Learning a second language  

I am fortunate to live a country that we are exposed to several languages besides our mother tongue. Hence, from a young age, we are exposed to English and Malay which is our national language. Being a multi racial country and society, we are also exposed to multiple dialects and hence most of us could master a few. The language that I would learn though would be mandarin and japanese but I japanese a little too difficult for me.

I just speak the language of my country. I do try to learn other languages, and do speak a little bit og German and Thai. It is always very interesting to speak a language other than on'e mother tongue. The sound is different, the grammer is different, alphabets are different. So, learning a language is very educational. It is in many ways learning about the culture of another country and nationality.

i speak 3 languages...
my national language, english... and japanese...
english - we learn this from the 1st.day of school - so, some of us may find it difficult (for exams), but i think most of have no problem understading it orally..
but put it in a long passage - newspaper article, speeches.. many might complain..
but for daily conversation, i dont think the majority of our people will have much problem - that's why we're quite a popular country for tourists.. plus the fact that we were once under the british rule (until 1957) - so you might even find the older generations (like my dad) speak much, much better english than the kids nowadays..
i think it is difficult to learn a new language - if you are not exposed to it most of the time - you have to actually be using the language to master it...
that is why i say english is not difficult for most of us here, because it is everywhere.. in school, on tv, on the radio, we have english daily newspaper.. we have to use it at work..
as for the japanese language - i studied in japan for 4 years - no choice but to know the language because you cant communicate using anything else.. and when i came back - i purposely worked with japanese organizations so that i still can use the language - uptil today... 20 years of using the japanese language...

I can speak 2 languages. The language in our country and English. Though English was already like one of our language tongue so I think it doesn't count on this. But Im learning Japanese now. And it is fun. It is hard because we didn't use it everyday so we must need a lot of practice.

I have only ever formally learned French Pose. In school. It did not stay with me, it was only in one grade.
But through my travelling experience, I have become more fluid in comprehension of other languages.
And also in my heritage is the Irish language, which my Mother spoke smatterings of and also the Sicilian on the Father's side.
I love to learn and really can't say about how difficult it may be..for I love it so much! I only wish I had more time to learn at least one to at least converse.

Learning language is very hard. I envy for those who has ability to learn language easily, because there are many languages I wish I could know. I learn Arabic for many years, and yet, still unable to understand it properly. My parents speak other language called Javanese a language from Indonesia, and I can only understand a little as usually they speak Malay to us, their children. I wish i can understand more, but yes, for today, many of us need to know more than one language, its needed, not only for employment purposes, but other thing too. Happy Mylotting.

English is my native language. Throughout my life, starting in childhood, I've taken foreign language classes including French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Japanese. Japanese is the one I have spent the most time and energy studying, and I love it. I'm entering my fourth year of formal study in Japanese. A lot of people find it difficult, and this causes many people at my college to quit the Japanese program after the first year. We usually end up with about three to six people in the higher level Japanese classes. Being accustomed to studying Japanese really helped me out with Chinese, which was insane. I did really well with everything except the four tones; I think those are what really get people with the Chinese language. (Not to mention the Chinese professor we had was absolutely insane. Nobody liked her.) Asian languages in general seem to provide more difficulty for people more used to westernized languages, especially for those of us who are used to Latin and Germanic-based languages. Structure, alphabet, grammar, all of it is very different. I guess that's why I enjoy languages though - they always provide challenges for me to overcome!

My native laniguage is Spanish so i had to learn English from scratch. I think the most difficult part was the pronuciation. Also, it was hard for me to understand people but school helped me a lot. Now, I am learning Portuguese and it is a lot easier cause it is similar to spanish. I say if i learn Engilsh i could learn any language!

I think is wonderful to be able to speak a second language
and even a third or fouth language. My first language is
spanish ,and I took 3 years of french in high school. I love
to be able to communicate with others ,and I really believe
that everyone should make an effort to at least learn a second
language.

Pose-

I believe English to be the most difficult language to learn for many reasons. For starters we commonly use foreign words as "English" words that are not truly English. The word Kindergarten is German, for example. We have a smattering for French and German words that we use commonly as if they were English. We also have the difference between Standard American English and Formal English.

The origins of English also makes conjugating verbs almost a nightmare. The mixing of Anglo-Saxon words, Norman, Celtic, Jutes, etc basically gave us a brand new language that has roots in the romance languages as well as the harsher slavic languages.

In terms of learning a second language in general, I feel children should be exposed early to other languages. Our own children are learning Japanese, Manderin, and American Sign Language, as well as German and Spanish. Their father speaks fluent German and Spanish. I speak Spanish, and know a bit of German, Russian, and Latin. My husband and I know Sign and are teaching it to our children. And we're all learning Manderin and Japanese together as a family. I think that time is probably the most difficult thing about learning a language. It's just finding the time to study so that one can practice. I think classes are great, but with small children sometimes studying at home is best.

Namaste-Anora