Article mentions my mother tongue, so of course I have to post it!

Lithuanian is not one of the easiest for English speakers to learn....

https://www.afar.com/magazine/...for-english-speakers

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Two months ago, I got a new iPad so I could use DuoLingo. I've been working on Polish. What a grind! There is zero instruction, so you only learn by making mistakes on the exercises and trying to figure out what you did wrong.

I took a year of Polish in college. I don't recall it being this hard. The use of pronouns is similar to but different from Russian, and the people that give you help on the exercises regularly contradict each other and sometimes contradict themselves.


Of course, English isn't an easy language to learn, either.

I liked reading about the different categories of languages, even in the European families. It categorizes some things that I was only acquainted with by encounters with some of those languages.

The only language besides English that I had some proficiency with was Portuguese as a result of spending two years in Brazil. My proficiency was at best mediocre because many of my Brazilian associates spoke better English and we'd resort to that for mutual understanding. My wife had to get by in many situations where there were no English speakers to defer to and so her ability to speak Portuguese exceeded mine. On the other hand, I sat through many meeting and encounters where I listened to Portuguese and so my ability to understand the spoken language improved to a fair degree. I was told that I spoke Portuguese with a Cariocan (native of Rio de Janeiro) accent, probably because of learning the Portuguse that I spoke there.

The relationships between Romance languages came into sharp perspective for me one night in Paris. I was with an associate who wanted to go into a shop to procure some souvenirs. I elected to stand outside near the curb and smoke a cigarette. While I was there, a car pulled up, rolled down a window and asked me, "Voce fala (Do you speak)?" Without pause, I replied, "Não, so fala inglês (No, I only speak English)." With that, the car rolled up its window and drove away. It was only a little while after that I realized what had occurred. Here I was on a street corner in Paris, being asked if I spoke Portuguese (or Italian, perhaps). I had given a response that they apparently understood and they had driven away. I wondered as I thought about it if they wondered what kind of jerk told them in a language they apparently understood that he didn't speak that language. The transaction itself took place without any conscious thought or translation.

The differences in sounds between languages were very clear when we first met the Italian girl who lived with us for a year as an exchange student. No matter how many times we repeated her surname, it didn't sound right to her. Finally she just gave up on teaching us how to say it. I'm happy to say that that difficulty did not poison our relationship, which continues today.

Big Al