Do foreigners find your local language difficult?

Hi Porspino, To learn a language one has to be in the homogeneous environment. as we are not familiar to the language, say Chinese. As I know theirs is a difficult language to learn. If not acquired in home situation, it becomes a lot hard to 'learn' the language. Though not fluent in spoken form one can write short notes, possible questions of that particular.

I think all languages are difficult to learn in the beginning and all have their little issues. Then if a language is from a different family say learning and Japanese for and European because not only the sounds but the alphabet is different. I speak 3 European languages, and find that if say you speak one of the languages of a specific family say romance languages it is easier to pick up on the others eg if you speak Portuguese it is easier to pick up Spanish then someone who's mother tongue is from another family group like for instance Danish. I notice with things like in English the th sound is quite difficult to pick up for certain people where they will use a f or d sound instead. I am not sure if Danish has a 3rd person structure language in which if you talk to someone that is family you speak in one way with it's own pronouns and words while speaking to another the same thing will be expressed in a different way. I mean like this Woudst thou tell thy brother to await my arrival to dine. instead of Tell your bother to wait for me for dinner in English this form of writing has all but disappeared, but there are still languages that depending on who you talk to will still use the first type of language. It is good that you help foreigners with their questions about the language because it is always frightening speaking a language you are not certain of, because you just know you will make mistakes.

Hi, Porcospino, I live in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian is one of the Slavonic languages. The problem for most Westerners is that we write with Cyrillic letters. I've heard that our grammar is not easy too. I can't say nothing about it, but I've learned the French grammar for about 12 years, so... I think that the rules make things easier and when I have to memorize it's hard for me. But I think also that if you want to learn a language you can do it even if it's as distant to us as the Japanese. Good night!

It's amazing that some foreigners who visits our country, Philippines , would always learn some of our spoken national language. I think our language is simple to learn because grammars are not that much of a bother when speaking them. What is important is you get to say the important words that can convey the meaning of what you are saying.

We have a lot of foreign here speakinh in English,but they have hard time to speak oour langauge. We can spek English easy,but to them is to hard to say a word that we use too.. It takes time to learn.

Our Tagalog language in the Philippines is very easy to for foreigners to learn and understand. In fact I have seen a lot of them speak the way we do. Even when I worked in another country, there were foreigners I have met before that can speak our language or even know some words. I was more fascinated with those who can speak our language straight and sometimes even using the terms we rarely or never used as it was what we called 'deep Tagalog'. I have tried teaching some terms or phrases to foreigners because they're really eager to learn our language.

Unlike your country where there is just one language, my country,India has several local languages and several dialects which make it very difficult for any foreigner to lear,However the national language Hindi is spoken throughout the country and since its script is different from the English script, a foreigner has to live in the country for a long period to pick it up.However in the cities English is understood and spoken too so most foreigners can get along without much trouble.

I'm not really sure if foreigners find our language difficult. I'm from the Philippines and English is our second language. So when there are foreigners, we easily communicate with them by conversing in English. There's however a problem in our dialects, which we have lots of. Filipino or Tagalog is our national language but there's a big percentage of us who speak different dialects, and these I think are harder to learn. But we have lots of words that are Spanish-influenced, having been a colony of Spain for a few centuries. Malay forms the bulk also of our language. So it really depends on one's country of origin. I mean, if you're from a Spanish-speaking country, I think it wouldn't be that difficult to learn our language.

Hi Porcospino In India there are many languages and dialects. And the biggest difference comes up when you travel south (for a north Indian) or north(for a south Indian). The languages are so very different that it becomes impossible for even Indians when they change states. In our local language (oriya) we too have some issues. The sh, s are both pronounced as s. And the V is almost always pronounce as Bh... that makes it difficult many a times. The foreigners who visit India, I have found, almost all of them stick with either English or if they know, some Hindi. English is understood by many educated people and even if not, there are always some people who will act as Interpretors for them. This is possible only because the foreigners do NOT travel to interior places and the places they opt for are of course Tourist Places.

It's all Greek to me....Have you heard that? Foreigners made it up fro Greek. I think Chinese or Japanese would be difficult.

"en" and "et" are a part of french I guess which I had learned (Had a hard time learning). Yes foreigners learn a few words like "Namaste"-greeting and "Tora tora" - little bit (Not well pronounced). That's almost about it I have any foreigner speak Hindi.

My uncle who is a Dutch finds our dialect very hard to pronounce but actually like the post I have read below, most people here in the Philippines know how to converse in English so it is not that difficult for most of us to talk to foreigners whenever needed or not. We have around 170 dialects that even people in our country don't comprehend each other when we are speaking with our native tongues but we understand one another when we talk with our national language which is Tagalog or when we speak English, which is one curriculum we have to take while studying, and that every single grade or level, we have to study English and for me, it's a great way for us to talk to the world. Happy MyLotting!

Well, foreigners in my country find that it isn't that hard to learn Bahasa Indonesia. I think it is not too difficult too, and the only difference with English is the pronounciation. Bahasa Indonesia pronounces the word as it is. But sometimes foreigners complain how to make /th/ sound, because they don't have it in English :D

Of course they do,very few speak in my language cause it ain't popular.People in my country(Georgia) can speak other languages much easier then foreigners in our country.The reason its like this is its diffrent from other languages.

I think any language is difficult to learn at first. They need to familiarize with it in order to learn. But once they get accustomed to it, then learning becomes easier. A word is easier to remember when you know the meaning of it. Yes they learned to speak my language but some find it hard to pronounce it properly. But it's alright, in time they'll learn better.