Personally, Japanese because of the history and culture and of course the way it sounds.
Which language do you find most exciting (other than native of course ) and wish you had time and patience to learn it?
Spanish. German would be a start.
Russian
Chinese
French!
Time
Patience
japanese, french, russian, spanish. and chinese.
a few friends and I will start japanese in Jan 2010
Sign languages--different ones.
Well at the moment the answer is Hungarian because we're moving to Hungary in a month or so. It's not related to any other language I know and is actually only related to two other languages being Finnish and some obscure Siberian dialekt. It is a challenge but I am determined to learn it as well as I can. Other than Hungarian I like Swedish because of the lilting sound, it's a great language to listen to and I loved it when I lived there. I also find languages that use a totally different alphabet or even a completely different way of writing to be fascinating, examples would be arabic or farsi and of course Japanese, Chinese, Greek etc. Oh and the famous one from Africa that uses clicks as part of the language.
I'd like to get my Hebrew back, spoken and written. I love the sound of it.
And I would like to speak English with an Irish accent.
Just try speaking normal english after one or two too many pints of Guiness, that'd be a reasonable place to start.
Note to the political correct thought police, the preceeding comment is actually intended as a joke.
If that's going to get you in trouble, I'm doomed....
do you mean the miriam makeba click song? that's xhosa...with a click ?! the xh is a sound you make with your tongue on the roof of your mouth...
italian - i want to fight and throw things around in italian - i just love it!!!
Actually I'd never heard of that song and it wasn't what I was referring to. I'll have a bit of a google and see if I can find the name for it.
Edit: Found it, it's Khosian (maybe also spelt Xhosian perhaps?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_language
khoisan is the language of the bushmen people, that mostly live in the namib these days, they are nomadic and were made famous (?!) by the jamie uys movie 'the gods must be crazy' in the early 80s. he won a few awards for it - really great comedy! you can hear a bit at around 10mins - and the story line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
Personally I love the sound of Danish and Japanese, but I probably won't learn either of them, because of practical reasons. Currently trying to learn Chinese, which is fascinating to me, love watching Chinese state TV without understanding a word.
Even at the risk of getting castrated for it.. Hebrew sounds interesting, but very similar to Arab to my untrained ears, are there similarities or is it a completely different language ? I once had an Israeli ..ahem.. affair, and when she spoke to her friends, family back home I often thought I couldn't distinguish it from Arab when not having a direct comparison.
Brazilian Portugese...especially in songs...just so sexy!
My neighbour is from Japan and when she speaks Japanese it sounds so nice i would love to be able to understand her
You can start here as well for the Irish accent:
After the third attempt, ahem .... yes, I must say, very Oirish indeed!!!
Come over, I'll do the castrating myself très sadaque I know.
To me it makes a world of a difference, even if some words are very similar.