Reggaeton Slang

I've been listening to some Reggaeton (reguetón) lately and learned a lot of slang in the process. Reggaeton is a mix of dancehall and hip hop music from Latin America. You can find a detailed description of its history, musical characteristics and different artists etc. on Wikipedia. Reggaeton singers usually use and create a lot of slang in their songs, here are some of the most important things to know:

- perreo / perrear: dancing Reggaeton, i.e. dancing "Doggystyle", grinding
- gata / gatita: woman, girl (lit. cat)
- guallar / guayar & pegado / pega'o: to dance really closely & really close (lit. plaster, stick, glue)
- tirar / tiradera / tiraera: to diss, offend someone lyrically (lit. throw, shoot)
- Mami, Mamita, Mamacita, Nena, Chula: ways of referring to sexy girls, females use Papi to refer to men


A more detailed list can be found at Reggaetonfever.

Which is the hardest language to learn?

While some attempts have been made, it is very difficult to determine the most difficult language. A learner's native language is very important when learning a new language as an adult, thus rendering universal rankings of difficulty meaningless. A native English speaker will learn Dutch much more easily than a Japanese native would. The closer the native language is to the target language, the easier language acquisition will be. 

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State compiled a list with 63 languages and after analyzing their difficulty for English native speakers. There are three categories of languages:

Category I: Languages closely related to English (23-24 weeks)

• - Dutch
• - French
• - Italian
• - Norwegian
• - Portuguese
• - Spanish 
• - Swedish
• ...

(30-36 weeks)

• - German
• - Indonesian
• ...

Category II: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English (44 weeks)

• - Czech
• - Greek
• - Hindi
• - Polish
• - Persian
• - Thai
• - Turkish
• - Vietnamese
• - ...

Category III: Languages which are quite difficult for native English speakers (88 weeks)

• - Arabic
• - Cantonese
• - Chinese (Mandarin)
• - Japanese
• - Korean

So of the 10 languages I set out to learn 6 are in Category I (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), 3 are in Category III (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and I guess Russian must be in Category II, though I didn’t find it in the FSI’s list.

An Overview of Romance Languages

Romance languages - also called Romanic, Latin or Neolatin languages - are spoken by more than 800 million native speakers worldwide. There is a huge number of different languages in this family of languages, but the most widely spoken are:

1. Spanish (Español, Castellano: ~400 million native speakers)

2. Portuguese (Português: ~240 million native speakers)

3. French (Français: ~200 million native speakers)

4. Italian (Italiano: ~70 million native speakers)

5. Romanian (Română: ~24 million native speakers)

6. Catalan (Català, Valencià: ~9.2 million native speakers)

Other Romance languages are:

-Corsican

-Lombard

-Occitan

-Aromanian

-Sardinian

-Sicilian

-Venetian

-Napolitan

-Romansh

-Friulian

-....

As I don't want to confuse you by just numerating different languages, I want to tell you something about the classification of the Romance languages. There are six different groups:

1. Iberian Romance languages:

-Spanish (also called Castilian)

-Catalan-Valencian-Balearic

-Galician

-Portuguese

-Aragonese

-Astur-Leonese

-Judaeo-Spanish (language of the Jewish people who left Spain in 1492 after the Alhambra Decree; today spoken in Turkey, Israel and New York)

2. Gallo-Romance languages

-Langues d'oïl (French as we know it today and its various dialects)

-Franco-Provençal

-Occitan (Spoken in Southern France, Monaco and bordering regions areas of Italy and Spain)

3. Rhaeto-Romance languages

-Friulian (spoken in Italy)

-Ladin (spoken in Italy)

-Romansh (spoken in France)

4. Italo-Romance languages

-We can divide different varieties in Northern, Central and Southern Italy

5. Sardinian

6. Eastern Romance languages

-Romanian and its varieties

Some of the Romance languages don't exist any more due to different historical reasons. A good example is the Dalmation language which was spoken along the today's Croatian Adria coast.

After introducing the world of Romance languages to you, I hope that you have felt the desire of learning one or more of them, and therefore I'll have the pleasure to give you some advice in my following posts in this blog.

What are the most spoken languages?

There are a few ways you can measure use of language. Mandarin Chinese (1) has by far the most native speakers with more than one billion natives, followed by Spanish (2), English (3), Hindi/Urdu (4), Arabic (5), Bengali (6) and Portuguese (7). However, when secondary speakers enter the equation, the ranking looks something like this: 

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)

In other words, if you learn any or all of these seven languages, you can communicate with a lot of people. If you can reach them, that is. The most used language in business is still English and the most used languages by the internet population are the following:

1. English (295.4 million)
2. Chinese (110.0 million)
3. Spanish (86.0 million)
4. Japanese (67.1 million)
5. German (55.3 million)
6. French (33.9 million)
7. Korean (31.3 million)
8. Italian (30.4 million)
9. Portuguese (29.4 million)
10. Russian (22 million)

Coincidentally, these are exactly the ten languages I’m studying and that I want to master until I’m 30. I’ve always wanted to be able to communicate with as many people as possible in their language. Somehow I intuitively chose the ten most used languages in the  internet. Do you think it’s more useful to learn the most spoken languages as opposed to the ones I learn? I will write more about why you should learn languages and which languages are best to choose in another blog post.

Team Addition - Lorenzo

Today I'd like to welcome another writer, Lorenzo, to this blog. He's fluent in six languages (German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) and even planning on learning another one (Arabic). I've known Lorenzo for a long time and I can assure you he's very talented in learning languages and we can expect a lot of insight into different methods and different cultures.