Supposed to be pretty good.

I'm interested to see how it works out for you. I've been tempted to pick up a new languange myself.

It works, I've used several of them. I'd suggest 'finding' the Pimsleur series to take alongside. It does a better job of helping you with the pronunciation.

I've heard the Korean one is totally worthless, but that's the only one I haven't heard the exact opposite for.

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Sarissa is absolutely correct. Pimsleur + Rosetta rocks. As for Korean, you're right on that count. Korean is BITCH to learn and is considered almost equally as difficult to learn as English. As DLI grad, I thought those of us in the Serb course had it bad with the endless vocab and dialect training, but after seeing with the cats in Korean and, to a degree Mandarin, had to do...fuck that heh.

Yeah, I was in the Mandarin course at the DLI, and that shit sucked. SUUUCKED.

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Ting yat geen!

I'd be very interested in hearing how well you do with it. I've toyed with getting it over the years just to try to get fluent in another language (I can speak some spanish but I'm not even remotely fluent), and I've heard it's great.

Also I'd love to hear if you have a 'knack' for languages (I don't and wish I did, it's not easy for me at all though I do really well with pronounciation)...and if NOT how 'easy' was it, etc.

And how much time you need to put into it, etc.

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The Russian version is really good.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Yeah I'd love to learn mandarin. I get the feeling chinese is going to become a fairly important language to know in the future lol....That stuff is just too damn expensive though.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

When you think about what a class would cost, it's really not THAT bad.

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Oh definitely. I just can't afford either lol.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

I also recommend Pimsleur + Rosetta. I have them for both Spanish and Japanese. Kinda miffed when I heard my friend had downloaded them a couple months after I shelled out a couple hundred bucks (well, birthday/christmas money, but whatever)

Rosetta is heavy word bank, and there are a lot of neat options. Pimsleur goes for conversational topics, and situational variances. Very helpful.

Thanks, I'll have to check out Pimsleur. Rosetta Stone was paid for by my work. For those who are curious, it's $600 for the full package.

If by "in the future" you mean 50-60 years from now, you're probably right. It's a little early in the game to be trying to get Chinese under your belt unless you actually plan to go.

And trust me when I say it's not worth the effort. It's one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. It's absolutely nothing like English or any of the Romance languages. It's a tonal language to start, so it's not about just getting the vocabulary and grammar down, you have to know how to pronounce each word or you end up saying something entirely different. There are five different tones, each lending a word a new meaning that almost never has a relation to the meaning in another tone.

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How would it not be useful to be able to talk to a fifth of the world's population?

And yeah Mandarin is fucking hard especially since I'm tonedeaf. But it's fun anyway.

You know, I remember more of French from school than I thought I would have (mind you, that's still not much). Good luck with that! I think it would be interesting to learn Korean, personally. I got a textbook for it and enjoyed figuring out some of the most basic parts of the written side. It really is interesting and mind-expanding to learn a new language. It's definitely on my list of things to do!

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

Depends really on your age and line of work. Spanish would be far more beneficial to me than any other language currently. If I worked in any type of customer service industry though, I'd pick anything BUT spanish...since there are so many native spanish speakers (who would certainly be more fluent as native speakers than I could ever be) that there's no shortage of that language.

Though I suppose one could argue that you could find a use for any 2nd language, and like learning an instrument, it's just good to do regardless.

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I toyed with a pirated copy of the first few chapters of the Japanese Rosetta stone for a while. It's definitely a good program.

I am surprised people think Korean is difficult to learn. I think it's about a million times easier than any other Asian language.

The writing is incredibly simple. I'm not sure if they go over this in Rosetta Stone, but the vowels are drawn as indications of how air flows through your mouth to pronounce them correctly. I could teach someone to read anything that they see written in about 1-2 hours; you won't understand what you said but you can read aloud.

As far as spoken, it is more difficult, but getting the basics down isn't too bad. If you just want to get to the point of communicating enough to travel there, it's not so bad.

I was also wondering how technical Rosetta Stone is. I have a really hard time using any of the languages I know since I am unfamiliar with any of the words I would use to discuss my work. Usually, I get stuck after small talk.

The US govt. considers it the 2nd hardest (major) language in the world to learn behind only English, and even then, not by much.

I stopped there.

why?

It's cool to hate America right now.

Having only spent a couple months in Korea I never really got a chance to learn any thing past how to order beer and find a bathroom lol...

What is it about the language that is tough? Slang? Conjugation? Structure?

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Big part is making your mouth produce the sounds, and your ears pick out the inflections. The US language institute's choices are based on an English speaker learning the language.

Overall, the hardest language to learn would probably be something like Hungarian.

Mandarin ain't no walk in the park either. One word can have a whole bunch of disparate meaning based on just the tone/inflection/context.

I honestly don't want to learn spanish at all, even though I work in an area where a lot of people only speak it.

Honestly, part of it is just principle. >< Kinda like giving a kid cake to make them stop crying...if we all keep learning Spanish to cater to folks that won't learn English, they'll never bother learning it and we'll be the ones changing for their sake for some reason.

I don't want to learn Spanish either, but I got one more semester of it before I can safely shelve it to the realm of spaghettio jokes.

WTF English is one of the easiest language to learn. Why would they consider it the hardest??

Because of the amount of dialects and slang in the English language.

You have American English, British English, Australian English and New Zealand English, and several sub dialects of each of those.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

You may also have several more "primary" dialects of english than those also.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

also our verb tenses are not as hard and fast as in other latin-based languages.

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And a lot of our grammatical elements don't always make a lot of sense to a new speaker. They seem to just mix and match here and there sometimes.

take a dude from the deep south, and take a dude from the bronx, and see if they understand each other very well, even though they are both speaking "english"

Also remember that the military language school wants to teach fluency, which means that when you speak the language, you sound like a native. At least they did when I was being talked into going there.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I just wanted to pop in here and mention I had the chance to try out version 3 of Rosetta Stone. I was using version 2, and it wasn't bad, but version 3 is really amazing. They shifted from just a multiple choice word bank type of program to an interactive instructional course. I'm going to see if I can get some more time with it so I can give more details.

Yea, it's pretty nice (not that I have anything to compare it against, but still... ).

Yup, 100% correct. In my case, I focused on Montenegro, Crna Gora, and southern Serbia. Also a smattering of Albanian creep.



Mostly because as a language, it makes no sense. Grammar and structure is ridiculously inconsistent, and tense is also very difficult. I'll look it at from the perspective of my other langs. Moving from Serb, you're going from a phonetic language (albeit with a HUGE vocab with multiple dialects) and logical conjugation, to one with that's almost completely the opposite. Knife/knives, contractions, and the joy that is rigid sentence structure. In Serb, if you say, the boy walks the dog, you can say it in ANY order. The word endings denote the subject (although it may sound weird conversationally). In English, if you try that, it has two entirely different meanings (ie - the dog walks the boy means something else).

Pretty safe to say that by and large, English is one of the toughest languages to learn due to all of the exceptions to the rules.

Take idioms for example. Lots of languages have some idioms and expressions, but nothing quite like English. Just think about all the words that have completely different meanings based on simple context.

John's back is to the wall.
John backed into the wall.
John is leaning on the back of the wall.

Let me cut to the chase.
I was cut chasing my dog.

My son always cries wolf.
My son cries if he sees a wolf.

No real point, but I would have to imagine it's brutal.

"I heard that," said the cowboy.
"I herd that," said the cowboy.

I helped my uncle, jack, off a horse
I helped my uncle jack off a horse

All the sudden, my input seems trivial.

In addition to what others have said, the English vocabulary is the largest of all languages. Not only do we borrow a great deal from other languages, we also have many words to describe the same thing, and double meanings on some words. We have an extraordinarily large number of colloquialisms as well.

In fact, many native English speakers are not fluent in their own language.

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I lived in Korea for a year when in the military and took elementary Korean through college while I was there. As was stated before, reading Korean is probably the easiest thing to learn. Actually understanding what it means is completely different.

As far as talking it, it's not too hard. The hardest part is obviously knowing the vocab, but the other part is knowing the which way to say it because there are about 6 different levels of formality in which to say hello.