What languages do you speak, are learning, or want to learn, and why?

[papa]

I really should make an effort to learn spanish. more than just the cussing, which is all I can do now. Most of my employees speak spanish as their first language.

 

[Jamshyd]

^ LMAO, cute (@ cussing). Trust me papa, I think Spanish is simply the easiest language for English speakers to learn due to the mass-transferability of the vocabulary and relatively easy grammar. For a good reference for the former (ie. the vocab transfer), check out the book Madrigal's Magical Key to Spanish (which I probably recommended before in this forum).

----

It is sad that I am unable to find any affordable means to get proper languages training in backwards-SW Ontario. The only place here that offers training in (a very limited selection of) languates in the local university, and one needs to pay university tuition for that .

So now I am capitalizing on what little resources I have... a few books, and the Pimsleur audiobooks which are a godsend.

An updated list of Laguages I'd love to learn (in no particular order):

- Syriac
- Sanskrit
- Ancient Greek
- Maltese
- Catalan
- Serbo-Croat
- Russian
- Iranian
- Armenian
- Kashmiri
- Kartvili (Georgian)
- Euscara (Basque)
- Kazakh (or any non-Oghuz Turkic language, really)

Notice how all of these (except the last three) are either Indo-European or Semitic. These are the two branches of language that interest me the most.


And of course, Spanish, Hebrew, Latin, and French which I am already going below the surface with. I have very little interest in the languages of South/East asia (not even Tibetan!), or Sub-Saharan Africa, or Pacific... they simply do not appeal to me in any way. The feeling is mutual toward all Germanic/Scandanavian languages, too. However, I do have a sort of slight masochistic interest in Finno-Ugric, Inuit, and Native (North) American languages.

 

[Jamshyd]

I'd like to learn japanese now

Nihongo-ga, suki desu ne ?

 

[claire22]

I
I also find that most native Greek speakers I've met can speak at least some Italian, even though they're kind of distantly related. I get the sense that modern conversational Greek is a lot more Italian-like than ancient literary Greek. Was there a lot of Italian influence on modern Greek?

The etymology of a lot of Italian words derive from Greek.
For example: the Italian word cinetico derived from the Greek word kinetikos, which also relates to English in the word 'kinetic'
However I am no etymology expert!
I am a fluent Greek speaker & semi fluent Italian speaker

 

[Jackal]

I speak Irish (Gaelic) and English, a few hundred words of both French and Spanish.

Irish was beaten into me from a young age, and both my parents, being old-timers, speak it very well. My oral skills in Irish were almost spot as I left my teens, and I can probably pick it up again if I wanted to, but it's practically a dead language, spoken only by about 150'000 people on the very west and south east of the island. Also spoken in Nova Scotia, strangely.

I would like to speak good French and Spanish, but I cannot stand to be seen to struggle with stuff and got incredibly frustrated and humiliated if I mispronounce words in a class, so I stopped going. I just love the sound of french, as opposed to the sound of Spanish which I hate, particularly in a woman. However I loved living in Spain and wanna be able to travel round south america without living as a mute for the sake of some lingo.

This week I learnt a bunch of Khmer words, as I'm in Siahnouk Ville, but forgot them all straight away

 

[_a_A_C_c_]

It is sad that I am unable to find any affordable means to get proper languages training in backwards-SW Ontario. The only place here that offers training in (a very limited selection of) languates in the local university, and one needs to pay university tuition for that .

have you tried to see if a library carries rosetta stone? i found it to be very useful when i was trying to learn danish. they have ones for farsi and russian.

 

[captainballs]

First language is Danish, i understand both Norwegian and Swedish and i speak Spanish and English also.

That's awesome. I shared a flat with a couple of Danes for six months during a year-long stay in the Nordic region. I learned that Danish and Norwegians can understand each other quite clearly, although the only language I successfully studied while living in Helsinki was Swedish. It's just because from an American standpoint it's inarguable that Swedish is the easiest to learn and actually speak intelligibly out of the three languages if you're a dumb American who barely knows how to speak proper English in the first place, because there are just so many dialects of Swedish that no matter how you pronounce the words the Swedes will know what you're saying since every region has the4ir own spin on it. I forgot almost everything I learned, same with Finnish (but the latter is an excusable language not to be able to pick up as easily as Swedish) I found the pronunciations and sounds in Danish pretty difficult and gave up lol. Learning Spanish currently. I think everyone should learn at least two or three languages in America. It's kind of pathetic that I'm just now getting really started at around age 25. The Finns, Danes, and Swedes are imo the most interesting, fun, and intelligent people I've ever had the pleasure of living alongside for an extended period. But Finland will always hold the most special place in my heart - wonderful, unique people.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

^ It's never too early, captain. Let no neurolinguist with his fancy schmancy age-1-to-6 acquisition window theory tell you otherwise

It's funny, Danish is actually closer related to English than Swedish is, if I recall correctly. But pronunciation, word order, and speed make a big difference.

I give you credit for being able to learn ANY Finnish. (Although I've met a couple other people who've been able to pick up some decent spoken / colloquial Finnish, they were all illiterate in it, and had no desire to tackle the written or literary language.)

 

[captainballs]

^I still keep a Finnish calendar for my daily tasks, and have a kids book called Suomea Suomeksi (Finnish in Finnish) that is a really great beginner's guide to Finnish since it doesn't have any English in it and forces you to learn progressively. The language is very logical in and of itself, and words are pronounced as they are written, no exceptions. But like you said, syntax is everything. With Finnish, you have to learn a whole new set of rules for prepositions and such - and then you have to learn a vocabulary that 99% of the time bears no resemblance to anything Latin-based (aside from loan words). If you have time, you should check out the history of the language on wikipedia - it is an extremely interesting read.

While over there, I was an English tutor for a legislative counselor and we discussed a lot of the history of the language, and speculated as to why and how it developed as it did. We came to the conclusion that the reason Finns are so quiet and don't aspirate hard letters is because they had to conserve heat energy by every means possible before modern technology because of their very northern location. I don't know if this is the case, but it seemed like some sort of explanation for one aspect of a very interesting and layered language/culture.

 

[rachamim]

Lacey: "Chaval...": The title? It is, idiomatically, "Where are all my friends now?" Like "Good weather friends." I have never heard the song though. I only returned to the US in May, and will be leaving again soon enough.

Today I was on Limewire loading up my MP4 with new stuff, funny, you would think that such sites are accessible all pver the globe but not so. I cannot use it in the Philippines.

I got a tonne of Bachata Urbana though, as well as Juan Luis Guerra in Bachata Regular, though people say he is not a true Bachatero.

In fact, I am playing a bunch of new Bachata Heights songs now. I will rack up with loads of Mix CDs before I leave. It is funny, like most Spanish speakers in NYC I hated Bachata when it first came to NYC in the 90s, it is like an American getting into 1930s Country Music! But when they flipped it with Urbana, I was hooked.

MyDoor: You speak Mandarin? See, for all my facility with languages I could never find an interest in Tonal Languages. I was involved with a Hakka girl for a while, and was exposed to Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin all the time but apart from "Nee Hao" and "Sheh Sheh" could not remember a thing.

I do not find an interest in East Asian Languages. In terms of numbers though, Mandarin is #1 in the world, just not as a lingua franca.

When I was young (being 42 now), French was always sold as the language to know...Now it is worthless. French is the only language foreign to me that I have studied academically (well English as well). It is a simple language for me because it is a Romance Language, but with conjugation and grammar I hated it. Thank G-D it only has 80,000 words or I would have never gained fluency. I have to say, I enjoy reading Anatole France in the native tongue though.

You lived in Taiwan? I am in and out of Tapei all the time but hate it. You know, the airport with signs on just about every room talking about "Execution for Methadone" never lets me relax.

Luckily they usually only employ 19 year olds on the Screening Stations. Hey, you ever try Betel when you were there? Probablly the only urbanised area in Asia still big on that crap, and with girls in gogo boots selling it? Crazy place. I have a tonne of the payphone cards from there. Since I bought a worldwide plan I will never use them...

"Portugese is useful because the sun never sets on a Porugese speaking place...": Well, if you are big on Mozambique, Angola or Brasil go for it hahahhhaha. Well, Brasil is big. I should add Macau, one of my favourite places, because as a Mandarin speaker you would love it there.

"Arabic speakers who speak French.": Absolutely, because of colonialism. Algeria, Tunisia, Morrocco (though you think Spanish would be big there, and aside from a small portion it really is not. Heck, even in Spanish Sahara they tend to speak French).

In Syria, Lebanon, people my age and a bit older have a good handle on it, the French Mandate and all that.

"Greek being distantly related to Italian.": Well...If you mean as they are both Indo-European, sure. Other than that, not at all.

They have close historical ties though. Even today you can find entire villages in southern Italy and Sicily speaking a form of Greek, that evolved much differently from Modern Greek because of the cross pollination in olden days.

The Romans believed themselves descendants of Greek colonists, etc. Also, I have not many people who know that there are strange pockets of Greek speakers in many paerts of Europe and Asia. In Rumania there is a small ethnicity, only a few thousand, nomadic like Roma but descended from ancient Greek colonists who esablibshed colonies along the Black Sea. Herodotus spoke of their ancestors. Today, they herd sheep and have only mantained their ethnicity because of the isolation in the Carpathian Mountains.

The biggest tragedy? A bloody crime it is, there are only 20,000 Native Greeks left in what is now Turkey! In 1909, before Ataturk went ballistic there were almost 2 million, and people have the audacity to ask just why most Greeks despise Turks!

The language I would like to examine? The language spoken by the Kalash, the pagan tribe living in the Pakistani Kush. They are supposed to be descendants of Macedonian and Thracian soldiers in Alexander the Great's army.

Until the early 90s no Muslims lived anywhere near them and so this tribe, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and an oral history that talks of Alexander as if he still lives managed to retain its heritage.

People often wonder about my feelings on Islam, and that is my biggest problem with it, it steamrolls everything under it. As much as Christianity can be criticised it still produces truly synchrestic faiths. Islam? Not a chance and so today, with a hiway now coming close to their tiny world, the Kalash will fall like the rest. Every 2 weeks another of out 6000 lanuages goes extinct!

I was reading an article today in a Botany journal, and they offered a rundown on a recent conference where a Linguist offered that when we lose another language we lose vital parts of this world, parts that can teach us how to adapt, how to survive.

 

[joanmiro]

Speak:

Native: Amer'cun
Fluent: Castellano (Spanish)
Not bad (can understand most and speak a decent amount): Català
Very minimal (can understand some and speak a few words): Portugues, Italiano

Want to learn: ^ all of the above, better - as well as French, German and Latin - well, and Euskera (Basque), but that's a lonnng shot

P.S. At least for Latin languages, I think 1 year is all you need to be proficient/fluent in each one as long as you are studying and practicing everyday

 

[rachamim]

Catalano is interesting, all those regional Iberian tongues (except Portugese...).

 

[joanmiro]

Catalano is interesting, all those regional Iberian tongues (except Portugese...).

yeah, Catalan is interesting- much more different than Castellano than I ever imagined...there are a lot of Iberian languages, but it varies in how legit they are. For instance Valencian is a legally recognized language, but for all intensive purposes is the same as Catalan. On the other hand, the Catalan on the Balearic Islands (Menorca, Mallorca, Ibiza) is much closer to being a separate language, but is only considered a dialect. You also have to take into account regional languages like Aragones (in Aragon) and Asturianu (in Asturias) are actually their own languages but are classified as dialects at best and non existant at worst.

Here is a rabbit hole to fall into :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Spain

 

[Jamshyd]

^ Yes, there is a motion to classify Balearic Catalan as a separate language rather than a dialect.

Catalan sounds much more pleasant than Castillian spanish, less "out there" than french, and more down-to-earth than Italian.

Linguisically, it is actually closer to Occitan, French, and Venician than it is to Castillian or Italian.

Btw I agree that Portuguese is probably ugliest of all Romance languages! Especially the Brazilian.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

MyDoor: You speak Mandarin? See, for all my facility with languages I could never find an interest in Tonal Languages. I was involved with a Hakka girl for a while, and was exposed to Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin all the time but apart from "Nee Hao" and "Sheh Sheh" could not remember a thing.

I do not find an interest in East Asian Languages. In terms of numbers though, Mandarin is #1 in the world, just not as a lingua franca.

Yeah that's one truly amazing thing about Chinese. Even though Chinese is spoken by A SHITTON of people, it's natively spoken amongst ONE ethnic group.

That's why I'm attracted to the Chinese language -- there are a lot of things about it that are frankly awe inspiring, at least to a native English speaker who likes words a lot:
* An utterly unique writing system, unrelated to any other
* The only ideographic writing system to survive in everyday use to the present day
* A seamless melding, doubtless due to the properties of the writing system, between history, literature, mythology, philosophy, religion, and magick/divination, in Chinese culture.
* 14 closely related present-day spoken languages (and hundreds of dialects!), all mutually unintelligible, that can nonetheless communicate in writing without any misunderstanding.
* Some really interesting caves for etymological exploration
* A tradition of poetry where the physical LOOK of the words carries another layer of intended meaning
* A tradition of calligraphy surpassed only by Arabic, IMHO.
* A lot of very good literature, much of which is completely unknown in the West
* A lot of very good philosophy, much of it underappreciated in the West

There are things about Chinese culture I think are great, there I things about Chinese culture I'm not such a fan of. Their language is one of the former. Along with food and film.

There are only 4 tones in Mandarin: I'll bet if you had someone, perhaps a singing instructor, work with you for a few days, you could get them down. That's how the first week of Beginning Chinese went.

All the other spoken Chinese languages are hard to learn. Like Classical Chinese, they all have up to 8 tones, depending on what you consider a distinct tone. As if this weren't hard enough, some Chinese languages also have some rather complicated rules about tone changes (ex: "what's normally a 3rd tone is pronounced as a 7th tone if it comes after a 2nd tone", or something like that.) Pile on yet another stone when you realize that in Chinese languages other than Mandarin and Cantonese, up to a third of the spoken words/utterances have no Chinese character, no way of being written. You might as well, by this point, be learning a Native American or African language: unfamiliar sounds, unfamiliar word roots, unfamiliar grammar, AND no written language to rely on.

You lived in Taiwan? I am in and out of Tapei all the time but hate it. You know, the airport with signs on just about every room talking about "Execution for Methadone" never lets me relax.

Luckily they usually only employ 19 year olds on the Screening Stations. Hey, you ever try Betel when you were there? Probablly the only urbanised area in Asia still big on that crap, and with girls in gogo boots selling it? Crazy place. I have a tonne of the payphone cards from there. Since I bought a worldwide plan I will never use them...

Yeah I actually really liked Taipei. It felt like a gentrified Kuala Lumpur, or a run-down Japanese city. It's a steamy hot tropical city -- a little safer, friendlier, and cheaper than Miami, with about the same sort of options for a partying lifestyle. Decent E. Lots of K. LOADS of shabu. I got a source for very good pot there (rare!), and found it a great place to be a stoner with a bicycle.

I'd move back to Taipei in a fucking minute. Don't know if I want to be there when the Red Army raids it, though.

"Portugese is useful because the sun never sets on a Porugese speaking place...": Well, if you are big on Mozambique, Angola or Brasil go for it hahahhhaha. Well, Brasil is big. I should add Macau, one of my favourite places, because as a Mandarin speaker you would love it there.

Yeah I have, actually. I flew from there to Taipei, sick as a dog, in 2002. It was quite unique -- something in between Taiwan and the Mediterranean in its feel. Definitely felt like a former colonial concession.

"Greek being distantly related to Italian.": Well...If you mean as they are both Indo-European, sure. Other than that, not at all.

They have close historical ties though. Even today you can find entire villages in southern Italy and Sicily speaking a form of Greek, that evolved much differently from Modern Greek because of the cross pollination in olden days.

I think there's some more recent Italian involvement in Greece, too. I have an old globe with the Dodecanese Islands labeled as part of Italy.

Sicily is very interesting place to geneticists. You find many many layers of genetic inputs in the population there, some of them from quite long ago and far away.

The language I would like to examine? The language spoken by the Kalash, the pagan tribe living in the Pakistani Kush. They are supposed to be descendants of Macedonian and Thracian soldiers in Alexander the Great's army.

Until the early 90s no Muslims lived anywhere near them and so this tribe, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and an oral history that talks of Alexander as if he still lives managed to retain its heritage.

According to Wikipedia, the Kalash are like the Ainu of northern Japan: they have been determined to be genetically quite unique, probably indigenous to the land they inhabit, and not closely related to Europeans, despite superficial similarities.

The Kalash language is an Indo-European one, closely related to ones spoken by neighboring tribes, and not really close to Greek. This supports the idea that they're indigenous to exactly where they currently live.

That said, I don't mean to belittle the anthropological significance of the Kalash people. They are a scholar's gem. They yield some very valuable clues about the ancient Indo-European (Aryan) people, those Central Asian nomadic herders who fathered most of the genes, words, and cultural practices of Europe, India, and some of Central Asia, tens of thousands of years ago. Their religion, for example, provides a missing link between Pagan Greek and Hindu beliefs. For the peoples of all these regions, they are a look into our distant past as livestock-herding Stone/Bronze Age people. Their complete assimilation into Pakistani Muslim society would be a great tragedy indeed, on the order of the southern African San (Bushmen) becoming exterminated.

Unfortunately, the world is changing in many ways that make the future look very grim for most of these small, pre-urban peoples, all around the world. A good friend of mine lives in the largest community of Tuscarora people in Canada, and he says not even the oldest people there remember even hearing much of their language.

People often wonder about my feelings on Islam, and that is my biggest problem with it, it steamrolls everything under it. As much as Christianity can be criticised it still produces truly synchrestic faiths. Islam? Not a chance and so today, with a hiway now coming close to their tiny world, the Kalash will fall like the rest. Every 2 weeks another of out 6000 lanuages goes extinct!

I agree with everything you just said, except with one qualifier: Wahhabi Islam, specifically. I have no problem with any Muslim or Muslim community who rejects Wahhabi values and political stances. The Saudi Oil Empire has done such a good job selling Wahhabism as 'the only REAL Islam', in order to form a gang to protect its oil interests from the grubby hands of richer and stronger countries. They've largely succeeded, and this is sad for 3 reasons:
1) It makes Muslims too busy hating non-Muslims to learn anything helpful from non-Muslims.
2) Islam has lost a lot of its local quirks and 'patchwork quilt' quality that it used to have. It used to adapt to local needs and freely incorporate pre-Muslim indigenous spiritual practices. Now thanks to Wahhabism, it's become the McDonald's of religion, squeezing out of business all the little local restaurants, with their unique tastes and local character.
3) Most of the people who subscribe to Wahhabi Islam have NO IDEA they've been duped, with a harsh faith that may not be well suited to them and their culture.

I was reading an article today in a Botany journal, and they offered a rundown on a recent conference where a Linguist offered that when we lose another language we lose vital parts of this world, parts that can teach us how to adapt, how to survive.

Yeah I'd consider human linguistic (and cultural) diversity a form of biodiversity. More is good, less is bad. It scares me to read some predictions that in 200 years, there will be only around 100 human languages spoken.

Edit: I did try betel nut when I was living in Taiwan. It's very popular, but considered really low-class. In terms of effect, I didn't find it recreational at all. It was very parasympathetic (nicotinic and muscarinic receptor agonist) in its effect: gushing salivation, mucus production, digestive muscle movement, sweating, urge to urinate. Its psychological effect was like a very strong cigarette, with more dissociation. The shards from it embedded themselves in my mouth lining, causing swelling that lasted a few days. Copious blood-red saliva is really charming, too. I give this drug 2 thumbs down.

The betel nut girls, who are banned fro Taipei City, are these scantily clad young ladies who sit in glass boxes with lots of neon lights, and sell betel nuts, cigarettes, and energy drinks to people who drive up (mostly truckers and taxi drivers). If you give them a nice tip, they'll flash you some tit.

 

[effingcustie]

I'm a native English speaker, and I know Spanish fairly well. Reading and listening to Spanish I don't have much problem understanding at least the general idea, but speaking is much harder because I haven't taken Spanish classes for 5+ years, or been in a Spanish speaking country, so when trying to speak in Spanish I usually end up only coming up with words in Japanese.

I've taken 3 years of Japanese now and lived there for a semester last year. I am definitely better at reading and writing than speaking and listening.. I stumble a lot with tenses and grammar patterns and have trouble with the different ways to say things to people in different social situations (how you would say something to a teacher/elder vs a friend vs an aquaintance, etc) which is pretty important. I can hold a basic conversation in Japanese though. I'd really like to continue working on my Japanese and at some point in the not too distant future live there for a year or two. Now that I have graduated I'm not sure how to practice, but will continue reading Japanese books and watching Japanese movies and maybe find somewhere to take classes.

As for languages I'd like to learn someday, I'd like to learn Portuguese for no reason other than I think it sounds really nice. But for now I will probably focus my effort mainly on improving my Japanese.

 

[Jamshyd]

I agree with everything you just said, except with one qualifier: Wahhabi Islam, specifically. I have no problem with any Muslim or Muslim community who rejects Wahhabi values and political stances. The Saudi Oil Empire has done such a good job selling Wahhabism as 'the only REAL Islam', in order to form a gang to protect its oil interests from the grubby hands of richer and stronger countries. They've largely succeeded, and this is sad for 3 reasons:
1) It makes Muslims too busy hating non-Muslims to learn anything helpful from non-Muslims.
2) Islam has lost a lot of its local quirks and 'patchwork quilt' quality that it used to have. It used to adapt to local needs and freely incorporate pre-Muslim indigenous spiritual practices. Now thanks to Wahhabism, it's become the McDonald's of religion, squeezing out of business all the little local restaurants, with their unique tastes and local character.
3) Most of the people who subscribe to Wahhabi Islam have NO IDEA they've been duped, with a harsh faith that may not be well suited to them and their culture.

I excuse you and Rachamim for forgetting that the whole (hole? on the map for sure thus far!) of Central Asia, including (especially?) East Turkistan ("Xinjiang") is actually a huge part of the Islamic world, and yet for them, Tasawwuf ("Sufism") is the norm . When one studies, say, Kazakh muslims, one often forgets that these almost mythical expressions of faith are, after all has been said and done, Sunni Muslim! There, Saint Worship, Ecstatic trance, Magic, Tengrism, and of course Vodka are all part of Islam. This, IMHO, is a better-preserved version of Medieval Islam than the perversions that predominate the modern image of Muslims (even amongst Muslims themselves).

 

[euphoria]

i know english and a decent amount of spanish, and i'm trying to learn french/italian/german as well.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

I excuse you and Rachamim for forgetting that the whole (hole? on the map for sure thus far!) of Central Asia, including (especially?) East Turkistan ("Xinjiang") is actually a huge part of the Islamic world, and yet for them, Tasawwuf ("Sufism") is the norm . When one studies, say, Kazakh muslims, one often forgets that these almost mythical expressions of faith are, after all has been said and done, Sunni Muslim! There, Saint Worship, Ecstatic trance, Magic, Tengrism, and of course Vodka are all part of Islam. This, IMHO, is a better-preserved version of Medieval Islam than the perversions that predominate the modern image of Muslims (even amongst Muslims themselves).

I had no idea. That's awesome! Kazakhstan is definitely on my list of places to visit.

 

[rachamim]

JoanMiro: Yes, you made a great poimt. So much of the nationalist/political quagmire is deeply intertwined with the Recognition of Regional Languages, not only in Iberia but all over Europe. Imagine trying to get the Turks to declare Phaeronic Greek as an Officially Recognised Language!

The thing about "Dialect" versus lanuage though, it is not always transparent (as to why it falls into one or another category). Like I was saying about Portugese speakers not needing much translation of Spanish but Spanish speakers not understanding more than 2 or 3 out of every hundred words. The linkage of language does not work in a totally linear pattern.

Alot of the issue relates to conjugational and grammatical rules and not at all on vocabulary, and etymology.

I would love to go back to Spain but it is not the best place for Israelis these days.

MyDoor: Hebrew is also ideographic! Indeed, in many ways it is still much less developed (in this manner) than Chinese!

Take the first letter, "Alef." It means "Ox." Look at the letter (I do not have Hebrew font, but if you het a chance, examine it, haha). The letter is an Ox (looking at it from the front of an ox)! "Bet," is a "House," and so on.

Now you raise a great point about all the Chinese languages utilising the same alphabet and being able to communicate within it in a mutually intelligible manner. However, I never really though on that...When they do so, there is no difficulty in conceptualising?

I mean..In Hebrew, we use the same alphabet in Aramaic and Yiddish (and until my parent's generation in Ladino). Yet, even between Hebrew and Aramaic which are both Semitic you cannot communicate clearly.

If you take a secular Israeli-Jew, they will have no knowledge of Aramiac and if you write something in Aramiac they can phonetically grab it but only so much of the vocabulary is mutual, follow what I am saying? So, in Han, and Hakka, Hokien, etc, is it the same issue OR is it instead that all share the same grammatical and conjugational rules?

"Chinese has a tradition of Calligraphy surpassed only by Arabic..."...Hahahaha I bet Jam can guess my objection! Jews must go to special schools before they can print the language. Our scripts? Damn, I wish I could use one of those freeform writing programmes to demonstrate actual Hebrew Calligraphy....or maybe I can just find some images and reedit them in later.

(Edited for spelling)