synonyms for every adjective in English lol.
We call a ladybug god’s small cow (bóín beag Dé) and a wolf “son of the country” (Mac tíre) it’s a lovely language and I wish it was spoken more in Ireland
French. Also Swedish.
Bra val, min vän.
Vad fan!!! Svenska???
I just started learning French in my late thirties — for work, but mostly for me. I wish I had done it sooner, but with access to modern resources (Duolingo, YouTube etc) it’s really fun.
Turkish cuz idk, I just want my ice cream
In seriousness I found Turkish fairly easy to pick up (at least at a beginner level) vs most other languages I’ve tried to learn. The agglutination felt natural and commonsensical, the pronunciation was achievable and the writing is phonetic. If you actually want to speak it give it a crack.
For English speakers Turkish is initially tricky because the internal logic and grammatical structure are about as different as you can get, but the rules once you start to think essentially backwards are easy and there are zero exceptions when it comes to grammar and spelling.
I struggled with it as Finnish because some things are insanely close so it kind of trips me when speaking. But I can read OK having lived and worked in Turkey for a couple of years. I still get a chuckle with words like nakit, pusula and even Ankara which all also have Finnish meanings but as languages are not actually related meanings are entirely opposite.
Yeah it's abit easy, dabbled in it some time ago during the Pandemic because I planned to travel before all the bans were started lol
Georgian. Most beautiful script and utterly wild but fascinating grammar.
Actually it's not so difficult (not easy, of course, but I mean, not so complicated as Chinese for example). Imo the main problems on entry level are the unusual sounds for English native and verb formation. But it's very poetic language and definitely worth to learn!
Good call. I didn’t meet a single long-term foreign resident in Georgia with a good grasp of the language, even people married to Georgians for years, so I think that says something about how tricky it is to master as an outsider
My own language, Yoruba. Tired of being the British cousin that doesn't understand when they're being told to get drinks😔
Latin. I know it‘s not spoken anymore but there are so many languages that derive from it. It would make it so much easier to learn languages like Italian, french and spanish.
I was looking for that answer, I would choose Latin too. Not to mention that it also sounds really cool. You can mumble under your nose a recipe for scrambled eggs and people would think that you're casting some intricate spell.
FWIW, I speak a handful of romance languages and Latin is further removed than you might expect. It seems like there was a time period where the everyday Latin of ordinary people had diverged quite a lot from the formal written language, but before the romance languages diverged too much. There are lots of words and grammatical features they have in common with each other, but not with Latin. I'd suggest diving in with either Spanish or Italian first and then if you pick up another one, you'll start noticing "Oh, if I start with the word in Spanish and apply these changes, I get the correct word in Italian 80% of the time" and so on.
I've heard that only 5-10% of all literature written in Latin has been translated into modern languages. If you were fluent, you might find some very interesting bits of undiscovered history / knowledge.
Korean. I’m trying to learn it at the moment but it’s proving really difficult. 😐
I would pick Korean so I could speak to my great grandmother, she speaks no English and I want to be able to say more than “hi grandma, bye grandma, love you grandma”
There are a million different greetings and variations of “I love you” that you can learn that are super short. My 5 yo calls his grandma and just to say good night. Reading Korean letters are very straightforward. There is almost no exceptions on how the letters sound like. That’s a place to start.
Linear A (or more correctly, whatever language Linear A is a script for). Instantly become the most famous person in modern archaeology.
I was thinking the same thing. I hope Linear A is translated in our life times.
The language of love!
German, good choice.
Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German because life is also terrifying and confusing.
Ich liebe dich!
SEI KEIN ARSCHLOCH
WAS IST DEIN LIEBLINGSFACH SAG MIR WAS
Spanish, I find the language to be quite hot, and I live in Florida, so it'd be quite beneficial
Italian ❤️
Lithuanian because my in laws really expected me to learn this shit like a decade ago but they really love consonants
Sanskrit ♥️
Italian. Would be great to finally be able to talk with my inlaws after 7 years. Unfortunately looking forward to another summer where my Italian hasn’t improved and I’m just sitting there, trying to not look bored. I really have to put in more effort
Your comment speaks to me. My wife is from north India and I’m from the south and between us, I’m fluent in both Hindi and Malayalam so I have a blast when I go to her place. She used to sit around talking to me mostly at family occasions in my home. It got to her and she’s in an intensive Malayalam class and I insist on speaking Malayalam around her for immersion. Now it’s actually much better two years later, when she can TALK to my granny and parents in our language. A lot of the differences melt away soon when that happens!
My inlaws are dutch and i tried for two years to get into learning it and what finally clicked for me was duolingo as it keeps pestering me to practice every day. After one year of duolingo, i surprised them by suddenly starting speaking dutch at chrismas and they said it was the greatest gift i could have given them. Beforehand, i tried to learn with a book and i couldn't get into it. Duolingo really clicked for me. They only require 5 or 10 minutes a day and i really saw myself making progress. So maybe duolingo or babel might work for you ?
German
Guten Abend, junge Frau
Sarcasm. I’d finally be able to communicate fluently with my cat and understand all those subtle jabs from my friends and family!
Sarcatsm
Dolphin. Just think about having deep conversations while surfing the waves with your new aquatic besties
Japanese, for sure. It's completely different from the other languages I know, there's TONS of content I could watch and read without the filter of "localization".
Korean, so I could be closer to my wife's side of the family.
Welsh. I know enough to get by, but I'd love to be fluent in my ancestral tongue, and be able to understand what the people in Rhyl are giggling about when they see me.
Japanese/chinese/spanish/russian Probly in that order :D
chinese, im half chinese and its embarrassing having my mom narrate words for me to say to my grandparents
Italian
Arabic
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Samee loll but the number of different dialects gets me every time 🫠
Mandarin
C++
They C me ++, they hatin'.
Russian
Mandarin.
Finnish is what I want to say personally but the most useful would be Mandarin, Russian or German.
Arabic. In my work I meet a lot of people who speak only arabic. Would make my life easier and also make me more attractive on the job market
Korean
French
I live in Canada and have employees who live in Quebec. Sometimes I feel bad that my French language skills are so bad, and that they have to speak English to communicate with me. I've gotten by for nearly half a century with terrible French skills, but it would have been good to have. Would have made visiting Quebec a lot more comfortable. Would have helped with the work that I do (adult learning, where we have to offer learning materials in both languages), and would have opened up job opportunities you might not consider. E.g., I believe at one point, you had to be bilingual to join the RCMP (the Mounties), but it looks like those days are gone now.
Russian because it sounds cool and I love russian curses
Loading into a russian CS lobby hits differently when you have 4 russians screaming иди нахуй at you
Something to really help my career, giving me a leg up in the kind of clients I can court. Maybe Arabic, do some remote work for rich oil states? Or maybe Chinese or Japanese?
German i wanna understand the songs i like so much
Japanese
Japanese
Yapping
SQL or NoSQL.