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Forums - General - What do you think is the best language?

 

Your favourite language?

English 131 37.11%
 
Japanese 51 14.45%
 
Korean 4 1.13%
 
Italian 18 5.10%
 
Spanish 43 12.18%
 
French 21 5.95%
 
Russian 13 3.68%
 
Swedish 4 1.13%
 
Chinese 6 1.70%
 
Other (Post! :D) 61 17.28%
 
Total:352
Mnementh on 04 October 2012
Mr Khan said:
Mnementh said:
Mr Khan said:
sethnintendo said:
English is a bastard language.

Most languages are. Very few have endured from sufficient antiquity to be considered "pure." Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew might qualify.

Chinese borrowed some elements from other languages, but not too much. Korean and Japanese on the other hand - borrowed the chinese writing system. I can't speak for Korean, but for Japanese at least the chinese writing system doesn't match. In Chinese every written character is a syllable, in japanese not. In chinese the grammar doesn't change the words itself (suffixes or prefixes). That's why the chinese characters are working. In japanese the words are changed. That's why the japanese writing adds another alphabet for this reason. It looks ugly if you compare texts in japanese with texts in chinese. At least the japanese writing-system is a hell of a bastard.

Right, Japan adapted their writing, and I suppose quite a few of the words (or word-fragments, at least) from Chinese. But wouldn't Chinese be an "origin" tongue, set as the basis of far eastern civilization?

Chinese borrowed some words and some grammar - but which living language does not. So yes, probably Chinese can be counted as an "origin" language.



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TruckOSaurus on 04 October 2012

As a native French speaker, I don't find French all that sexy (it might be related to the Quebecois accent which can be rough sometimes). To me, Spanish is sounds the sexiest (and I also adore the British accent).



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abroZ on 04 October 2012



Think for yourself, question authority

Lafiel on 04 October 2012

I enjoy my games/tv shows/movies/books/comics most in japanese and english, so these are my favorites right now



MDMAlliance on 04 October 2012
Mnementh said:
MDMAlliance said:
Wh1pL4shL1ve_007 said:
MDMAlliance said:
Wh1pL4shL1ve_007 said:
Corey said:
English because it's used the most wordwide.


WRONG!!! Mandarin is.


Half wrong, half right.  It would most likely still be considered most "used" worldwide.  Just not "spoken."


Numbers are numbers man. Although english is the international language.


Well considering that a lot of people in China also "use" English (as well as many of the other heavily populated countries), the numbers really would be in favor of English.  No way to actually be able to count it, practically.  English is the official language of the most countries, though.  When you think about the top 10 most spoken languages, though, you start to realize how much fewer languages there are now than before.  Some languages are just dying off.  Russian and Japanese, I believe, make it to top 10.

I'm too lazy to dig up hard numbers, but I think I remember english is the language most people speak at least as a second language. As native language Mandarin and English should be more or less on equal levels. And I don't think so many countries use english as official language, most countries probably have spanish or portugese as official language. I'm not sure Russian and Japanese make it to the top 10 (most spoken in the world), but english, mandarin, spanish, portugese and french should be there for sure.


"1. Chinese (Mandarin) 1,213,000,000 2. Spanish 329,000,000 3. English 328,000,000 4. Arabic 221,000,000 5. Hindi 182,000,000 6. Bengali 181,000,000 7. Portuguese 178,000,000 8. Russian 144,000,000 9. Japanese 122,000,00010. German 90,000,000"
Did a quick search and these numbers showed up.



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Player2 on 04 October 2012

Spanish have the best insults so it wins by default. If that isn't enough we can do combos with them for a bigger effect.

Edit - There is a book that recollected the 10000 best ones. Yes, over 9000.



Chris Hu on 04 October 2012
Mnementh said:
Chris Hu said:

You really can't say that English is not very poetic when some of the most famous poems and poets are in English and where written by people that had English as their native tounge.

Most famous poems and poets? Hmm, I think Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Heine, Fontane, Tucholsky, Keller, Mörike, Brecht, Kästner, Brentano, Büchner, Bürger, Droste-Hülshoff, Eichendorff, Enzensberger, Herder, Fallersleben, Morgenstern, Ringelnatz are among the most famous poets, and the poems they have written among the most famous poems. But they didn't write in english - they made their works in german.

The language for the famous novels on the other hand seems to be russian.


German is a more poetic language but their are just as many famous poets and  poems that are written in the English language.  William Shakespeare who considered the greatest writer in the English language by many was just as much a poet as he was a playwright.  Also for what the English language lacks in poetry it makes up for by being very lyrical.  I highly doubt The Beatles or the majority of all muscial acts during the last 60 years would have been as big if they didn't write and sing their songs in English.  Even today your best bet to make it big in the music industry is by singing in English.



babuks on 04 October 2012

Arabic and English.

Both are amazing languages with rich vocabulary and easy to learn grammar.



SvennoJ on 04 October 2012
Mnementh said:
SvennoJ said:
It's definitely easier to type in English, no annoying extra bits above and below letters. 26 letters are also a lot more convenient that thousands of symbols.

My keyboard has keys for characters with extra bits above letters: öäü. Also, even english has extra bits above the ı.

I grew up in the Netherlands, which has umlauts and accents too. Apart from typing the ascii code directly I could never figure out how to consistently conjure up those letters on the standard US keyboards we had. I'm glad to get rid of them.

MDMAliance already pointed out that japanese is even easier to type, phonetic writing, sounds good to me.

Not to take anything away from German, it sounds great to me. It was annoying to learn in school though, do you really need so many verb tenses and der, den, dem, des, die, der, das, ein, einen, einem, eines, eine, einer. I always watch German movies with the German soundtrack. I can understand it, yet not going anywhere near trying to write it.

Btw everything sounds better than Dutch. (then/than, that nonsense needs to stop too :)



samuship on 04 October 2012

I guess we have more extras than anyone: áêõüç.



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