It-tfal riedu jsibu kliem li ghandhom l-istess hoss ta’ ‘ballun’

It-tfal riedu jiktbu kliem li ghandhom l-istess hoss ta’ cavetta.

It-tfal riedu jiktbu kliem li ghandhom l-istess hoss ta’ nar.

Today we got the Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul sample.When I first gave it to her she warmed up to it instantly.She’ll actually paw at me to get it.In fact Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul is about the same as Solid Gold.She’ll only refuse it if she’s full.Wellness was good too but she didn’t warm up to the food as quick.Science Diet & IAMS she’d refuse it altogether even if she’s hungry.BUT,what I didn’t know and I did know about Diamond Recalls was that Diamond requires all of their pet food companies to perserve fish meal with Ethoxyquin which can cause dogs to get cancer.Regretfully and thankfully these were only samples from the companies and it’s good I checked it out before we got the bag of Chicken Soup as I certainly don’t want Lacey to die early because of a “dishonest” choice of food I gave her that caused her to be ill & take her life from her so no more Diamond Pet Food Brands including Artemis which I also looked into but we didn’t sample it thankfully.
Update:December 7 2009:As an update on Diamond using Ethoxyquin please see the update above this last entry to see what Chicken Soup said.Intially I took it as that Chicken Soup did use this,Ethoxyquin,because on a forum on dogster one animal owner mentioned that Diamond requires all brands to use Ethoxyquin but from the email and the website they don’t.I feel reassured knowing that I made a safe decision for Lacey.

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Tonight my mom mentioned abt going to ny for a visit.it reminded me that life is about generally for me taking chances and it was by chance that i ran away from tungland and i don’t regret once but i am glad that i did and i am very thankful my now ex velle has helped me with the help of some of his friends.i am grateful for all that they did.however this ex also moved on to another girl but at least he had the guts to tell me about it before finding out through someone else.most men don’t have that in them to tell the truth straight up.my second ex fiance certainly didn’t!But,i have finally set up an ebay selling account for books and i plan on using ebay to sell books with 10% of the income going to word of life each way by check(written by my parents)and eventually i hope to take a cooking class and eventually do acting even part time down in hawaii to help me get a job in california.if i do hunt for a man he must be local meaning on the island of oahu so my pup can approve or disapprove him.Her decision will be the final draw if I deal with a certain man or any man.I plan on taking her with me and continuing to take her to a VCA animal hospital in california.as for children right now it’s not in my interest but i will deal with children one way or another even if it’s sponsoring a child.regardless my plans are still up in the air for the time to move but hope to be out of hi before my parents get senile in their 80’s. i chose ca because it’s closer to my dad and i didn’t feel like it’s worth the pain of traveling from somewhere on the east coast to hi knowing if my dad only had 48 hours god forbid i might not make it back in time.that alone would be a burden on my heart forever.

Ryu the Maltese with Hair coloring on the ears, tail, and feet!

Please find below the letters, their stories and vocabulary for each letter tackled this week during our Maltese session.

G: Gerit u Gori għandhom gomma griza.

Ġ: Il-grieden dendlu ġolġol mal-qattus.

F: Fido ferah bil-fekruna u l-fenek.

g= gomma (rubber), griz (grey), granċ (crab), geddum (chin), gazzetta (newspaper), gaġġa (cage)

ġ = ġebla (stone), ġelat (ice-cream), ġnien (garden), ġobon (cheese), ġurdien (mouse), ġemel (camel)

f = farfett (butterfly), flus (money), fenek (rabbit), fanal (lamp), fjura (flower), fellus (chick)

Thanks to this system the children are building up a vast vocabulary in the Maltese language.  Being a phonetic language, most children are also trying to sound out the words learnt to write them down.  A very big well done to all those trying.:-)

This past weekend my parents went to the Neil Blaisdell Center and they had all different types of food to try out.So happened that Waggin’ Tail Bakery was there.Mom and Dad brought home a Waggin’ Tail Bakery Wheat Free Chicken Flavor Treat.Well,when we first gave these Waggin’ Bakery Wheat Free Chicken Treats she would sniff at it but wouldn’t touch it.The magic that got her to eat it was smearing the treat that’s shaped like a bone with Chicken & Sweet Potatoes.It was only then she ate it!Same thing with popcorn.she’ll only touch it if there’s Chicken & Sweet Potatoes.

It was only recently I’ve noticed since I’ve been giving her more sweet potatoes that her bowels are not on the soft side.Now,it’s more firm.Halo said that they are sending out the sample today so we’ll see how she reacts to it as it has sweet potatoes listed as a ingredient.Overall,Lacey is doing great!Her fur is getting more soft which means more matted fur to brush out but we can’t have it all right??!Lacey is also able to jump off the couch now.Something she wouldn’t do before!

Tonight my brother(Lance) was complaining about school and how this professor doesn’t even give out study guides yet expects each student remember what is in about six chapters per test..My response:I went to school but I knew my limits and how frustrated I was going to get.Yes,I knew there was going to be definite frustration for me because of my disabilities academically which is why my parents never mainstreamed except once that I remember.They claim it never happened but I remember it.
However I don’t regret going to school and as a surprise to many I actually enjoy and love taking care of my loving companion pup Lacey 24/7/365 days a year.I have never once said I don’t want to take care of her.In fact I am so devoted to giving her a life of many fulfilling experiences I am willing and specifically told my parents if she should ever get so ill that you may want to put her down to rest I told them don’t.Let her live till the very life is out of her(her very last breath is taken on her very own but not until then.I want her to die at her home in peace when she’s ready.I know that it’s not for many many years and hope we have many more blessing moments together)

Caution: This post is very long. It runs to 48 pages on the Net.

This is a continuation of the earlier post. I split it up into two parts because it had gotten too long.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed: Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months to 1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months to 1 year. Level 3 languages = 1 to 2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

NE Caucasian, NW Caucasian and Kartvelian

Of course the Caucasian languages like Tsez, Tabasaran, Georgian, Chechen, Ingush, Abkhaz and Circassian are some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Tsez has 126 different cases! Tabasaran is rated the 3rd most complex grammar in the world, with 48 different noun cases.

Tsez, Tabasaran, Chechen, Circassian, Ingush and Abkhaz are rated 5, hardest of all.

One problem with Georgian is the strange alphabet: ქართულია ერთ ერთი რთული ენა. It also has lots of glottal stops that are hard for many foreigners to speak, a single verb can have up to 12 different parts, similar to Polish, consonant clusters can be huge – up to 8 consonants stuck together, and there are 6 cases and 6 tenses. Georgian is said to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce.

Georgian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ubykh, a Caucasian language of Turkey, is now extinct, but I believe there is one second language speaker. It has more consonants than any language on Earth.

Ubykh is rated 5, hardest of all.

American Indian Languages

American Indian languages are also notoriously difficult, though  few try to learn them. You almost really need to learn these as a kid. It’s going to be quite hard for an adult to get full competence in them.

Dene-Caucasian

Na-Dene

Navajo has long, short and nasal vowels, a tone system, and a grammar totally unlike anything in Indo-European. A stem of only four letters or so can take enough affixes to fill a whole line of text. Some Navajo dictionaries have thousands of entries of verbs only, with no nouns. A verb has no particular form like in English – to walk. Instead, it assumes various forms depending on whether or not the action is completed, incomplete, in progress, repeated, habitual, one time only, instantaneous, or simply desired.

For instance, the verb ndideesh means to pick up or to lift up. But it varies depending on what you are picking up.

For instance, ndideeshtiil – to pick up a slender stiff object (key, pole), ndideeshleel – to pick up a slender flexible object (branch, rope), ndideesh’aal – to pick up a roundish or bulky object (bottle, rock), ndideeshgheel – to pick up a compact and heavy object (bundle, pack) , ndideeshjol – to pick up a non-compact or diffuse object (wool, hay) , ndideeshteel – to pick up something animate (child, dog), ndideeshnil – to pick up a few small objects (a couple of berries, nuts), ndideeshjih – to pick up a large number of small objects (a pile of berries, nuts), ndideeshtsos -to pick up something flexible and flat (blanket, piece of paper), ndideeshjil - to pick up something I carry on my back, ndideeshkaal – to pick up anything in a vessel, ndideeshtloh – to pick up mushy matter (mud).

But picking up is only one way of handling the 12 different consistencies. One can also bring, take, hang up, keep, carry around, turn over, etc. objects. There are about 28 different verbs one can use for handling objects. If we multiply these verbs by the consistencies, there are over 300 different verbs used just for handling objects.

In Navajo textbooks, there are conjugation tables for inflecting words, but it’s pretty hard to find a pattern there. One of the worst things about Navajo is that every little morpheme you add to a word seems to change everything else around it, even in both directions.

It is even said that Navajo children have a hard time learning Navajo as compared to children learning other languages, but Navajo kids definitely learn the language.

Similarly with Hopi below, even linguists find even the best Navajo grammars difficult or even impossible to understand.

Navajo is rated 5, hardest of all.

Hopi is so difficult that even grammars describing the language are almost impossible to understand.

Hopi is rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavey, a Na-Dene language of Canada, is hard to learn. It is similar to Navajo and Apache. Verbs take up to 15 different prefixes. It also uses a completely different alphabet, a syllabic one designed for Canadian Indians.

Slavey is rated 5, hardest of all.

Salishan

The Salishan languages spoken in the Northwest have a long reputation for being hard to learn, in part because of long strings of consonants, in one case 11 consonants long. The Salish languages are, like Chukchi, polysynthetic. Some translations treat all Salish words are either verbs or phrases. Some say that Salish languages do not contain nouns, though this is controversial. Many of the vowels and consonants are not present in most widely spoken languages.

Nuxálk is a notoriously difficult Salishan Amerindian language spoken in British Colombia. It is famous for having some really wild words and even sentences that don’t seem to have any vowels in them at all. For instance, xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ – he had a bunchberry plant.

The Salishan languages are rated rated 5, hardest of all.

Kootenai

Yet the Salishans always considered the neighboring language Kootenai to be too hard to learn. Kootenai is an isolate spoken in Idaho.

Kootenai is rated 5, hardest of all.

Algonquian

Ojibwa and Cree are said to be very hard to learn. They are written in a variety of different ways with different alphabets and syllabic systems, complicating matters even further. They are both polysynthetic and have long, short and nasal vowels and aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants. Words are divided into metrical feet, the rules for determining stress placement in words are quite complex and there is lots of irregularity. Vowels fall out a lot, or syncopate, within words.

Cree adds noun classifiers to the mix, and both nouns and verbs are marked as animate or inanimate. In addition, verbs are marked for transitive and intransitive. In addition, verbs get different affixes depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses.

Cree and Ojibwa ares rated 5, hardest of all.

Uto-Aztecan

Numic

Comanche is legendary for being one of the hardest Indian languages of all to learn. Reasons are unknown, but all Amerindian languages are quite difficult. I doubt if Comanche is harder than other Numic languages. Bizarrely enough, Comanche has very strange sounds called voiceless vowels, which seems to be an oxymoron, as vowels would seem to be inherently voiced. English has something akin to voiceless vowels in the words particular and peculiar, where the bolded vowels act something akin to a voiceless vowel.

Comanche is rated 5, hardest of all.

Quechuan

Quechua is said to be very hard to learn. Some say that Quechua speakers spend their whole lives learning the language.

Quechua is rated 5, hardest of all.

Oto-Manguean

Chinantec, an Indian language of southwest Mexico, is very hard for non-Chinantecs to learn. The tone system is maddeningly complex, and the syntax and morphology is very intricate.

Chinantec is rated 5, hardest of all.

Iroquoian

Cherokee is said to be very hard to learn. In addition to everything else, it has a completely different alphabet. It’s polysynthetic, to make matters worse. It is possible to write a Cherokee sentence that somehow lacks a verb. There are five categories of verb classifiers. Verbs needing classifiers must use one. Each regular verb can have an incredible 21,262 inflected forms! All verbs contain a verb root, a pronominal prefix, a modal suffix and an aspect suffix. In addition, verbs inflect for singular, plural and also dual. Number is marked for inclusive vs. exclusive.

Cherokee also have lexical tone, with complex rules about how tones may combine with each other. Tone is not marked in the orthography.

Cherokee is rated 5, most difficult of all.

Australian

Australian Aborigine languages are said to be some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn, like Amerindian or Caucasian languages.

All Australian languages are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Afroasiatic

Semitic

Arabic has some very crazy manners of noun declension, even in the plural. For instance, the word girls changes in an unpredictable way when you say one girl, two girls and three girls, and there are two different ways to say two girls depending on context.

Further, it is full of irregular plurals similar to octopus and octopi in English, whereas these forms are rare in English. The language is full of stuff like that. When you say I love you to a man, you say it one way, and when you say it to a woman, you say it another way. On and on. There are 28 different symbols in the alphabet, three different ways to write each symbol depending on its place in the word, and on top of that, there are many different scripts. The laryngeals, uvulars and glottalized sounds are hard for many foreigners to make.

Arabic is at least as idiomatic as French or English, so it order to speak it right you have to learn all of the expressionistic nuances.

To attain anywhere near native speaker competency in Egyptian Arabic, you probably need to live in Egypt for ten years, but Arabic speakers say that few if any second language learners ever come close to native competency. There is a huge vocabulary, and most words have a wealth of possible meanings.

Arabic is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Maltese is a strange language, basically an Arabic language that has very heavy influence from non-Arabic tongues. It shares the problem of Gaelic that often words look one way and are pronounced another.

Maltese is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Hebrew is said to be hard to learn, but I am not sure why. Part of the problem may be the writing system, which leaves out vowels if I am not mistaken.

Hebrew gets a 4 for extremely difficult.

Dravidian

Malayalam, a Dravidian language of India, was recently rated the hardest language of all to learn by the World Language Research Foundation. Tamil, a Dravidian language, is probably close to Malayalam in difficulty. Tamil has an incredible 247 characters in its alphabet. In addition, as with other languages, words are written one way and pronounced another. Both Tamil and Malayalam are very hard to pronounce and have complicated scripts.

Malayalam and Tamil are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Altaic

Most agree that Korean is a hard language to learn.

The alphabet, Hangul at least is reasonable; in fact, it is quite elegant. But there are 4 different Romanizations- Lukoff, Yale, Horne, and McCune-Reischauer – which is preposterous. It’s best to just blow off the Romanizations and dive straight into Hangul. This way you can learn Romanization later, and you won’t mess up your Hangul with spelling errors, as can occur if you go from Romanization to Hangul. Hangul can be learned very quickly, but learning to read Korean books and newspapers fast is another matter altogether.

Bizarrely, there are two different numeral sets used, but one is derived from Chinese so should be familiar to Chinese, Japanese or Thai speakers who use similar or identical systems.

Korean has a similar problem with Japanese, that is, if you mess up one vowel in sentence, you render it incomprehensible. Korean has a wealth of homonyms, and this is one of the tricky aspects of the language. Any given combination of a couple of characters can have multiple meanings. Pronunciation is easy, with the exception of morphing consonants at the end of the word that slide into the next word. One problem is that the b,  p,  j, ch, t and d are pronounced differently than their English counterparts.

Meanwhile, Korean has an honorific system that is even wackier than that of Japanese. However, the younger generation is not using the honorifics so much, and a foreigner isn’t expected to know the honorific system anyway.

Korean is rated by language professors as being one of the hardest languages to learn.

Korean is rated 5, hardest of all.

Japonic

Japanese also uses a symbolic alphabet, which is odd in that even Japanese speakers will sometimes encounter written Japanese and will say that they don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t mean that they mispronounce it; that would make sense. I mean they don’t have the slightest clue how to say the word! This problem is essentially nonexistent in a language like English.

There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way. Due to the large number of frequently used symbols, it’s said that even Japanese adults learn a new symbol a day a ways into adulthood.

The Japanese writing system is probably crazier than the Chinese writing system. Japanese borrowed Chinese characters. But then they gave each character several pronunciations, and in some cases as many as 24. Next they made two syllabaries using another set of characters, then over the next millenia came up with all sorts of crazy and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse.

Chinese uses 5-6,000 characters regularly, while Japanese only uses around 2,000. But in Chinese, each character has only one or maybe two pronunciations. In Japanese, there are complicated rules about when and how to combine the hiragana with the characters. These rules are so hard that many native speakers still have problems with them. There are also personal and place names (proper nouns) which are given completely arbitrary pronunciations often totally at odds with the usual pronunciation of the character.

Speaking Japanese is not as difficult as everyone says, and many say it’s fairly easy. However, there is a problem similar to English in that one word can be pronounced in multiple ways, like read and read in English. There is also a class of Japanese called “honorifics” that is quite hard to master. These typically effect verbs. Honorifics vary depending on who you are and who you are talking to. In addition, gender comes into play. One wild thing about Japanese is counting forms. You actually use different numeral sets depending on what it is you are counting! There are dozens of different ways of counting things.

The grammar is quite complicated, one of the most complex on Earth. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs. Meanwhile, honorifics change the behavior of all words. There are particles like ha and ga that have many different meanings. One problem is that everything that all noun modifiers, even phrases, must precede the nouns they are modifying.

In this sentence:

The plane that was supposed to arrive at midnight, but which had been delayed by bad weather, finally arrived at 1 AM.

Everything underlined must precede the noun plane:

Was supposed to arrive at quarter to three, but had been delayed by traffic accident the plane finally arrived at three-thirty.

Speaking Japanese is one thing, but reading and writing it is a whole new ballgame. It’s perfectly possible to know the meaning of every kanji and the meaning of every word in a sentence, but you still can’t figure out the meaning of the sentence because you can’t figure out how the sentence is stuck together in such a way as to create meaning.

However, Japanese grammar has the advantage of being quite regular. For instance, there are only two irregular verbs.

Like Chinese, it has short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. However, while Chinese is forgiving of errors, if you mess up one vowel in a Japanese sentence, you may end up with incomprehension.

The real problem is that the Japanese you learn in class is one thing, and the Japanese of the street is another. One problem is that in street Japanese, the subject is typically not stated in a sentence. Instead it is inferred through such things as honorific terms or the choice of words you used in the sentence. Probably no one goes crazier on negatives than the Japanese. Particularly in academic writing, triple and quadruple negatives are common, and can be quite confusing.

Yet there are problems with the agglutinative nature of Japanese. It’s a completely different syntactic structure than English. Often if you translate a sentence from Japanese to English it will just look like a meaningless jumble of words. Although many Japanese learners feel it’s fairly easy to learn, surveys of language professors continue to rate Japanese as one of the hardest languages to learn. However, it’s generally agreed that Japanese is easier to learn than Korean.

Japanese is rated 5, hardest of all.

Turkic

Turkish is often considered to be hard to learn, and it’s rated one of the hardest in surveys of language teachers, however, it’s probably easier than its reputation made it out to be. It is agglutinative, so you can have one long word where in English you might have a sentence of shorter words. Many words have more than one meaning.

There is no verb to be, which is hard for many foreigners. Instead, the concept is wrapped onto the subject of the sentence as a -dim or -im suffix. Turkish is an imagery-heavy language, and if you try to translate straight from a dictionary, it often won’t make sense. However, the suffixation in Turkish, along with the vowel harmony, are both very precise, and there are few if any exceptions. The Roman alphabet and almost mathematically precise grammar really help out.

Turkish is only rated 2, or moderately easy.

Finno-Ugric

Finnic

Finnish is very hard to learn, and even long-time learners often still have problems with it. You have to know exactly which grammatical forms to use where in a sentence. In addition, Finnish has 15 cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. This is hard to learn for speakers coming from a language with little or no case.

For instance, talo is the house, talon – house’s, taloa – some of the house, taloksi – into/as the house, talossa – in the house, talosta – from inside the house, taloon – into the house, talolla – on to the house, talolta – from beside the house, talolle – to the house, taloista – from the houses and taloissa – in the houses.

A simple adjective + noun noun phrase of two words can be conjugated in up to 100 different ways.

As with Hungarian, words can be very long. For instance, lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas which means a non-commissioned officer cadet learning to be an assistant mechanic for airplane jet engines.

Finnish, oddly enough, always puts the stress on the first syllable. Finnish vowels will be hard to pronounce for most foreigners. However, Finnish has the advantage of being pronounced precisely as it is written. This is also part of the problem though, because if you don’t say it just right, the meaning changes. And Finns don’t understand foreigners very well, because they are not used to non-native speakers trying to speak their language. So, similarly with the Poles, when you mangle their language, you will only achieve incomprehension.

As in many Asian languages, there are no masculine or feminine pronouns. One redeeming feature of Finnish is a complete lack of consonant clusters.

Finnish is rated the second hardest to learn by language teachers. Estonian has similar difficulties with Finnish, since they are closely related. However, on the plus side, Finnish is very regular.

Finnish is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ugric

It’s widely agreed that Hungarian is one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Even language professors agree, as they rate it second hardest to learn. For one thing, there are many different forms for a single word via word modification. This enables the speaker to make his intended meaning very precise. Hungarian is said to have an incredible 35 different cases, but the actual number is probably just 18. Verbs change depending on whether the object is definite or indefinite. There are 5 different types of verb conjugations. Nearly everything in Hungarian is inflected, similar to Lithuanian or Czech.

There are also very long words such as megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. Being an agglutinative language, that word is made up of many small parts of words, or morphemes. That word means something like for your (you all possessive) repeated pretensions at being  impossible to desecrate.

Another long word is töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek.  And I’m not even really sure what that means.

The preposition is stuck onto the word in this language, and this will seem strange to speakers of languages with free prepositions.

Hungarian is full of synonyms, similar to English.

For instance, there are 78 different words that mean to move: halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál , andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál , bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér , botladozik, őgyeleg, slattyog, bandukol, lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng, csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol , tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog and mozgolódik .

Only about five of those terms are archaic and seldom used, the rest are in current use.

In addition, while most languages have names for countries that are pretty easy to figure out, in Hungarian even languages of nations are hard because they have changed the names so much. Italy becomes  Olazorszag, Germany becomes Nemetzorsag, etc.

As in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, word order is relatively free in Hungarian. Further, there are quite a few dialects in Hungarian. Native speakers can pretty much understand them, but foreigners often have a lot of problems. Accent is very difficult in Hungarian due to the bewildering number of rules to determine accent. In addition, there are exceptions to all of these rules. Hungarian spelling is also very strange for non-Hungarians.

There are many irregularities in inflections, and even Hungarians have to learn how to spell of these in school and have a hard time learning this. Hungarian phonetics is also strange, and to make matters worse, there is tons of slang. One of the problems with Hungarian phonetics is vowel harmony. Since you stick morphemes together to make a word, the vowels that you have used in the first part of the word will influence the vowels that you will use to make up the morphemes that occur later in the word. The vowel harmony gives Hungarian the “singing effect” when it is spoken. The gy sound is hard for many foreigners to make.

It’s hard to say, but Hungarian is probably harder to learn than even the hardest Slavic languages like Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Polish.

Hungarian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Sino-Tibetan

Sinitic

It’s fairly easy to learn to speak Mandarin at a basic level, though the tones can be tough. This is because the grammar is very simple. Short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. But with Japanese, you can keep learning, and with Chinese, you sort of hit a wall, often because the syntactic structure is so strangely different from English (isolating).

The alphabet uses symbols, so it’s not even a real alphabet. There are 85,000 symbols, but you only use about 3,000 of them, and many Chinese don’t even know 1,000. It’s a real problem when you encounter a symbol you don’t know because there is no way to sound out the word. You are really and truly lost and screwed. Mandarin is similar to German in that you need to learn quite a bit of vocabulary just to speak simple sentences.

The tones are often quite difficult for a Westerner to pick up. If you mess up the tones, you have said a completely different word. Often foreigners who know their tones well nevertheless do not say them correctly, and hence, they say one word when they mean another.

A major problem with Chinese is homonyms. To some extent, this is true in many tonal languages. Chinese being monosyllabic, there is a limited repertoire of sounds that can be used. At a certain point, all of the sounds are used up, and you are into the realm of homophones. Tonal distinctions is one way that monosyllabic languages attempt to deal with the homophone problem, but it’s not good enough, since Chinese still has many homophones, and meaning is often discerned by context. Chinese, like French and English, is heavily idiomatic.

It’s little known, but Chinese also uses different forms to count different things, like Japanese. Many agree that Chinese is the hardest to learn of all of the major languages. Language professors have rated Chinese as the hardest language on Earth to learn.

It gets a 5 rating for hardest of all.

However, Cantonese and Min Nan (Taiwanese) are even harder to learn than Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones to Mandarin’s 4, and in addition, they throw in a lot of traditional Chinese characters in their writing. Min Nan also has a more complex tone system. In addition, Cantonese has verbal aspect, possibly up to 20 different varieties. Furthermore, since non-Mandarin characters are not standardized, Cantonese cannot be written down as it is spoken.

Cantonese and Min Nan get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Austroasiatic

Mon-Khmer

Vietnamese is also hard to learn because to an outsider, the tones seem hard to tell apart. Therefore, foreigners often make themselves difficult to understand by not getting the tone precisely correct. It also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on. Vietnamese grammar, like Chinese, is simple, and reading Vietnamese is pretty easy once you figure out the tone marks. It’s monosyllabic like Chinese. However, the simple grammar is relative, as you can have 25 or more forms just for I, the 1st person singular pronoun.

Vietnamese gets 4, extremely difficult.

For unknown reasons, Khmer has a reputation for being hard to learn. I understand that it has one of the most complex honorifics systems of any language on Earth. Speaking it is not so bad, but reading and writing it is said to be pretty difficult.

Khmer gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Hmong-Mien

Hmong is widely spoken in this part of California, but it’s not easy to learn. There are eight tones, and they are not easy to figure out. It’s not obviously related to any other major language but the obscure Mien.

It has some very strange consonants called voiceless nasals. We have them in English as allophones – the m in small is voiceless, but in Hmong, they put them at the front of words – the m in the word Hmong is voiceless. These can be very hard to pronounce.

Hmong gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Austro-Tai

Austronesian

Malayo-Polynesian

Bahasa Indonesia and the related Malaysian are fairly easy languages to learn. For one thing, the grammar is dead simple. Verbs are not marked for tense at all.

Bahasa Indonesia and Malaysian get a 1 rating for very easy.

However, Tagalog is considerably harder. Tagalog is an ergative-absolutive language, not a nominative accusative language. In the former, phrases are marked not according to subject or object as in the latter, but according to whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. The subject of a transitive verb is marked one way, and the subject of an intransitive verb and object of a transitive verb are marked a second way.

Compared to many European languages, Tagalog syntax, morphology and semantics are often quite different. Unlike Malay, verbs conjugate quite a bit in Tagalog. However, articles and creation of adjectives from nouns is very easy. Compare ganda = beauty (noun) and maganda = beautiful (adjective).

Tagalog gets a 3 rating, moderately difficult.

Maori and other Polynesian languages are said to be quite hard to learn. I’m not sure why that is exactly.

Maori gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Tai-Kadai

Thai is a pretty hard language to learn. There are over 100 symbols in the odd script, there are no spaces between words in the script, and vowels can come before, after, above or below consonants in any given syllable. There are five tones, including a neutral tone. Tones are determined by a variety of complex things, including a combination of tone marks, the class of consonants, if the syllable ends in a sonorant or a stop, and what the tone of the preceding syllable was.

There is a system of noun classifiers for counting various things, similar to Japanese. In addition, common to many Asian languages, there is a complicated honorifics system. The vowels are different than in many languages, and there are some odd diphthongs: eua, euai, aui and uu. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants.

Consonant pronunciations vary depending on the location of the syllable in the word – for instance, s can change to t. There are many vowels which are spoken but not written. There are many consonants that are pronounced the same – for instance, there are 6 different t’s, not counting the s’s that turn into t’s. The Thai script is definitely one of the most difficult phonetic scripts. Nevertheless, the Thai script is easier to learn than the Japanese or Chinese ones. In spite of all of that, the syntax is simple, like Chinese.

Thai gets a 4 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Niger-Kordofanian

Niger-Congo

Bantu

Bakjalukasha, a Bantu language spoken in Ivory Coast, is also said to be hard to learn. Many of these African languages are tonal and can be quite complex. They also divide nouns into different categories (noun classes) like Caucasian languages do. Further, they are often seriously inflected.

Bakjalukasha gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

The African Bantu language Ga has a bad reputation for being a tough nut to crack. It is spoken in Ghana by about 600,000 people. It has 2 tones and engages in a strange behavior called tone terracing that is common to many West African languages. It also has many sounds that are not in any Western languages.

Ga gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Khoisan

!Xóõ (Taa) is a notoriously difficult Khoisan language with the impossible to comprehend clicks. Nguni and Xhosa, two languages of South Africa, are quite difficult, with up to nine click sounds in both. Clicks do not exist in other languages, and are extremely difficult to learn. Even native speakers mess up the clicks sometimes.

Taa, Nguni and Xhosa all get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Zulu and siNdebele also have these odd sounds. These languages also make plurals by changing the prefix of the noun, and the manner varies according the noun class. If you want to look up a word in the dictionary, first of all you need to discard the prefix. For instance, in siNdebele, river = umfula, rivers = imifula; but stone = ilitshe, stones = amatshe; yet tree = isihlahla, trees = izihlahla .

Zulu has pitch accent, tones and clicks. There are 9 different pitch accents, 4 tones and 3 clicks, but each click can be pronounced in 5 different ways. However, tones are not marked in writing, so it’s hard to figure out when to use them. Zulu also has depressor consonants, which lower the tone in the vowel in the following syllable. In addition, Zulu has multiple gender – 15 different genders. And some nouns behave like verbs.

Zulu and siNdebele both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Eskimo-Aleut

Inuktitut is said to be extremely hard to learn. Inuktitut is polysynthetic, and roots can take many suffixes, in some cases up to 700. However, suffixation is extremely regular. In a typical long Inuktitut text, 92% of words will occur only once. This is quite different from English and many other languages where certain words occur very frequently or at least frequently. Certain fully inflected verbs can be analyzed both as verbs and as nouns.

Inuktitut is also rated one by linguists one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce. Inuktitut may be as hard to learn as Navajo.

Inuktitut is rated 5, hardest of all.

Paleosiberian

Chukchi is one of the few polysynthetic languages, so clearly it must be hard to learn. In polysynthetic languages, very long words can denote an entire sentence, and it’s quite hard to take the word apart into its parts and figure out exactly what they mean and how they go together.

Chukchi gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Basque

Basque, of course, is just a crazy language altogether. There are 24 cases, and the verbs are quite complex. This is because it is an ergative language, so verbs vary according to the number of subjects and the number of objects and if any third person is involved.

If you don’t grow up speaking Basque, it’s hard to attain native speaker competence. It’s quite a bit easier to write in Basque than to speak it. Nevertheless, Basque verbs are quite regular. In fact, the entire language is quite regular. In addition, most words above the intermediate level are borrowings from large languages, so once you reach intermediate Basque, the rest is not that hard. In addition, on the plus side, pronunciation is straightforward.

Basque is rated 5, hardest of all.

when u said lets go get a cone i thought u meant ice cream

ah loves ice creem

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Breaking News – Custody battle rages over Lady GaGa and Chewbacca’s
child. No word yet as to which parent gave birth.

heers da dad

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Yesterday we went to the Pet Spot in Ward Warehouse to try get Lacey canned food from Wellness.I wanted to find out is it really the sweet potato and that most of the foods are too rich for her or was it just that specific recipe(Super5Mix for Small Breeds).I got her Chicken & Sweet Potato but before I left the house in the morning I got her organic food ready for her(abt 3 Tablespoons)in case she was hungry.Indeed she was because when I got back the dog food was not close together and so I knew that she ate.She didn’t eat a lot since she probably knew I was coming home and waiting for the good food.I gave her the Chicken & Sweet Potato to see how her tummy reacted.Sure enough her bowel was still on the soft side but not as much as with the dry food from Wellness.My aunty thought it was the table food that did it and I told her no it’s not and she asks how do you know that?I said I just know.As the main person who cares for Lacey I tend to know her reactions to certain things,food,what makes her bark etc more than most people.And I knew that the food I gave her wouldn’t make her bowel soft.Even with organic dog food(Solid Gold) + table food wouldn’t make her bowels too much on the soft side.The second time she made a bowel it was firm and I knew that was from her Solid Gold.She enjoyed the Chicken & Sweet Potato and I do think it’s the Sweet Potato in most of the Wellness foods she can’t have besides the treats.But just to be sure on that next month if we still haven’t found a second brand for her I am going to try the grain free canned dog food from Wellness to see her reaction.

A note on Halo:While Halo is a good reccomended brand for organic dog food they are not efficient when it comes to customer service.I had requested a sample of their adult dog food almost a week ago and it hasn’t came in the mail.I won’t be giving them a call back.We won’t be buying their food either.
Update on Halo Pet Sample:Please see Lacey Sweet Potato Update to find the latest on sampling their food

“Jane, come out to Long Island for a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving.”

“Thanks Bob.  We’re not “dating.”  So, I shouldn’t do holiday fraternizing  with your family.  But, come to think of it, after five years, I should get a gold watch or a plaque .” (other than arterial sclerosis.)

“Ha Ha.  Everyone loves you.  There’ll  be dogs.”

“Listen, I have other plans.  I’m going to go to the Harvard Club and sit and the “orphan’s table.”  Sorry, they call it the “community table.”  Women in funny hats.”

“I’ll pick you up at 2:00 he says.  At your mother’s place.  Try arguing with an attorney.

He shows up promptly in a blue blazer looking unusually handsome.

“Some irises.”

“These are my mother’s favorite flowers! How did you know?”

He smiles and looks unusually charming.  (Does he know her maiden name too?)

We walk into my mother’s bedroom, her new throne, and take our positions on the bed with her.We watch the “Toy Dog” segment of the Westminster Dog show on TV.  This is a sacred ritual and no one is allowed to speak until the “Best of Show” is revealed.

“Remember, Jane, when we there in person?  Then we went downstairs and saw all the dogs,”  she breaks the silence.  We all think about happier days and try to avoid looking at the delicate floral urn on my mother’s dresser that’s housing Daisy’s ashes.

The three of us are mourning the death of my mother’s Maltese dog, Daisy, her beloved companion, who died this past May.  We look at the pictures stationed around the room–many of which were shot by Bob.  My mother’s bedroom is a shrine, not to the memories of her two grown children and grandchildren, but to her departed Maltese. She now exists with  the two mechanical cats that I purchased in a drugstore–Miss Kitty and LuLu, “The Non-Life Breed”.   My mother continues to babble about how the “girls”  are watching the show, but what they really love are cartoons and they have their own schedule.  “One ran out of batteries so she’s just relaxing now.  We’ll have to deal with that situation.”

I pretend not to hear the request for batteries.  I’ve been giving my mother dinner for the past three hours, and I’m about to pass out from exhaustion.  So far every aid has quit, but it’s difficult for a daughter to turn in her walking papers.  Throughout dinner, she continually lapsed into anger. I don’t know when my mother will erupt.  Constantly walking on eggshells makes me feel like I will break.  I look at her skin and see that  is becoming translucent.  There is a sad beauty in what is left–even in a fading leaf.

I drift of to sleep to the sound of a Purina Dog Chow commercial.  I’m dreaming.  A really handsome man is walking me on a pink rhinestone leash!   (I’m not going to tell you whether I’m wearing my dog coat and booties…) Yippee!  There is an afterlife.

“Let’s go Jane”  I hear Bob command.  “We have a train to catch.”

I feel relief as I peel myself off my mother’s bed.  I kiss her goodbye.  She is angry, but resigned.  I wonder if this is our last Thanksgiving together.

We emerge from the elevator onto the street.  I feel like I’m under a spell.  The cold air hits my face.  I’m filled with grief, exhaustion, and loneliness.  I can hardly stand.

Bob starts to babble with his nose in a train schedule,” Well, we can catch the 6, then the D, then the trains to Sysosset.  They run pretty frequently…”

I erupt in anger, ” Listen, let’s take a taxi to Penn Station.  I’ll pay for it. I”m exhausted.  Or maybe I’ll just go to the  “orphans” table.”

“No that’s OK.”  Silence.  I can be a jerk sometimes.

We sit in silence on the train on our way  to the “perfect” Thanksgiving.  In 45 minutes, we arrive at the “perfect” home  in North Shore horse country as  the “perfect” couple from NYC.

We walk up the stone steps and Bob turns to me and hurls ” You know, Jane, you really have some of your mother’s characteristics.”

I think about the orphan turkey that I lost…

Beneful Simmered Turkey
Pumpkin Barley with Turkey
Leftover Pumpkin filling
Pumpkin Patch Dog Biscuits
Coconut Water
and of course some table food depending what there is

Tonight we made Lacey Pumpkin Patch Dog Biscuits.This is one of two recipes for her Thanksgiving Treats.
Pumpkin Patch Dog Biscuits
Makes up to 24 dog biscuits
1 1/2 c Whole Wheat Flour
1 T brown sugar
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
4 T butter flavored crisco
1/2 c canned pumpkin
1 egg
1/2 c buttermilk
Preheat oven to 400.In the first bowl,combine 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour,1/2 tsp of cinnamon,1/2 tsp of nutmeg,and cut in shortening 4T of crisco.
In bowl 2,Beat egg with milk(buttermilk),1/2 c pumpkin.Then combine with flour by mixing well.Stir enough till dough becomes soft.Drop by tablespoons onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake 12-15 minutes.Cool and serve.
One thing I liked about this recipe was that it’s very easy for her to chew not hard at all.It’s also tasty too.We’ll make these Pumpkin Patch Dog Biscuits every Thanksgiving for Lacey since she likes it so much!

P: pupa (doll), pala (spade), pasta (cup cake), platt (plate), pjanu (piano), papoċċ (bed slipper), pinzell (paintbrush), pultruna (arm chair), pulizija (policeman)

Q: qmis (shirt), qattusa (cat), qalziet (trousers), qasrija (flowering pot), qampiena (bell), qarnita (octopus), qawsalla (rainbow)

J: jien (me), jasal (he arrives), jorqod (he sleeps)

G= gomma (eraser/rubber), griz (grey), granċ (crab), geddum (chin), gazzetta (newspaper), gaġġa (cage)

Ġ = ġebla (stone), ġelat (ice-cream), ġnien (garden), ġobon (cheese), ġurdien (mouse), ġemel (camel) 

p: Pietru pitter pittura bil-pinzell.

q: Il-qassis sab qattusa bil-qanpiena.

j: Josef jaf jikteb.

g: Gerit u Gori għandhom gomma griza.

Ġ: Il-grieden dendlu ġolġol mal-qattus.

Today Lacey was a barker from morning to night.Part of it was due to other dogs in the neighborhood barking.Others were when Aunty Betsy and Uncle Sherman came to check on their plants.We took Lacey outside after putting her leash and collar on to visit with Aunty betsy in the front yard.sure enough that’s what Lacey wanted.She just wanted to say hi to one of her favorite people.Lacey had her first interaction with a dog today.When we were outside we passed by the dog who was on the other side of the wall(our neighbor)and Lacey peaked inside the holes of the gate and looked for a few seconds.The other dog just looked at her also for a few seconds.Of course they sniffed the front of each other(through the open spots of the gated fence)then they went into play mode.There was a few growling from both dogs but then it was time to go back to the front.Lacey also got a rawhide that is flavored from Hartz.I knew that it was one of the healthier brands but I can’t say everything is within health reasoning.Although most of it is.There is no by products of any type in it but there is coloring in the rawhide.Otherwise it’s healthy.We went shopping tonight to get ready for thanksgiving cookings.Tomorrow I am going to make Lacey’s Pumpkin Patch Dog Biscuits for her Thanksgiving treat.Either Tuesday or Wednesday I will make her main meal for Thanksgiving.Aunty Betsy and Uncle Sherman are also going to be bringing over their two dogs.Mom wants to try snap a picture of all three dogs(Ours:Lacey maltipoo:maltese/toy poodle)Emi(Shiba Inu)and Mochi(Samoyed).Lacey is the youngest of all three.Lacey 8 months Emi is about 4-6 years old Mochi is about 2-3 years old.

I am trying Lacey on 1 Tablespoon of Wellness to see how she does.While her bowels are not diarrhea it is on the soft side.I’d hate to take away a favorite food of hers if I can help it…If I mix it she gets soft bowels.If I give her 1/4 cup of Wellness she gets soft bowels(It’s still formed not like literally watered down bowels)Now I am trying combination of 1 T of Wellness + 1 T Solid Gold,1 T Wellness or 1 T Solid Gold..So far she hasn’t eaten since yesterday early morning so I can’t say if it will work or not but we’ll see.
Update:Lacey has ate.Her first bowel was good.the second time it was on the softer side.Yup,I will have to call Wellness today and see what they recommend trying for Lacey.Otherwise back to the drawing board we go.Can’t have soft bowels.I prefer firm instead of soft even through it’s not loose stools.

When Lacey was given the Wellness Super5mix Small Breed by itself she liked it and quickly ate it up but one thing I noticed was her bowels were still soft.So I checked out the ingrediants on Solid Gold & Wellness Super5Mix Small Breed and the difference was the sweet potatoes.On Solid Gold her bowels were more on the firm side and with Solid Gold or even mixed together she gets soft bowels.My guess is she can’t have sweet potatoes in her dog food.The next sample Halos which should be coming this coming week also has sweet potatoes.If even trying Halos she does indeed get soft bowels then I will be assured that it’s the sweet potatoes she’s reacting to.The next one I will inquire after that Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul doesn’t have Sweet potatoes so we’ll see what her reaction will be.My guess it better but I can’t be sure till we sample it.