which language is the best one in the word?

i am a chinese.we must learn another language when i am a child,so the english is the second language of mine ,but i feel that it is so hard to learn english.maybe you will laugh at me.
you will say the english words just be fit by 26 letters.it is so easy to grasp it,yes you are right,i am very consentaneous to you ,but there are larger number of words to recite.so you will find if you want to use the english freely ,you must grasp many many words.but in chinese language,there are only about three thousand words in common(there are 200000 simple words in the ancientry but now the usual is 3000),and we combine these words to creat two hundred thousand phrase.example:"冰“means ice.it from "水”（水means water) why does "水”means water,beacuse the "水“describe the shape of the flowing water.in the ancientry the people write the ”水“ in the form as"".and then we combine the "冰” ana the "箱“（it means box")to get a new word '冰箱”。what is the "冰箱“。it is a thing ,refrigeratory.just as use the ice and the box to create the icebox.but the words like "icebox" are very limited.but this phenomenon is usual in chinese language.
so which language is the best one?but in china many people think that the english is the easy learned language.what do you think about your language.
i can read all the book written by chinese language,except the old book.can you read all the book use in your language.?

English is indeed a difficult langauge for second speakers, but that's not unusual. I don't know of a language that is relatively easy as a second langauge (except for langauges that have a lot in common). People who try to learn Chinese as a second langauge complain about the writing system. People who try to learn English complain about the large vocabulary (and for Chinese, the word inflections). Shakespeare had something like 11,000 words in his vocabulary. So to answer your question, can a modern English speaker read older books? It depends on how old the book is. With a high school level education, you should be able to mostly understand works as old as Shakespeare and the "classics" in English literature and with a college education you should understand them completely. The older works in "Old English" would require some dedicated study. To put in context, old english is about a thousand years old (correct me if I'm wrong).

Constructing words from other words isn't uniquely Chinese (few things in the world are uniquely anything). One example I have personal experience with is German.

Which is the best langauge depends. The best language is the one you learn naturally as a kid. Langauge is an arbitrary construct evolved from society. There are very few languages that have been designed with any engineering goals, such as ease of acquisition, ease of use, expressiveness, in mind. I recall there's one constructed language that is all numbers. All words are just big numbers. It sounds hard to learn, but it is no less arbitrary than any natural language. You can google or look on wikipedia for "constructed language". One of the most popular is Esperanto. You can look at the wiki on that as well. It has engineered grammar rules and a vocabulary based on about 900 root words, combinations of them, and phrases barrowed from western languages.

I have a sick feeling in my stomach about this thread so I hope it won't get out of hand.

But nevertheless I rank the best languages in the world as:

English
Mandarin
Russian

even though I only know and speak english.

Finnish offcourse...what else did you think?:nono: :nono:

Its rich and unique language, the best one for lonely wondering in the woods and you have name for everything you see in there, something that 'urban' languages like all indo-european ones can never achieve...

But guess Im bit bias to say about this, but atleast our language is written as its spelled

In my view, the best language is Korean, it was invented by Linguists, very structural and compact and easy to learn.

You think English is harder to learn because it is not your first language. Try to ask a native English Speaker to learn Mandrin Chinese. You will be pleasently surpised how easy it is to learn English.

Well i've heard about storyes when non-finnsih try to learn finnish...You see english, german, french, russian and other european based languages belongs to the indo-european language group and those all have very simial structure. But finnish is completely different, and it belongs to much more older languahe group called finno-ugrian family. The difference in finnish to other languages is that we don't have no prepositions but each words have it's own (18 in total) placement modes

for example:

In english you say, In the house, from the house, to the house, of the house and so on (i used the colours to indicate which part of the word is what)

Now for finnish the house is Talo, and here's the same forms: Talossa, Talosta, Taloon, Talon

So now you know why I sometimes may confuse some prepositions as they are quite alien to our languages...

English is a fusion of languages. It contains the formal basis of Greek and Latin and is mixed with old Gaelic (undoubtedly itself a misture of different languages assimilated in the British Isles over millenia of Prehistory. This mixture is then combined with Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, before being layered again by Norman French.

Just to make matters worse, the mix of these elements varies considerably depending on where you are, which means the dialects are numerous and varied.

Has Chinese been able to maintain its character largely intact, or has it too absorded a vast amount of syntax from many other languages?

Generally speaking, linguists categorize languages into Level I, II, and III by difficulty to learn by non-native speaker. In some cases the spoken and written language have different levels. Spanish is considered very easy and Level I, English is level II, and Chinese/Arabic is Level III.

I live in Southern California, and can say that the most useful language to learn here next to English is Spanish.

adeptitus said:

Generally speaking, linguists categorize languages into Level I, II, and III by difficulty to learn by non-native speaker. In some cases the spoken and written language have different levels. Spanish is considered very easy and Level I, English is level II, and Chinese/Arabic is Level III.

I live in Southern California, and can say that the most useful language to learn here next to English is Spanish.

Click to expand...

That's right..if you live in So Cal you need to know some Spanish. and if you are a business person it is best to learn how to speak Spanish or hire bi-lingual workers or an inturpurter..

My ex-wife says for her English was difficult to learn..She's from the Philippines.