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My better part is from Sweden. She talks French, english and finnish, and sure sweden <img src="wink.gif" border="0"> I talk sweden, english and some deutch. (and finnish).

Writing english ain't hard...

She also plays. Drives rally (CMR2, Rally Trophy), hack'n'slash Baldurs Gate, Tomb Raiders and some Playstation games.

After doing my share of a household I do play Spwaw if she does something else. If she wants drive rally then we do it both. I do work alot in evenings and she plays while waiting me.

I am happy man <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

wife: Did you buy milk?
me: Damn, I did forget...sorry..
wife: What did you buy?
me: Food.
wife: That amount of food feeds whole company of your soldiers...
me: I'll do cooking..

mosh

Originally posted by Shakaali:

There are 16 case endings in Finnish. And nouns are easy in Finnish, compared to verb conjugation: one verb can have up to 1600 conjugated forms. But we have no articles and only a couple of prepositions, everything you do in English by using prepositions is done in Finnish by conjugating verbs. This language of ours is very easy to learn, isn't it <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

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And remember that the longest single word (according to the Guinness Great Book of Records) is finnish: "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään". Can't say that in english though... too many prepositions. <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

My Fiancee is also Japanese, she very tolerant of my playing Steel Panthers. The only restriction she places on me is that if I use Japanese forces I HAVE TO WIN!!! She even walked around Bovington Tank Museum with me for 6 hours without even a whimper and it turned out that she really enjoyed it as well.

Kendokabob has a *great* signature!

This is a great thread.. keep going.

Originally posted by General Richmond:
Les the Sarge 9-1 --> yeah, I was *shocked* at the abundant illiteracy of the American public when I started online with email and various groups. Not just typos, which can be rampant at times. I am talking about kids who have grown up in the computer age and never learned to spell properly. It freaks me out. No long math, no writing skills. What's left?!?

Fidel --> Are you saying Russian is a member of the romantic language family? I didn't think that was the case. I know they have their unique alphabet.

When I hear people in the USA who can speak two languages somewhat fluently, I have alot of respect for that. Being a white American, I just babble a few words in French, German, and Russian. Granted, there aren't a whole lot of people who speak those languages in any random 10 square mile plot in the USA, so it's hard to practice. But I look at it like this - if I moved to another country, I'd *sure* learn that native language. To not do so hampers lifestyles and it's disrespectful to indigenous peoples.

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Russian is know as a Slavic language like Polish, Hungary, and The Baltic States. Romance is Italian, French, Spanish, and of all things Romania. Germatic are English, Swedish, Norwedgen, Swiss, etc. More useless information from my world history classes taken sooooo many years ago.

<img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

Thanks for the compliment, General Richmond.

How is it that our European friends often come to learn so many languages? I know a lot of movies are in English and it's taught in many schools. But other languages--I once went on a tour boat in Italy and the guide was fluent in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.

Many Americans that I know can speak at least a little Spanish and where I'm from (southern New Hampshire), a few can speak at least a little French. Beside English and Japanese, my wife learned French in school but says she's forgotten it all. Japanese are often just as bad as Americans in their limited language acquisition. Not that I'm ranking on Americans about this, either, I can speak a little Spanish, but that's about it--often it does come down to there being no one to practice, say, German with. <img src="frown.gif" border="0"> Well, besides wargames, but "Vorwarts, marsch!" and "Achtung, Panzer!" is only so useful.

Originally posted by Halgary:


And remember that the longest single word (according to the Guinness Great Book of Records) is finnish: "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään". Can't say that in english though... too many prepositions. <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

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Yeah... That is a verb conjugation, from a verb "epäjärjestelmällistää" ("unorganize") . In english the whole mouthful would be something like: "not even with his (hers)lack of ability to make others unorganize" <img src="tongue.gif" border="0">

Originally posted by Charles_22:
OTOH, the Spanish speakers often throw in 'the' where it don't belong. There's a lady up here at work, let's just say it's Microsoft, who has the following greeting on her vmail: Hello, this is Jane Doe of the Microsoft.

It think the problem is their being bi-lingual in that it's easy to forget in English to often drop the 'the', while in Spanish they're probably not putting them in where that language calls for them (therefore throwing English useage into Spanish and Spanish useage into English).

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Actually, I think that when Spanish speakers add the article 'the', they are using correct Spanish usage. Many nouns in Spanish get an article in front of them...el, ella, de, del. Also, in Spanish sentence structure, adjectives usually follow the noun (casa blanca), while in English, nouns usually follow the adjectives (white house). Similar structure differences probably explain why speakers of other languages can get English word order mixed up.

I used to tutor English in college. Taking a Spanish class illuminated many of the difficulties I saw Hispanic students having when they were learning English. I was able to tutor them much more effectively after I took that class.

Originally posted by General Richmond:

Fidel --> Are you saying Russian is a member of the romantic language family? I didn't think that was the case. I know they have their unique alphabet.

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Russian is a Slavic language, but language groups like Germanic, Slavic, and Romance are grouped together into a larger language family(I think that's the term) called Indo-European. So, while Spanish and Russian aren't brothers, they are distant cousins, and as such there are some similar words.

GrinningDwarf:

Actually, I think that when Spanish speakers add the article 'the', they are using correct Spanish usage.

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That's what I was saying. They throw the 'the' into the language where it doesn't belong, and then when they go speaking Spanish they probably do the English thing, occassionally, and leave out the 'the', therefore end up screwing up in both languages, because they keep getting the proper placement screwed up. I guess that's too subtle for them to be much on their guard about, because though Spanish uses the adjective after the noun, I've never heard one of them say it that way in English, such as 'house white'.

I consider it very interesting how people "think" according to their native language. It becomes quite difficult to 'think' in terms of a secondary language. But some people have that knack and it's great.

As to Japan and the people's lack of fluency in regards to other languages, I think that's just par for a homogenuous island nation that really has been quite isolationist thoughtout it's lifespan. What is so unique to America is that everyone comes here and speaks other languages, but we don't have enough population density per square mile (of any given foreign language speakers) to really have an impact on other people and their ability to speak other languages. Now Spanish the exception. But I had few people to speak Russian with in MD, and even fewer here in VA. Serbs everywhere, though, and it's a related language, I understand.

As to the education thing - well, I had a Swiss client and she was explaining how schooling is done in Switzerland (and France and Germany). Well, no freakin' wonder other countries crush America in test scoring. I admire the schooling systems there. And they are better in the Orient, too.

General Richmond,

I'll disagree with you about Japan being homogeneous. There have for many, many years been large numbers of Chinese, Koreans, even Malaysians and Thai, not to mention the islands off the northern coast are inhabited by Russky fishermen, and then there's the native Ainu population to boot (but they no longer speak their own language.) That "homogeneity" is a myth propagated by the Japanese government. I think you're right in a way, though--the Japanese people tend to perceive of themselves as homogeneous--in a large part due to the government and media constantly reminding them how different they are from everyone else in the world, yet how they are still all spiritually Japanese. There's no real pressure in school to learn any second language other than English, even though you've got these large immigrant populations. At least, that's how my wife explains it.

Didn't know all that, but I wouldn't think there is a nation anywhere that is totally homogenous. But there is that aspect that you are looking at basically east asians minorities there. While that is not Japanese, it is nowhere like having large numbers of Europeans, Africans, South Americans, etc. as a part of your population. The impact level has got to be quite lower. And hence, the language variety is diminished with that. My guess, but interesting stuff.

I'll agree with you on that. It is still *mostly* made up of east and southeast asians, but many of these language are entirely unrelated to each other. However, there are--at least to my eye--a lot of cultural similarities between, say, Japanese and Chinese, but if you actually told a Japanese that they'd probably run you through with a sharp pointy object.

You're definitely right about there not being huge numbers of say, S. Americans, Africans, etc. At least, there is nothing like the huge diaspora we've seen in the US.

I would say the same thing would happen if you said that to a Chinese person. There is no love lost between those nations. I am surprised there are many Chinese in Japan. Maybe Communist China is so bad that they would rather deal with the cultural friction - I don't know.

I guess this thread is dead. Too bad - I thought there'd be more comments on how signifigant others respond to people playing SPWaW.

Nah the thread aint dead General

Just needs a shot of adrenaline

Like me telling the story of how one gamer used his woman unfairly during a wargame.

Rule number one. If the opponents woman is present during a game, she must wear a bra.

Rule number two. Exaggerated displays of female anatomy is grounds for immediate forfieture of a game.

Hey you think I am kidding. The woman was also a natural blond.

Of course this never happens during PBEM games.

I got extremely lucky. My gal lets me play until I'm blue-in-the-face. She even spends the time to listen to me prattel on about my PBEM strategies, ask questions and has dispensed some interesting solutions. (and she's come up with some beauts. <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0"> I never would of thought of them <img src="rolleyes.gif" border="0"> )

My wife she has no problem with the hours that turn to weeks I spend campaigning. It's not unusual for her to find me asleep at the helm in the wee hours of the morning, give me a shake, to which I'll reply "'yeah, I'll be up as soon as finish this attack. or some such thing" Only to find me, hand on mouse, asleep at the helm, as the sun comes up. I keep my rig in the living room that keeps the peace in my family. She also knows SPWAW keeps me sane as well.

my first wife didn't like anything that cut into attention on her, especially SP. course she also didn't have much fondness for me reading the republic outloud to our cats or the Steelers, and for that she had to go!!!! go steelers!!

Originally posted by Belisarius

Originally posted by Grumble:
Richmond,
Believe you're looking for "articles". I'm no linguist but I think MOST non-Indo European languages don't use them. For that matter, Russian doesn't have 'em either. Which is why Russians speaking English sometimes sound brusque.

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Funny thing, Scandinavic languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic) altough being Germanic ones, does NOT have a definite article like "the" in eg "the gun". We use case endings instead. Example:

English: A ball - the ball

Swedish: En boll - bollen

see? Swedish has three case endings; -en -et or none at all. In Finland they have 15 or something <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

What complicates things ofcourse is that we do have a definite article for specific objects.

Eng: That ball

Swedish: Den bollen

Eh.. kinda forgot why I was posting this, but somebody might find it amusing (or hopelessy boring <img src="wink.gif" border="0"> ) [/B]

Yeah!

In Finland:

a car = auto
the car = auto
in the car = autossa
on the car = auton päällä
cars = auton
to the car = autolle
etc.

Commander