Ancient History

I would've loved to see the expression on the Spaniard faces:
"Admiral! Admiral! Are those wooden coastal fortresses?"

"..."

"Admiral?"

"No...they're Chinese ships."

"Ships? What? They're HUGE"

"Yep...I mean, we can outmanoeuvre them, but the Venetians didn't take these monsters into account when designing their ships and their weaponry..."

"So, we're going back to kill Aztecs and taking their gold?"

"Yep, sounds like a fine plan."

and that kids is why the Chinese are so damn badass.

Damn right! Untill the British came along 400 years later and this happened...

DAMN YOU OPIUM WARS.

Damn you British, but because you guys are whole reason why we are speaking English now and not French... Heil Britain *sigh*

too many people to heil, overload of heiling.

I've read that there was a fellow named Wilhelm Ostwald who had plans to simplify German, but he hadn't developed much of the so called Weltdeutsch (global German)... And Germany didn't need a Weltdeutsch anymore after their entire colonial empire got stripped away...

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltdeutsch

Isn't there an old tale that German almost became the official language of the united states.

Never heard of that...

http://www.tnonline.com/2011/feb/05/was-german-almost-official-language-us

Quite impressive story, but I'm glad that the bill was rejected by Congress... It's difficult for me to imagine all those Americans speaking German or an American German...

and then we have world war 1 or world war 2 American Nazis.

Technically speaking, that was LONG after the Ming Dynasty had dismantled their Treasure Ships. Those in the picture are junk-class. To my knowledge, no European power ever fought a Treasure Ship-class warship.

Sorry, but German is the ugliest language ever. Spanish and Italian is what language is about. And why don't you like French. Don't think French is that bad, just fucking hard to learn.

French isn't too hard to learn, try Latin or Greek. Spanish and Italian sound so whiny to me, although that might be the hand gestures...and that they're tiny. Seriously, I'm not very tall, but when I was in Rome, I felt like a giant.

German is harder than French, because German has 3 grammatical genders and, many different articles, and 4 grammatical cases...

You of course think Latin is hard because it isn't the mother language for dutch, for me it's actually pretty easy to get. I agree with the Spanish sounding weird, but not Italian. French is very hard to learn as well as German (and dutch for that matter). Also any language that doesn't use the latin alphabet is reeeeaaally hard to learn, like any Arabic languages or Russian.

Every language has simple aspects, but also difficult aspects... English for example... Compared to most other Indo-European languages English has way fewer declensions and only one definite article, but the English alphabet bears absolutely no correlation to the pronunciation and English has a huge vocabulary...

Well, Latin is a dead language, it isn't the mother language of any country, but I do get your point, French, Spanish, Italian and especially Romanian (at least, I think it was) are very closely related to Latin. The same goes for Dutch and German (and Scandinavian languages as well, I think), they're closely related, so are easier to learn for people whose mother tongue is related to the language they're studying.
But apparently, Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn because it's very irregular. And I'll have to agree, a lot of people here have difficulties (myself included) getting the correct spelling all the time. The other reason is that the spelling is being changed every few years...
But yeah, it's always harder to learn a language that uses a completely different alphabet then your own, and even harder when the way you write it is different as well (as in from left to right and top to bottom in the Latin alphabet vs from top to bottom and right to left in Japanese, for example.).