> In Australia we were a little peeved when the new state of East Timor > adopted Portugese as its national language instead of English. > Indonesian would have been a better choice as like Esperanto it is an > excellent language and spoken by neighbouring countries, but we could > sort of understand resentment after the years of occupation by > the US backed Soeharto dictatorship.
> My sister has just given up on Japanese, in spite of working in Japan. > Ridiculous language. > Bye > Kali Is Japanese a more ridiculous language than Chinese or Korean? I think these three languages have a large complicated character set as opposed to an alphabet such as Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic. I imagine Chinese, Japanese or Korean must be monstrously difficult to learn for somebody accustomed to an alphabetical language such as English. I hate to think what it must be like to read less-than-neat handwriting. Sometimes I can't even read handwriting in English!
