Ooops. Attributed to wrong poster. Mea culpa. blush Kial tio kutime okazas, kiam mi volas aspekti sperte?
'S ok. Is that Esperanto, btw? If so, I haven’t a clue what it means.
audiobottle, doesn’t Korean have the same type of politeness distinctions that Japanese does?
I’m not sure what politeness distinctions you mean, but if you’re talking about a large variety of ways to address other people based on their relatives status to you, then yes. It can be difficult for even a native speaker to know how to address somebody. It comes from the Confuscian emphasis on relationships and respect. Like a very extended version of sir/madam. Just as an example, you would almost never call somebody older than yourself “you.” However, that is a cultural thing and not really an obstacle in learning to speak the language. If you are a foreigner and you incorrectly address somebody they’re not going to beat you down for it.
ILM: Also: are you American kimstu? If so, are you legal to stay in Holland, and if so, how? (If I may ask)
Yepper, American native-English speaker. Temporarily employed in Netherlands, and learning Dutch in the process. (Although if I weren’t staying here legally, you don’t think I’d admit it here, do you? :))
Mea culpa is Latin. The other is Esperanto for “Why does this usually happen when I want to look expert?” 
So aorist is sort of like an infinitive as a verb tense? Something takes place, whenever?
I still don’t get the difference between optative and subjunctive, but considering that English has might and would and could but barely has subjunctive verbs, and Esperanto has a tense that takes the place of subjunctive and would and could, that’s not surprising. Optative is like subjunctive, but without mention of time?
Basically, subjunctive is for things that could happen, but aren’t actually happening, right?
Haven’t hit subjunctive in French yet, but it’s only a matter of time…
I asked at the beginning what the easiest and hardest languages were to learn.
Could it be because, oh, I don’t know, that most people in the United States tend to take Spanish? Even in Highschool where French, German, Spanish, and Italian were offered the classes with the most students were Spanish. The Italian students only had one class of maybe 15 people.
Yep, or at least in Slavonic. It exists in other languages as well, but may have different shades of meaning there. A good illustration in English would be “Shit happens.” It’s not specifying when the shit happens, or how, or if it’s still happening or has already happened; the shit just happens.
Kind of. English, Spanish and French don’t distinguish between subjunctive and optative (or, rather, use subjunctive for both purposes), but Slavonic does, i.e. in Slavonic, the bolded verb in “If he were X, then he would be Y” is a different verb mood from “I wish that he were X”.
I speak only one language. I have travelled a lot and while I can say thank you in many of the local languages, I only picked up a sprinkling of most of the languages I have been exposed to.
That said, I vote for Bahasa Indonesian as the easiest to learn, and here is why;
It is romanized, so the letters are not like, say, chinese or thai.
It has incredibly simple grammar etc. ( child = anak, children = anak anak)
They have a cool notation wherein you can square words like we square numbers, see anak anak above, often written as anak squared, (sorry I do not know how to do that on my computer, but I assume you know what I am refering to.)
Additionally should you leave Indonesia, and find yourself in say Malaysia, not only do you already know a lot of Malay but it is actually higher Malay, meaning more formal and correct, as opposed to street lingo.
Keep in mind this coming from a language challenged individual, truly terrible at languages.
Terima Kasih ( thank you )
So both “If he were X” and “he would be Y” are in the subjunctive (being hypothetical things that would occur only if sonething else happened, but the “were” in “I wish that he were X” is optative (a wished-for thing)?
What’s the difference between verb mood and verb tense?
How hard is “pidgen english” to learn? And, didn’t sombody change esperanto into a language called “IDO”?
Correct.
Moods express information about the reality of the action, while tenses are concerned with time and place. Wikipedia has some quite good summaries of the distinctions between them; see mood and tense.
It depends on which pidgin you are talking about. There are several pidgins and creoles based on English, with various degrees of intelligibility to English speakers. Probably the best-known is the aforementioned Tok Pisin, which is the national language of Papua New Guinea. It has quite a simple grammar, is easy to pronounce, and can be worked out in written form by an English speaker, though trying to use it fluently at conversational speed is rather more difficult. Here is an example of it. It looks really foreign at first, but if you say the words out loud you’ll find you can understand a lot of it.