Feh. Spoiled Yank 
For your reading and educational pleasure, I present the Tutorial to Swearing in Dutch. You’re gonna need it when you come down here!
tatertot,
thank you for welcoming me back!
I got a promotion last year, and then early this year work sort of took over completely (but in an enjoyable way). So I had to leave here for a while (and I still haven’t finished my Heroes III computer campaign either…)
(guiltily returns to thread) us native English speakers may not have much to offer on this topic anyway. Because everyone else is so ready to speak English, many of us don’t try to learn another language.
Mind you, one of the language teachers at my School has a rich Liverpool accent in English, but speaks Spanish like a Spaniard.
Having been an exchange student in Thailand, I have to put my vote in for tonal languages of any sort. You just don’t pick up the tonal differences as being meaningful even after you can sort of distinguish them in practice. I’d tackled Russian pretty successfully before I went and I thought, how hard could Thai be? What an experience of humility.
Written Thai has 72 (or is it 76? my, its been a while)letters. Nouns can be placed over, under, before or after the relevent consonant and in a sentence, words are not neccessarily separated by a space. Even the Thais have problems writing it. For example, there are four letters that make an “S” sound, depending on which noun is used and which tone the word is supposed to be pronounced in. Complex gradations in status dictate a very large number of I-You pronouns depending on the age, class, gender, profession and context. Thai only has 5 tones but I understand other Asian languages have as many as 12. Adding to the difficulty is that there is no one consistant system of transliteration of Thai words into English. Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city, is spelled in English at least four different ways depending on which system you use.
As one writer mentioned, you can make some incredibly funny/stupid/wierd things without meaning to because of misplaced tones. One of my fellow students tried to summon a waitress and called her a puss-covered worm. Suffice to say, our service was poor.
I’ll put in a vote for any of the tonal languages. One of my best friends is Chinese-American, and on a lark, I asked her to teach me a few words of Chinese (Mandarin). Since her dog was in the room, she said, “Okay, well, dog is ‘toh’.” I repeated her: “Toh.” She shook her head. “No, that means head. It’s not ‘toh’, it’s ‘toh.’” Ooooookay! And that was the extent of my Chinese lessons. I honestly could not hear the difference in these words.
I think that any non-Indo-European language is going to be hard for an Anglophile to learn, more so than an Indo-European tongue. The thought processes behind different families of languages can be so vastly different. I have spent a good deal of my time trying to learn Hebrew, which is a Semitic language, like Arabic and Amharic. On the surface, Hebrew shouldn’t be such a difficult language; there are only three tenses (past, present, future/imperative), and there is a phonetic alphabet (althought it poses some other pitfalls*). However, the ideas behind the words are extremely difficult to grasp for someone not used to the Semitic language structure. I was writing up some examples, but they are so complicated that I won’t get into them here. Anyone interested can email me. It’s not just the words, but the way they are arranged in groups and structure that reveal an entirely different way of thinking - which is why there isn’t any way to briefly sum it up here.
*Additionally, the alephbet is generally written using only two/three vowels. It’s conditional because two of the vowel sounds (oo and oh) are made by the same letter, which ALSO makes the v-sound, so you still have to figure out what vowel-or-consonant sound the letter is making. As a result, it’s difficult to read Hebrew unless one is fluent in it, and it’s difficult to become fluent without being able to read it (for practice and textbooks, etc.).
Alors, tu vas devoir tout simplement me faire confiance.
I’ve head gaelic is a fun thing to learn, but never got more than a few minutes into it. (“Crwggn? Uh, I’d like to buy a vowel…”)
I’ll weigh in with the Northern languages camp. I am competent in French, German, Latin, Greek, and Old English. I visited Iceland in March, intending to move there for a three year language/literature program, so I decided to start learning some basics while I was there. It is very, very difficult. I had a hard time keeping track of noun declensions, and trying to speak even a handful of words proved to be more than I could handle in a few days.
And Finnish…one of the most gorgeous languages I can think of. But breathtakingly difficult. One day…
MR