Thanks; I love reading posts about languages. It's funny but I think Korean and Japanese are so much easier to understand than Chinese: just by watching all of these soaps I can understand fairly simple conversations in Korean and also get some of the bits of others. But I've watched a lot of Chinese too and I have no idea of how to even break the individual words out.

As for redundancies in language, well Irish is probably of of the most inefficient languages there is in this regard - it's really hard to say anything directly or very quickly, which is why everyone speaks it so fast and you don't pronounce half the word! There isn't even a way to say 'yes' or 'no'; you have to repeat the verb back to someone.

So if I asked do you understand (An dtuigeann tu'?) someone would have to say I understand (tuigim) or I don't understand (Ni thuigim).