halpin wrote:Being brought up in Ireland, Irish is drilled into kids in a format that hasn't changed in decades, having to memorise old poetry and stories that no child or even a PHD student has interest in reading. Nobody speaks it outside of school, except for very small communities in the west of Ireland. I do wish I was better at it though.
Nach féidir tú Gaelige a rå? Thuigim beagán agat.
The problems with Irish are political as much as anything else. They can't admit it to be in effect a foreign language for most Irish people and teach it with that in mind. And yet it's the country's first language, it takes precedence legally over English. Nor does it help that English language culture is so strong and Irish language culture not exactly up to date and exciting, so it's an uphill struggle to make it a daily language. (I had a laugh watching Harry Potter dubbed into Irish on TnaG so maybe there's some hope)
But I can speak it like a native... hardly at all!
I'm always amused by the Speak Irish communities on mixi. And the Irish language communities on the Internet. Why??
There was a great short film a few years back. A Chinese student wanted to go to Ireland so naturally he learnt Irish because that's what they'd speak in Ireland. He gets to Dublin and no-one can understand his beautiful Irish. Until in a pub Frank Kelly (I think) speaks to him in Irish and explains the mistake. The two guys at the bar comment to each other "Jaysus, I never knew Frank could speak Chinese!"
But actually my vote for a difficult language would be English. I'd hate to have to learn it from scratch. It's had so many influences on it that the spelling and grammar and vocabulary are thoroughly messed up. Then there's all the regional variation and accents. I'm glad I learnt it the easy way.
Of the languages I've encountered
English (Anglo-Irish) native
Irish 13 years and unfortunately disliked it much to my shame now. Oddly a lot of it is still in my head somewhere, beaten into me perhaps. I still have passive understanding. And I did learn it as a native language, so I've never had an understanding of the grammar and structures. Which was always the problem, we were expected to know it in the same way we knew English.
French 5 years at school, could never really speak it and have forgotten most of it.
Greek tourist stuff about a year, again mostly forgotten. I learnt to write it too.
Latin 3 years. forgotten, gave a good grounding in grammar though.
Dabbled in written Chinese for a while as a teen.
Japanese a slow 5 years now, mostly as a hobby. But it's the language I like the most and have had most success with because of that. I wish I had that enthusiasm when I was younger and might have been able to do more with it.
Knowing English has made me lazy I think. I've no great desire to learn any language except Japanese now, and I started Japanese more or less accidentally.
I can't say that any is more difficult than any other, it all tends to balance out in some ways. But Japanese is certainly different to all the others and does have a much more complex writing system, much really slows things down.
Marathi/Hindi/Kannada (All three very different indian languages)
