any suggestions for foreign language?

wolfpiper
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:04:47 +0000

Why are people stuck on the idea that Spanish (or Germanic and Romance Languages in general) are so much easier than other languages? I’ve formally studied Japanese, Italian, and Arabic, and I couldn’t just say one is “easier” than the others. In Japanese, for example, you don’t conjugate by person, but you do have particles (and kanji). In Arabic, you conjugate differently by gender (male you, female you, he, she), but your conjugations have to all match. In Italian, the conjugation is harder than the other two, but you have cognates and the same alphabet. In fact, the only language I’ve studied that I would say was amazing difficult would be American Sign Language because the “grammar” employs concepts you can’t even began to express with other languages.

To the OP: I suggest your son try more than one language in college (or even before, if he can take community ed or cc classes), and see what he likes.