There were three medieval kingdoms on the shores of a lake. There was an island in the middle of the lake, over which the kingdoms had been fighting for years. Finally, the three kings decided that they would send their knights out to do battle, and the winner would take the island.
The night before the battle, the knights and their squires pitched camp and readied themselves for the fight. The first kingdom had 12 knights, and each knight had five squires, all of whom were busily polishing armor, brushing horses, and cooking food. The second kingdom had twenty knights, and each knight had 10 squires. Everyone at that camp was also busy preparing for battle. At the camp of the third kingdom, there was only one knight, with his squire. This squire took a large pot and hung it from a looped rope in a tall tree. He busied himself preparing the meal, while the knight polished his own armor.
When the hour of the battle came, the three kingdoms sent their squires out to fight (this was too trivial a matter for the knights to join in).
The battle raged, and when the dust had cleared, the only person left was the lone squire from the third kingdom, having defeated the squires from the other two kingdoms, thus proving that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.
If you like that, there are more excellent math jokes at University of Alberta's math professor Volker Runde's website: http://www.math.ualberta.ca/%7Erunde/jokes.html
Comments (19)
Booooo!! *throws a beaker full of blue liquid*
two hydrogen atoms are walking down the street together when one says to the other "I think I lost an electron" the other responds "are you positive"?
get it...........are you positive...ahahahahahahahaha
this is only an example, it gets more complicated than that.
I think the only reason it's easier than Arabic is that we like to make words up as we go along.
but for some reason, I almost always know what my russian buddies are talking about. it's weird. i feel like the equivalent of an intelligent dog.
je parle en peu de francais, but it's been a long itme.
That's not different from Portuguese (and perhaps Spanish and other latin languages) at all. To me the worst part of learning Arab would be to learn how to read all over again. And backwards.
keyword: planning.
:S
partially because there is never a need to speak it
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
my favorite latin palindrome ^^^
i haven't taken a latin class in 5 years
@ Kaviani: I'm a native-English speaker and found Japanese to be relatively easy. I've also heard that it is one of the easiest languages to learn for foreign speakers.
Aside from its well-known difficulties (e.g., 3 scripts), Japanese often omits the subject of a sentence, and has different levels of speech depending on one's social status relative to one's interlocutor.
Also, the 6,900+ figure is for languages AND dialetcts.
Nice people but their politics are a little confused.
ps: they make nice beer.
Chinese and Arabic are equally difficult but in different ways. Chinese isn't terribly hard to pick up but it gets a lot harder as you progress.
Arabic is difficult in the beginning but afterward you start to get a feel for things--it's a consistent system unlike English.
It's impossible! By law, all Irish children spend a massive 12 years learning this impossible language and a bare handfull can speak it fluently when they leave school.
What to know some of its'f madness? Ok, in Irish, we add letters called séimhiú and urú http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations . Basically these are added to words to make them easier to say, so if I wanted to say, pen I would say "peann". If I wanted to say my pen, I would say "mo pheann" and if I wanted to say your en it would be "bhur bpeann".
Hard enough yet? Well the letter you put it changes according to personal pronouns and other things, but it also changes according to the first letter of the word. So we had "bpeann" for pen, but what about horse or "capall"? Well in that instance it's still "mo chapall" for my horse, but now it's "bhur gcapall" for their horse.
And if you wonder why some Irish people can't just say yes or no to a question, that's because Irish has no yes and no words! We just use the negative & positive of the verb in question, so if someone askes "An bhfuil sé ag cur baiste? is it raining? you say Sea, or Ni shea (it is or it isn't)
And that's before we get into the weird tenses, the exceptions to the rules (more exceptions than rules to be frank)the regional dialects, the pronunciation, the bonkers spelling, etc etc etc! Still, it's a great language!^_^ Anyway, here's a pretty old irish langauge film - I picked it because it'd give you a fairly accurate version of Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxFpWRNhySI
My persian is at a 6th grade level. I've got a thing for languages. I started arabic it was too hard so I started japanese as well which by comparison is really not bad at all!
Can I just add, that grammatical arabic is a beast unlike any other, that I have seen.
The base form of any word has a total of 14 conjugations. Then, there are 14 forms, for each, past, present, future, negative, command... and the list goes on. anything you want to say, has 14 conjugations.
Then to add to it, the rules have variety depending on the letters you use. So the size and scale of the rules exponentially increases! Then, as the article mentions is the passive tone which has a completely different set of rules.
What's worse is that conversationally mispronunciation can completely change the gist of what you want to say. Oh and dialects between countries, are so extreme that they can be incomprehensible.
:-(