English..

Where things get interesting is when each of the languages tend to bring out almost a different personality.

Both, depends what I am thinking about. Since I speak in Russian to my family/some friends, when I think about that it is in Russian. When I am thinking about other things such as school it is in English. On occasion my thought process mixes the languages together, but this is rare.

I find that interesting. Thanks.

Oh and +1 to different personalities when thinking in different languages. But I think that is mostly based on a language carrying a certain culture for you, which skews how you think about things.

well a very good example would be when talking to women, the flow is different. It's hard to explain though..

Just figured to post the wiki link to this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet

It is pretty ridiculous what this guy can accomplish.

icelandic is super hard, for me at least, there are just so many ways to change words around, when to add to and take away from a word, when to add/remove letters/suffixes, etc.

lolz.

i have some unexplainable obsession with the country and i spent a significant amount of time there after college.

i can't explain it. iceland owns my life. the language is absolutely beautiful, too.

Like doubleD said, it depends on the scenario for me. If I am abroad and haven't spoken Dutch (my native language) for a while my thoughts tend to be English. If I am in Holland with my family, usually Dutch. If I am with Dutch people abroad or with foreigners in Holland, I am not sure, it varies.

I don't really notice it until I pay attention to it, kind of like breathing.

On a similar note; I have lately realized that I sometimes dream in English or Dutch. That was quite confusing when I woke up.

when i was in europe i could understand dutch speaking english better than the english (or any british) speaking english. and dutch girls are wayyyyyyyy hotter.

I'm fluent in 3 languages, and am about half way there on the fourth.

The language "in my head" depends primarily on the language that I have been using most frequently in the past few days. That includes the fourth one.

I'm pretty far short of fluent in Spanish but sometimes I find myself trying to think in it if I've been using it quite a bit that day. It's frustrating because it makes my thinking really slow. =p

lol at clowns saying english is on its way to changing how stuff is spelled or whatever. english is badass because it has so many words. gayass languages like spanish where expect, wait, and hope are all the same word make literature and speaches so boring. so many times in spanish you want to know a word and you get some latin-root cognate, so you ask how to say that, and it's the same. example

hey jose, how do you say to steal in spanish?
robar
well then how do you say to rob?
also robar
what about burglarize?
robar
so how do you distinguish between them?
context
doesnt it get confusing?
ORALE!

I forget who I was quoting, or misquoting, but I really think you have to have learnt both languages as a second language to have an unbiased view on this.

My eyes were really opened recently when I saw a "fill in the blanks" worksheet from English class in a Polish school, every single question was a simple English phrase that any native speaker would get correct but it's almost impossible to codify in rules.

I took four years of German during high school, back then I often found myself thinking in German. I was nowhere near fluent, but I recall it being pretty easy to pick up. While I was probably missing a lot of the finer points (gender, past/present tense etc), I was surprised at how well I could make myself understood.

Nothing I've done academically was as difficult for me as trying to learn German. I've had four years and still completely suck at it. It just did not fit with my mind (started at like 15, so that's part of the reason).

I have no general problem with language (high test scores, won some writing awards), but German made me its bitch. Thankfully, Germans are impressed that you try even if you speak poorly (unlike, I've heard, the French).

You do realize that since every letter is written exactly like they are said without any difference and every word basically has the same emphasis in spoken language means that Finnish kids learn faster and better to speak and write than the rest (if I recall correctly, it takes one year compared to three to get Finns at the same level of writing than English kids)? This leaves time for other activities and learning which may be partly the reason of high level of math results of Finnish elementary schools.

Okay, English would be more useful but when it comes to all possible languages that we could speak, Finnish is a jackpot.

Finnish spelling bee would be a huge bore.

It's probably northerners who you struggle to understand, particularly from the North East (who speak Geordie), Scotland, and Yorkshire, where I'm from. I guess to a lesser extent Liverpudlians (who speak Scouse) and Lancastrians who both have strong accents but don't have as many strange things going on with dialect.

Some examples of Yorkshire accent/dialect:

- We often use thee, thou (pronounced more like "than" minus the "n"), thine instead of you, your.
Eg. "Whose turn is it to buy?". "Thee."
"Who's coat is that?". "It's thine."
"Is thou going out today?" (note that it would never be are thou)
To complicate things further, people in Sheffield pronounce it more with a "d" instead of a "th", earning the nickname "deedar".

- Maungy (moody), gip (retch), spice (sweets/candy), snap (food), laik (play), bray (beat up), lig (lie about), cal (gossipy talk... women like to cal).
Just a few examples of dialect words, as if English doesn't have enough anyway.

- Coat/coal/hole become coit/coil/hoil (often drop the h too, so it's more like oil). Water becomes watter (rhymes with hatter). Town/down become tarn/darn. Light/night become leet/neet, but fight becomes feight, just to confuse things. Mouth becomes marf (don't really do the "th" sound all the time in Yorkshire). Out becomes aht. Take/make become tek/mek.

- We clip words all the time. Most famous is what becomes of "to the", which wiki puts better than I ever could:

Truth is, even English people struggle to understand us if they're not local. It's not really our fault though, I couldn't even fully distinguish the dialect stuff from the standard English stuff untill I went to university and found I wasn't making myself understood as well and as often as I would like. Through having to repeat yourself and noticing blank expressions, you kinda get a feel. My accent is now very weak, I would say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss

My GF is from Yorkshire. Her accent is hilarious. Bloomin' 'eck this, nowt that.

i speak Polish and English and some Spanish. I think an English speaker would find polish more difficult to learn than Spanish.

but this is all looking at how hard it is to learn a language after you already know a different language.

to see how difficult a language is to learn you should look at how long it takes children to learn that language as their first language. and it seems to be pretty much the same everywhere.
children raised in japan learn Japanese just as quick as children raised in England learn English. so neither one is more difficult than the other. so, if there was some reason that the world decided to all speak only one existing language, it doesnt really matter which one is chosen. children will learn them all with equal ease.

Can't children learn two languages side by side almost as easily as one? Perhaps even more.

I spoke spanish as a kid before school and at the time my parents barely knew english. I was speaking both in no time as soon as Pre-K started.

this is a really good point

Polish is my first language. That being said my English is better than my Polish now since I've never been to Poland and I started learning English at age 4. Polish is definitely easier to learn because every word is spelled how it sounds. I'm nearly certain we don't have silent letters in Polish, so that helps, although we do have more than 1 letter with the same sound. My parents tell me however that it's not as hard as it seems to learn which letter is used when (I obv haven't had much of a chance to practice Polish on a regular basis at all in my life) because you can pick up on easy patterns and such.

My father speaks 5 languages. In order of learned first to learned last they are Polish (native), Russian (learned in school), German (around it everyday), Greek (lived there 10 years from ~age 28-38), English (age 39-56(present)). He learned these at different points in his life obviously so as he got older his ability to retain information lessened, but he told me that Russian would be the hardest of those to learn for someone that wasn't born with it or didn't learn it in school. German came failry naturally to him since he lived on the Polish side of the Polish/German border for the first 20 years of his life. He also said that he found that Greek was the easiest to spell for him, and English was the easiest one to pick up enough to get around, but the hardest to fully master.

This with Polish for me.

I was thinking that the reason no one was responding to his post was because everyone realized how stupid it was. There are plenty of cases where things can be expressed much more clearly in Spanish than English. Sometimes it's really frustrating to say something in English when I know that the language is really interfering with my precision.