On a side note, Pamplona is a modern city and not many people know how to talk Euskara, so if you actually want to communicate with your family your best shot is Spanish. Basque is an "isolate" in linguistic terms - not related to any of it's surrounding languages.
It is not a form of Spoanish but is a stand alone language and not all that easy to learn. I'm really interested in learning Basque as well--does anyone have any credible online websites that they've used to at least begin learning? The Basque language is much older than the Spanish language, and is a very unique language. Not to discourage anyone but I would imagine it to be much harder to learn the Basque language compared to Spanish for two reasons.
First, you won't find as much study material or reference materiel to study Basque from as well as Basque language speakers that might be able to tutor you. Also, the language is a lot older and doesn't share the origins of modern languages such as English, Spanish, German, French, etc. You make some good points here; do you think the language is at risk for dying as a result of this though?
Also, do you know if the situation is similar with Catalan? You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account. Paste as plain text instead. Display as a link instead. Clear editor. Upload or insert images from URL. Is Basque harder to learn than other forms of Spanish? Reply to this topic Start new topic. Recommended Posts. RomanAnthonysMama 0 Posted September 16, Posted September 16, The notion of honorific language is challenging for learners.
Japanese speech can vary with levels of politeness, with each level having set forms and rules. English has no set way of speaking honorifically or intimately, and learners may have trouble recalling when and where to use honorific speech. Grammatically, Japanese is a mixed bag. There are only three irregular verbs and a pretty consistent structure, with verbs at the end of the sentence.
Nouns carry no gender or number, though they can function as adjectives or adverbs, which can be confusing for readers. In the Pacific battles, Japanese codebreakers cracked other allied dialects and coded language.
They could never decipher Navajo. Navajo is a verb-centred language. Even adjectives have no direct translation into Navajo; descriptions are given through verbs.
Another feature unique to Navajo is animacy, wherein nouns will take on certain verbs according to their rank in the hierarchy of animation. Humans and lightning are highest, children and big animals come next, and abstractions sit at the bottom.
Though Navajo language learning materials may be hard to come by, Rosetta Stone offers a Navajo course. Written Mandarin is pictoral and contains over 20, characters. Mandarin, like Cantonese, is a tonal language, and a misused inflection can change the meaning of a sentence. Grammatically, Mandarin is far simpler than Indo-European languages. Words, for the most part, have only one grammatical form.
Their function is shown through prepositions, word order and particles. Building and comprehending this syntax, however, takes time. There are some tough elements like Mandarin adverbs: a dozen words which have no direct English translation. At first, the language seems far easier than other East Asian tongues. No tones! No pictoral writing system!
Speaking and listening, while tone-free, can be challenging with unique sounds that are hard for English speakers to recognize, let alone master. The biggest challenge with Korean lies in the grammar. Verbs can be conjugated hundreds of ways, depending on tense, mood, age and seniority. Like Japanese, one sentence can be said in three different ways, depending on the relationship between the speaker and addressee.
Adjectives are conjugated too, with hundreds of possible endings. Also, there are also two different number systems, quite different from one another. We use cookies for analytics tracking and advertising from our partners.
For more information read our privacy policy. Trending Videos View All Videos. Aruba Feb 11, Sponsored The art of sharing places: New Hampshire Jul 16, Whereas you might expect to be able to assimilate words or so in the first two or three months of learning Spanish, German or Russian, this is a rather high bar to set for yourself with Basque.
Later on, acquiring vocabulary is made easier through a bit of analysis. Basque is called an agglutinative language, meaning it likes to use suffixes, prefixes and infixes, so new words are frequently formed by adding a common tag onto the end or the beginning or in the middle of a simpler word. Speaking of suffixes, a second point of complication comes from the fact that Basque is synthetic, rather than analytic.
In other words, Basque uses case endings to denote relationships between words, much like in the Slavic languages or German. The difference is that Basque has plenty more cases than Greek's puny four or Russian's measly six.
Other times, suffixes will denote concepts more difficult to translate directly into English. Unfortunately, the large number of suffixes makes it difficult to construct even simple sentences without tackling the issue head on, but taken slowly they can be learned fairly quickly. Finally, verbs, which are the truly difficult part of the language. In general, Indo-European languages i.
Sometimes different forms of conjugations are used if a verb is transitive it can have a direct object or intransitive it can't. Basque does all of these things, and then some. For starters, unlike in Indo-European languages, Basque doesn't just change the end of the verb, it changes the beginning too.
It also has a few more moods ex.
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