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otooziki
United Kingdom
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I have a habit of learning a few words from many languages … I have tried Danish, Dutch, Lithuanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Bosnian, Romanian, Slovak, Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, and seen many more written down at some time or other …. and I did French at school, and I am trying to learn Turkish now, on and off …. well, actually I am really bad at speaking foreign languages. I find Turkish really difficult – so many different cases, long words, but the pronounciation is easy-ish. I agree Arabic, Finnish, Lithuanian and Hungarian look really difficult. I'm interested in what Javamanju said about sanskrit as a metalanguage. Chinese is easier than people think, I think, I tried to pronounce chinese and it was easy (a chinese person understood me – now I usually get my pronounciation and accents horribly wrong). I have a crazy idea that all languages should change their written form to chinese characters – because they are separate from the pronounciation – so we could all use the characters to represent our words, like the chinese, and then we could all write things down in 'our' written language, and we could all understand it fluently – we would get the meaning from the characters, even though we would actually speak different languages. Isn't it true that you only need a small number of characters, because a lot of them are added together to form new words, there are families of characters aren't there?
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