Martin's the name, languages are the game (sorry). Seriously, I love languages for languages' sake (as opposed to learning them for a particular purpose) and always have done. I'd probably have a reasonable command of most of the languages below if I weren't so lazy...

Welcome to the Omniglot forum!

What's "fas"? Farsi?

And are you planning to learn every national language of Europe or something?

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Yes, "fas" is Farsi. Using the ISO 639-3 codes was the only way to fit them all on.

No, I'm not planning to learn them all - Spanish has never really interested me, for instance (to be honest, I'm not all that keen on French, really). Nor am I bothered about learning every Slavic language, although I suppose learning Czech would open up Slovak.

Fair enough. I'm just curious why you have so many European languages and then Japanese and Farsi.

Swedish is quite easy if you already know English and German, but it's easy to get bogged down with Japanese.

I suppose the European bias is due to my being European, although of course Hungarian and Estonian aren't Indo-European, while Farsi is. I'm interested in Farsi mainly because of the importance of Persia/Iran in world history, but also because I want to explore the similarities (and differences) between it and other IE languages. I wouldn't mind learning Quechua and Mandarin one day, but for the moment they aren't even on the radar.


A Finn once told me that about Swedish. As for Japanese, I'm not expecting an easy ride - I just find it (so far) a wonderfully succinct language (depending on how polite you're being) and, of course, the writing system is beautiful, if a tad cumbersome.

Yet I was told that it's almost impossible to master the tonal accent properly, even if you are a native speaker of a Germanic language.