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i think english used to do a similar thing? the rules might have been similar, a lot more words in the US constitution and declaration of independence are capitalized compared to, if the documents were written now.

heillese uses a gender neutral pronoun "zae" in some instances, i have to figure out exactly which.

The little bit of Norwegian I have done was much easier than Finnish.

I did five years of German at school, and still came out unable to speak more than a sentence or two. And I was one of the top students in the class! Terrible teaching system.

I'm currently concentrating on my Italian and French, as those are much further along. Then I'll go back to Finnish and Norwegian.

I can't recall if I've said this here before or not, so if I'm repeating myself, grin and bear it My mother has said several times that she has heard (but cannot tell me where she has it from) that if you're good at languages, you should pick French, if you're good at maths, pick German. (Those two were the only two third languages we could learn in most junior highs; now apparently some offer Spanish). I picked German because it's closer to Norwegian, so I thought it would be easier than French. I also liked the German teacher a whole lot better than the French teacher.
I never got the hang of it, and I do dreadfully in all advanced maths. Of course, I don't know if I would have managed French either...

How far have you come in French and Italian now?

Finnish is hard

Basically we have bokmål, which was very influenced by Danish. We were under the Danish for a very long time. As Norway wanted to be independent and develop a national identity, dialects from the western part of the country were considered more purely Norwegian, and a guy took it on himself to collect them and merge them into the form called nynorsk. It's not like another language, but it's still pretty different from bokmål.



I'm sure it did.
Nouns used to be capitalized in older Norwegian too, until the reform in 1901. The spelling has changed a lot too. I've read parts of old texts from the 1600 and 1700 hundreds, and it's really hard to read.

Interesting. Is zae meant to be either he, she or it, or is it meant to be neutral for people? In Swedish they have used han for he and hon for she, but now they have recently added hen, for a neutral word that refers to a person without saying anything about the person's gender.

Maybe we should follow the Latin convention and CAPITALIZE EVERY LETTER.

Or we could follow Kiprobalhato's example and not use capital letters at all. Either way, it'd make learning English a little bit easier.

All this talk of languages has been brilliant. Makes me want to learn even more about other languages. It's also made me look into the history of English and how it's been changing over time. Especially how the English alphabet has changed. Fascinating stuff!

I'm glad that Norwegian managed to enact some reforms. Goodness knows if we'll ever accomplish that in English. I actually feel sorry for people around the world having to learn English, because it's such an inconsistent language IMO. Even English speakers get frustrated with how we spell things.

You should see how Korean high school students learn English. There's a heavy emphasis on rote learning geared towards exams. Some high school students learn hundreds of English words a day (I'm not kidding, "hundreds"), but still have a hard time trying to say more than basic sentences in a conversation.

When I was learning Japanese in high school and uni in Australia, there was a much heavier emphasis on conversation and speaking practice. At the end of it I could hold a conversation reasonably well, even with less-than-perfect grammar. If only I'd kept it up.

good for sweden.

zae is a neutral pronoun for people. or anything else referred to as "he" or 'she". the male is za and as for females, they're zie.

i have an equivalent of "it", tes (or tess). it works much the same as it's English translation, except for in sentences with "it is", where tes itself is used instead without the "it".
it's often 'compressed when it comprises a compound word with a grammatical suffix/prefix, like the acccusative prefix a for pronouns, shortenign it to ats/atz instead of "ates". contrast azae, azie.....

also with the possessive suffix 'rie", being shortened and reversed. tserie.



yay, followers!



god forbid having to lean english once, but twice?

I for one haven't heard it before. I'm not sure if you would say I am good at languages (although I do love them). I think I can disprove your mum's theory though, as I was good at maths (I got fast tracked into the 'elite' group that went straight onto calculus, algebra, quadratic equations etc before everyone else) but I still did badly at German. I did hate my German teacher, which wouldn't have helped.

There is also a small flaw in the theory. How are you supposed to know which language to choose, if you don't know if you are good at them, if you haven't started studying yet?



Italian I can read pretty fluently now, although I still lookup a lot of extra vocab words. If I'm feeling too lazy to do that, I still understand what is going on. I find listening harder (even in English) but even so I watch a daily soap opera, and understand approximately what is going on, even if I miss some of the finer details.

I'm just about to finish the French course on Duolingo, I'm currently learning some of the final things like subjunctive verbs (I would do that, you could go there, etc). I've just started reading my first book in French, and as expected it is a lot harder. I still have to check a lot of the words, as I am not as confident in French, but in another book or twos' time it should all start clicking into place. I need to do a lot more French listening too.

I should be able to cut back on the Italian study time soon, and just read in Italian to keep things ticking along, then I can get onto my next language. I'm torn at the moment ; persevere with my Finnish (hard work at home on my own, without the help of a Duolingo course), pick up the Norwegian Duolingo course again, or start the Russian course which is due out in the next month or so. Russian is my current favourite, although I reserve the right to change my mind.

Why are you trying to learn Finnish? It's impossible. However, it's not as impossible as Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Excellent choice. There are two languages in the world which are associated with love and emotions. They are French and Russian. If you whisper the local number of a landfill manager in either language, you will be loved.

Because it's impossible, and I like to beat myself up. Seriously though, I just checked out all the languages in the Nordic region, and I loved Finnish from the moment I heard it. It's so different to anything I had heard before.



@Krabo - Russian? Really? I never thought of it that way. I always thought the Russians had ice in their veins. Mixed with vodka of course.

Oh, no no. Russians are most warm-hearted and lovable people once you get to know them. And this was said by a Finn. They are not any longer our enemies. What is past, is past.

I'll see how it goes then, learning Russian.

Take it easy and learn Esperanto instead.

It's never appealed. I don't know why, it's a language without its own home country. It should appeal to me. But it doesn't.

Not much use for it really. It's not like you can talk to a lot of people who has it as a native language or read books/ watch TV shows in Esperanto.