Being bilingual in a completely different language is way more impressive than speaking multiple languages that are similar, amirite?

My cousin speaks English, German, and Vietnamese (parents are Viet, born and raised in Germany, learned English in school). Vietnamese is nothing like German. The longest word in Viet has 7 letters.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

>Europeans languages are essentially different versions of the same language. America moment

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Fwiw Hindi is an Indo-European language so it would be much easier for most people who speak European languages to learn it rather than say, Finnish, which is a different language family. So that one doesn't track. I actually studied Hindi for a bit and it's not as difficult for an English speaker to learn as you would think.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

*Europeans languages are essentially different versions of the same language.* Tell me you're American without telling me you're american. Bruh, French is completely different from German which itself is quite different from English (despite German and English being in the same category). Grammar, syntax, words, everything is different to a degree where Knowing 2 out of 3 of these won't help you with the 3rd all that much. Even Slavic languages which diverged relatively late can still be quite different to each other.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah they're all indo-european languages but that's about it. I doubt this guy would say French and hindi are similar at all. I bet he'd also be impressed by the guy who speaks German and Yiddish.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm not American lol. I'm ethnically Korean and speak English, learned French in school as well as a bit of German and Mandarin. Yes they are ‘different' and the grammar is a bit different as well but nonetheless much easier to learn once you know English.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm very interested to know the need to say "ethnically" Korean LOL Were you born in Korea? If so, why not just say I'm Korean?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

He's an american in denial that he's american

by Anonymous 1 year ago

So since you know English, German and French, it should take you no time to study Ukrainian or Albanian since they're all "European languages", right? Or since you know Korean and know a bit of mandarin, it should take you no time to learn hindi or dari since they're all "Asian languages"

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Anyone who says to be "ethnically" something is an American in denial that saw a 2% foreign country in their dna test

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I kinda agree with you lol. Knowing Chinese (first language) didn't help me learn English one bit, but knowing English sure helped me learn Spanish and French a lot more than Chinese did (which was also zero help lol). I could make out the general msg of signs etc in french/spanish because a lot of the words are similar enough to English already.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Wow, not from America but with the ignorance of Americans. Has you country disowned you yet ?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Damn, you *really* have no idea what you're talking about.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

>Europeans languages are essentially different versions of the same language. They share so much similarities that learning them and boasting that you speak 4-5 languages is not too impressive. This is just not true, lol. Yes, some languages are more similar than others. But good luck getting by with your french in Germany or vice versa, or with your german in Spain, or with your dutch in italy, etc. etc. etc. Knowing different languages is impressive. How many languages do you speak?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What do u mean by European languages lol. There is no such thing. Hungarian is way different than Portuguese. Estonian is not similar to Spanish. You don't know what you are talking about.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Try Hungarian, Danish, Polish, Finnish, Icelandic...sooo similar right?! This is not an unpopular opinion, just an obvious lack of knowledge.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I speak Russian, English and German and at one point I could speak French. I think French in itself is harder to learn than Russian, with all the grammar and exceptions

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah I also at one point could speak some broken french and I agree french is a bitch to learn. I find some languages are inherently harder to learn. However imagine you didn't speak any english and had to learn french from let's say hindi or cantonese. It would be a nightmare.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Youre confused. Hindi and mandarin ARE harder than french and german, but knowing german doesnt make french any easier, just like knowing mandarin doesnt make hindi any easier.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My aunt is Vietnamese. She married a French man and has been living with him in France since 2016. Some Viet words do come from French (colonial times), but other than that, completely different. She's quite proficient at French now. I feel you can learn any language if you constantly use it to communicate.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Your narrative is common sense, not unpopular opinion.... bur your simplification of european languages is comical

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I speak four languages that use three different alphabets (Arabic, English, Japanese, and French) and now learning Korean. I also used to think like you. But at this point in my life after meeting many people who can only speak one language and are not even fluent in it, I find anything more than bilingual impressive no matter how similar they are.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I find people who learned a language as an adult to be a certain kind of impressive, especially if it is a language very different from their native one. It is good if someone speaks more languages but it definitely seems less impressive if one's parents spoke it to them as a child or they learned it in school as a child.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's not really how it works. German and Dutch are for example close enough to after an initial treshold to go on a very steep learning curve. With English not so much and with the Latin languages not at all. Some far more exotic languages can be very easy to learn, or extremely hard because they use tone, or sounds or script that are completely alien. Closeness is a factor but not the only one and it's not as straight forward.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Sigh, you have no idea what you're talking about, and it shows. 🤦🏻‍♀️

by Anonymous 1 year ago

European languages are basically the same. For example "how are you this morning". In Estonia, it is " kuidas sul täna hommikul läheb?". In Latvia it is "kā tu šorīt jūties" In Lithuanian it is "kaip jautiesi šįryt?"

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I learned spanish at the age of 4 in an immersion school. 20 years later, I was able to pick up Portuguese to complete fluency in 2-3 years depending on where you draw the line. I then decided hey I'll learn mandarin. I gave up instantly cause of how godamn hard it was.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

European languages are not all similar. You're thinking of romantic languages (French, Spanish, Italian…) which are evolved forms of Latin, so of course they are similar and easy to pick up once you know one. (I used to be fluent in French and before starting Spanish I could read and understand 20% of it, now I can understand bits of Italian and Portuguese because the languages are similar). Not really an opinion more of a fact you're stating. It's like saying it's not as impressive to be proficient in biology and chemistry as it is chemistry and history. But you seem a bit ignorant on languages and how vastly they differ, and why some are similar.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What about Hungarian? Not like any other european language I don't think

by Anonymous 1 year ago

While Hungarian is a language spoken in Europe, it's technically a "European Language" It's in it's own separate language family (Finno-Ugric with Finnish and Estonian) So, although the surrounding languages definitely provided some vocabulary, grammatically and with the majority of the vocabulary is quite different. Also, Hungarian's kinda just hard to learn in general.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

> While Hungarian is a language spoken in Europe, it's technically a "European Language" Yep that tracks!

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Right?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm not too familiar with Hungarian but if it is completely different from your other language then I would say yes it is very impressive. I think when I said European, it was more towards people who speak English, French, Spanish & German which is not comparable to let's say if you speak English, Mandarin, Hungarian and Hindi. The latter is x10 more difficult.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

TIL Europe consists of English, French, German and Spanish speaking peoples only, not 24 official languages and over a hundred of minority ones.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm fluent in Mandarin, English, and Polish. Know a decent amount of Spanish too. I grew up in a lot of places.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

True, the time it takes to be fluent in Mandarin as a native English speaker, you could probably learn 2-3 Germanic languages in that time frame. Like you said, it's still impressive to be multilingual, but I certainly am more amazed by those who are multilingual in a diverse range of languages than those who only learn languages in their language family.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Someone who learned their second language as an adult is more impressive than someone that grew up speaking 8 languages.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Now that's something we can think about. Not what OP wrote lol

by Anonymous 1 year ago

spoken by someone who speaks like 1.1 languages

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Unless you can speak any of those clickety-clack languages you don't impress me much.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What about trilingual

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I speak English, Hawaiian, French, and a bit of Korean. A language like Italian would be cool to know, but interests me a bit less as it's so similar to French. It'd be cool to learn Mandarin or Russian.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm trilingual (English, Filipino, French). Bruh, wat ?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The Chinese dialects can be quite different from each other, like Chaozhou dialect and Mandarin are practically different languages.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Who would this opinion be unpopular with?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Op name really is spot on huh.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This is America

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Did you just compare german and french to mandarin and cantonese?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What about if you speak Czech as your 1st language, English as your 2nd, Amharic as your 3rd, and Besaya as your 4th? Would that be considered impressive by your standards?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

So what

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"Speaking multiple European languages like german, french and English isn't as impressive as speaking mandarin, hindi and English. " I agree a little of what you're saying but I have many objections. First, Hindi, Farsi, Armenian, etc are actually all related to the majority of the European languages (including English, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Greek, etc), especially the Slavic languages. Second, yeah sure many of them have similar vocabulary and sometimes grammar, but especially English compared to other languages, there's quite a lot of differences. English doesn't have noun cases, nor are the conjugations in English that difficult that you really have to learn them that much compared to others, there's no masculine and feminine, etc. For people who's native language don't have these grammar rules, it's tougher for you to try and learn them and therefore more impressive. Also there's different groups of Indo-European languages that make it hard for a speaker from one group to speak the other. Romance and Germanic languages are very different, so are they from Greek, Albanian, Slavic, Indic, etc branches.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I believe every language has its own beauty and complexity. Whether the languages are similar or not, being multilingual is always an impressive achievement.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And you speak how many languages?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Europe has many different countries, have you heard of Lithuania, Greece, Poland? Just these three countries languages differ between each other- lithuanian is a baltic language, greek is helenic and polish is a slavic language.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Also, I shall mention that its really hard to learn a similar language, because you can get confused easily, imagine that a language youre trying to learn has the same nouns as your native language, except the meaning is different. Its like looking at the word "green" written in yellow and trying to say "yellow" instead of "green."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

American detected

by Anonymous 1 year ago