Russian, Czech, or Hebrew?

[Masklinn]

French would also be a good choice

You could then visit France, Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Louisiane ( [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) and a good part of Africa.

Best of all you could then argue with french people in their own language, you will make an rather strong impression with that !

[Masklinn]

German as spoken by normal Germans can be as beautiful as any language.

I totally second that Melusine !

We are too use to hear german spoken by non-german persons or exagerated greatly (in films, in jokes etc...).

I have had in the past many contacts with german students and I can tell you that language is far from being harsh and guttural.

German is in fact very soft to hear and gramatically well structured.

Not to add that when spoken by a a cute german girl it takes a whole new sounding to you, really

[Iron_Ranger]

Originally posted by Masklinn: Best of all you could then argue with french people in their own language, you will make an rather strong impression with that !

Hey...Now thats a good idea!

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by Iron_Ranger: To make a long story short, I am choosing between Russian, Czech or Hebrew as a second language and I cant decide the one I want. I have study a little (very little) Russian in the past, but the book wasnt really very good, but this method is suppousedly really good. German is also a choice...Just cant decide. I really want to learn Finish, but I have yet to find a book on that. Well, a decent one anyway. Polish would also be pretty cool to learn, but thats not a choice.

Well it depends where you want to live/what you want to do. However, if German is also a choice then there really is nothing to decide. German is by far the most important language out of the ones you mentioned above. Germany is in the top 5 richest countries in the world - hence most influential - and the biggest population in Europe. German is also spoken in Austria and some of Switzerland. There is no point learning Czech unless you want to live there. There is no point learning Hebrew unless you want to read the Bible in original form. There is no point learning Finnish unless you want to live there.
German is the second most important language in Europe so go for it.
On the world scene, Spanish is probably the 2nd most important language, followed by things like Japanese and Chinese and Arabic and French.
Melusine is right that Finnish is difficult to learn - it is in the same language group as Hungarian and that is bloody hard for English speakers
Going off topic a bit - one interesting thing in Hungarian is that double negatives are proper grammar, I don't know if that's true in Finnish

[ 04-24-2003, 09:05 AM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

[Cloudbringer]

In the end, it really depends on your preferences and what you want to do with the language once you've learned enough to use it, IR. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I've got two degrees in Russian lit and language and I enjoyed my studies immensely, but if that's not an area of the world you've got a special interest in, no amount of coaxing will get you to study hard and learn it well.

If you're thinking of using the language in your work someday, it might be good to do a little research in your prospective field and find out what languages are most needed there. If you want to sell tractors for a local company, Spanish might be more useful to you in your part of the country but if they do international sales, maybe you'd fill a niche by knowing French, German or Russian. (That's an example from real life, btw, one of the students I tutored in Russian began his own company, selling farming equipment to Russia many years ago.)

If you just want the other language for the fun and personal or family history, choose what appeals to you most and dig in! I took German for fun and really enjoyed the 3 semesters I did- wished I'd had more time to pursue it after that!

As some people have mentioned, Russian isn't the easiest language to learn for a person with English as their mother tongue, but if you don't mind learning an inflected language (case endings that determine or change meaning of the sentence) and a new alpahbet (Cyrilic) that's based on the Latin and Greek alphabets, then by all means go for it! Sounds like you've had a taste of it already and are in a good position to know if you liked it or not.

Keep in mind that the study of any language is not just about words and sentences in a book or classroom. It's about the culture and history and art of the peoples who use that language to communicate with one another. In a way, I envy you, just starting out on that learning journey!

[Cloudbringer]

EEF! I'm gonna ditto the comments made on Finnish! I took a short course in it and after a few months of study could barely read the main points in a child's simple story (kinda like you'd read to a pre-schooler) WITH a translation! LOL It's a fascinating language, though! Wish I'd started it when I was much younger.

Oh and Mel is so right- German is very pretty! I had heard all the bunk about it being rough and gutteral and harsh but I met some students of German heritage while I was in college (first generation born in the states for their family so they used German at home and with one another) and it was so lovely to hear them speaking German... I realized I had to study it then! I never regretted it,either!

[/)eathKiller]

Korean is the easiest language of all to learn, just 15 characters in their alphabet!

[johnny]

Originally posted by /)eathKiller: Korean is the easiest language of all to learn, just 15 characters in their alphabet!

Yeah, but each and every one of them, causes you to swallow your own tongue.

[Dreamer128]

Originally posted by Masklinn: quote: German as spoken by normal Germans can be as beautiful as any language.

We are too use to hear german spoken by non-german persons or exagerated greatly (in films, in jokes etc...).

[/QUOTE]Thats right. If you believe the American movies; every German is a tall Militant called Hans

[Ramon de Ramon y Ramon]

Originally posted by Melusine: As for German, don't listen to people who try to tell you it's a "harsh, guttural" language yada yada yada. I've seen several IW members say things to that effect and its just total bollocks, pardon my French. Probably a left-over from the war or something... Actually most consonants in German are soft-sounding. It all depends on how you hear it spoken - possibly all you get on the telly is WW2 films with screaming SS officers or espionage movies with horrible fake German accents. The language of love, French, that most people love so much, could be said to sound nasal. German as spoken by normal Germans can be as beautiful as any language. Finnish is cool but be prepared for a very difficult learning period: it's an extremely hard to learn language.

Dear Mr. Iron Ranger,

to spare you a major disappointment and maybe even an outright traumatic experience, I feel forced to correct some of the gross misrepresentations of the German language and of the Germans given here by some either misinformed or completely irresponsible members.

As a matter of fact, those WWII movies, which Miss Melusinchen so quickly dismissed as misleading, offer infact a fairly accurate depiction of German life as it is still today: our standard form of communication - and really the only socially accepted one - is to yell commands at each other at the tops of our lungs. Smiling - except for the evil smirking variety of course - was ruled unconstitutional by the Federal Constitutional Court last year. And finally so as I feel compelled to say for it spares us the disturbing results of the, admittingly infrequent but inevitably botched, attempts at mastering a friendly smile by a German, who had previously given in to the temptation of listening to something emotionally uplifting, like French love songs. I hope it goes without saying that offenders against the ban on smiling are shot by the police without previous warning.

It is also a well-known fact that Germans don't possess any sense of humour whatsoever. Thanks to intensive research conducted at the Reich-University in Berlin during the early nineties, we now know that that phenomenon is not generically genetical - at least not in the sense that Germans lack the humour genes that other humans possess, but that it is rather an effect of the typical German diet: it could be shown that eating Sauerkraut and Bratwurst all the time, especially from an early age on, causes permanent damage to the humour genes located at chromosoms 51-53. Unfortunately, after over 1000 years of absolute predominance of that noxious diet - before Ronald McDonald came to liberate us that is - there are only very few Germans with intact humour genes left, so that it will probably take another full 1000 years of intensive breeding programs and carefully monitored and guided reproduction - as well as of equally intensive and carefully monitored and guided watching of US sitcoms - before there will be any traceable sense of humour in the German mass population. That need for an influx of unspoiled humour genes is also the true reason why the German government instituted a Green Card program of our own a couple of years ago - not as it was claimed by the German media at that time a shortage of qualified IT personnel. For further reading on that topic: www. reich-university.de/DHS/humourgenes.html .

Originally posted by Masklinn: I have had in the past many contacts with german students and I can tell you that language is far from being harsh and guttural. German is in fact very soft to hear and gramatically well structured. Not to add that when spoken by a a cute german girl it takes a whole new sounding to you, really

Now this is outrageous: There is simply no such thing as "a cute German girl" ! All German females, regardless of age, are muscular, stand at least 6'2 and weigh at the minimum 250 lbs. They are also all, without a single exception, mean-sprited, brash and compulsively aggressive - always ready to tear off the extremities of any man if he as much as looks at her in the wrong way. Which for her is any way. Just try picturing a female character from a Wagner opera like Brunhilde. And that is not even mentioning the silly spiked helmets they all wear all the time ...

And, of course, German sounds guttural and harsh ! I think Monsieur Masklinn mistook the vain attempts of those German students he met at wooing him by trying to speak French for them speaking German. Which is very understandable considering the abhorrent accents Germans tend to exhibit in all their tries at speaking a foreign language.

Infact, German sounds so awful that I, as a baby, simply refused to speak it at all. But my mother, being the typically mean German valkyrie, of course brutally forced me to speak it anyway ! For the sake of the women and children present, I shall refrain from going into the grim details of how she achiebed thar evil objective, but let me say as much that it left me physically and mentally scarred for life !

Originally posted by StigTC: Well, as much as I hate the German language, I'd say that it is the most practical, since it'll get you by in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and most of eastern Europe.

Now that I call the right since realistic, utilitarian and worldly attitude !

Btw, I have mentioned that I make a living by teaching German as a foreign language? Which should once and for all prove the truth of the notion that all Germans have an inherent sadomasochistic trait.