<p>nko, I realize that about sanskrit. But don’t most Indo-Aryan languages stem from Sanskrit? I just find it interesting, especially since I know nothing about any of those languages.</p>
<p>I think Spanish is easy to pronounce. I’m Chinese, and I roll my R’s easily.</p>
<p>“chinese. I tried learning one sentence and messed up on every word”</p>
<p>read the title of the topic: LATIN-scripted</p>
<p>gstein, I can only attest to German from the languages I’ve been trying to learn. It’s those verbs in certain tenses that bog me down, as well as the false cognates…</p>
<p>meduh: </p>
<p>yes, like I said, its kinda like latin. Since I know hindi, I know that a lot of hindi words are derived from sanskrit.</p>
<p>I can’t roll my “r”'s at all. I had straight A+'s in Spanish, though.</p>
<p>I didn’t know Sanskrit was alive…it’s kinda like Latin-no one speaks it, except holy places.</p>
<p>I figured everyone thought about Chinese in Pinyin.</p>
<p>Well, you’ll find that Sanskrit has been going through a moderate revival over the past few years. The CBSE (main board of education in India) has it as a third language through middle school and as a second language in high school. I also know of a town in Gujarat (a state in India) where the entire population speaks sanskrit.</p>
<p><a href=“Sanskrit - Wikipedia”>Sanskrit - Wikipedia;
<p>(All hail wikipedia, greatest of all resources :))</p>
<p>I thought German developed on it’s own without the Latin influence. During the Ancient Roman Empire, Germany didn’t speak Latin. (I’m not sure, but i remeber hearing something about this.)</p>
<p>I think German is developed independently of Latin too, but don’t count my word on this. I have a friend who’s a total linguistic freak and he rambles a lot about the origins of languages, and it’s not that I don’t care (I find this stuff fascinating), I just can’t keep up with him.</p>
<p>And I wouldn’t trust some things found on Wikipedia simply because it’s Wikipedia…</p>
<p>I would think Finnish might take this one, and both Vietnamese and Bahasa Melayu are near it.</p>
<p>Germanic “barbaric” tribe invasions were actually a big cause for the fall of the Western Roman Empire.</p>
<p>German is not a Romance language, but look at its alphabet.</p>
<p>From those that I’m slightly familiar with: Enllish, German and French – the French is the hardest. German is the easiest. From other languages, I would say that Russian is of a same difficulty as French, walking together with Ukrainian but I can’t judge that as I’m a native speaker.</p>
<p>Have you taken a look at Russian grammar though? Personally, I haven’t, but I had a Russian friend who went to school in Russia through 7th grade (I knew her during 8th) and she said that she didn’t even know or remember all the rules to proper grammar.</p>
<p>I came to US in the midst of 7th grade and yes, I was studying Russian grammar extensively. It is harder than English, especially with different transformations of words and exceptions from rules.
However, I should mention that US schools don’t pay as much attention to grammar as any ex-USSR school would do (it even backtraces to hymnasiums before revolution of communism 
), as I have younger brother in school here. Well, not knowing what a perfect tense is in 3rd grade, grhm! isn’t exactly an idea of extensive grammar learning.</p>
<p>Study of grammar may not be so useful from first glance but it really helps learning another language and we were <em>required</em> to learn three: Russian(native for our region), Ukrainian, and English.</p>
<p>Chinese cant be that hard… i know an guy who has been tutored the last 4 yrs to speak chinese…and now he’s fluent with the language…its really amazing how he picked up the language…lol but funny at the same time seeing an italian guy speak chinese…</p>
<p>Being fluent with a lagnuage doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it. We speak fluent English, but have we mastered it?
English is actually based from German which Latin influenced somewhat. For example, the German Alphabet is similar to the Latin Alphabet. </p>
<p>The Fall of the Ancient Roman Empire was just loss of political power, it practically became the Byzantine Empire after Constantine announced Christianity.</p>
<p>You know what would be cool? If Latin came back to life by having a country nationalize it as their official language. The name “Roman Empire” will be used in the future because it symbolizes power.</p>
<p>I’d have to go with Spanish. I took French for a little, and I thought it was easier than Spanish (after you get the spelling and pronunciation down). I heard German is pretty easy…a lot like English. But even though you don’t want to hear it, Latin really is the hardest Romance language out there. You have to conjugate literally everything in a bazillion different declensions, conjugations, and a whole bunch of other ****.</p>
<p>Tennis girl you’re right because in Latin the syntax doesn’t matter. That means you can place words any where in the sentence as long as you decline and conjugate everything correctly. It’ll still make sense but it’ll be really hard to translate. That’s why reading Virgil, Homer, Plato, etc is really hard in Greek or Latin.</p>