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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KitanaVorr" data-source="post: 832659" data-attributes="member: 9167">Hehe discussion on languages! One of my faves...Asian languages are pretty difficult to learn, especially the characters.  Memorizing thousands and thousands of characters...not on the to do list of most people.  So unless you've been learning from birth, I think few foreigners can really grasp the language at a level beyond grade school or even highschool at least for a reading level.I find big differences myself in the spoken.For example, Vietnamese like most asian languages is a tonal language.  Meaning of words are different based on the tone a word is spoken.  There are five different accents which determine how a word is spoken.  To make this even more confusing...its different depending on which region of the country you're from.So depending on how you say it...you can say the exact same word and still mean something different.  Call your friend a table and vice versa.And even weirder...we refer to ourselves in the third person.Thankfully, there is no conjugation...you just add a word to indicate time.I don't think American English (which is very different from British English) is easier...sometimes its more confusing because it is such a melting pot language now.  So many words in American English comes from the many different cultures which get changed until it slides effortlessly in.  American English is always changing and yes we do make verbs out of nouns constantly.There are lot of idioms and slang in American English that confuse the non-native speaker.  My mom has been trying to grasp this for many years now and still has trouble.</blockquote>

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