From Newsgroup: comp.mobile.android

On Tue, 2 Dec 2025 16:57:07 +0100, Jörg Lorenz wrote:

I tend to disagree. Basic English is easy to learn but a sophisticated
let's say Shakespearian English is quite different.

Do people still speak that?

The real challenge for speakers of Germanic based languages are the
Latin languages.

I studied Latin for 6 years, but this was only one way. Translations to
Dutch. Still, a good base for learning Spanish.

Let me tell you that as someone living in a country with four languages.

That's one more than Belgium.

Bonne soirée!

Goeienavond!
--
s|b
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From Newsgroup: comp.mobile.android

On Tue, 2 Dec 2025 17:01:56 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:

I heard that unless you grow up as a child in a Dutch speaking
household, you may well learn the language, but will never get the
phonetics right?

I don't know. Children pick up new languages pretty easy. It's different
for adults.

I think Queen Maxima of the Netherlands speaks Dutch very well, better
than the King an Queen of Belgium. They've got horrible French accents.
--
s|b
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From Newsgroup: comp.mobile.android

On 2025-12-02 15:56, Stefan Ram wrote:

"Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote or quoted:

On 2025-12-02 14:53, s|b wrote:

We had to learn French from the age of 12 and then another 6 years. IMHO >>> it's easier than German.

It is easier at that age.

I'm a late self-taught learner of French myself. I can
understand simple texts with no special vocabulary, but
can't speak nor write myself.

The "equal complexity hypothesis" claims that, in the end, all
language have the same complexity. One language might have fewer
word forms but makes up for this by a more complex grammar etc.

Measured by the number of hours of instruction required
to bring native English speakers to a certain level of
proficiency, the simplest languages are French (indeed!),
Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian,
Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, and Swedish.

German is in the next, more difficult, group together with
Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu,
Indonesian and Malay.

But the list does not stop here, the third group has languages
that are even more difficult than German: Amharic, Bengali,
Burmese, Czech, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer
(Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian,
Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

And, finally, we have the most difficult languages of all
(as far as languages were part of that survey): Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Interesting list!

So, how much French can I understand?

Well, I listened to TV shows, and whenever I got something,
I wrote it down. So here are some French sentences I once understood
listening to TV shows. (I would not have been able to write them down
in correct French spelling, so I used a service for the writing.)

Monsieur Data, vous prenez les commandes.

Vous êtes capable de rire.

Vous pouvez disposer. (Here, I actually got the meaning of
"disposer" from the situation in the TV show.)

Vous avez des raisons personnelles ?

Ma mémoire fonctionne parfaitement bien.

alimentation principale, alimentation de secours

Je crois que maintenant ça marche.

. . . (about 160 lines altogether)

:-)


I started to read "Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers", but my teacher
told me to stop, because I would get a bad pronunciation. However, it is
what I did with English, reading first Enid Blyton then Agatha Christie.
--
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;
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