Yacht
All Yakked Up
Tough, though and thorough were a major step for me back in the days…I never knew which one was which nor how to spell them, I felt so frustrated!
My favorite has to be “read” (to read a book) and “read” (previously read a book)
What about the fact that ‘set’ has several hundred different definitions?
I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it’s easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
As a Hungarian I can confirm. We mostly read words letter-by-letter. No weird shit like “rebel” and “rebel” sounding different because one is a noun, other is a verb 🤡
Or “queue”, are you drunk, English? And the native speakers’ favourite mixups, “there” and “their”, “it’s” and “its”.
You can blame the French for “queue”, it was like that when we got it.
You don’t have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
Someone beat you to it but they deleted their comment :(
Me to the Japanese every day.
This is almost certainly copied from Facebook, not blurred especially for Lemmy.
They should unblur it before posting it here.
No doubt mate.
I’ll say fudge-diddly-darn if I want to and you can’t stop me.
Lookout guys, we got a badbutt over here.
I love that it’s blurred like a Japanese adult comic, enough to say technically, but not enough that you can’t literally see everything.
fucking!
deleted by creator
Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.
As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word “yacht” is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: “The Chaos” (poem)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
It’s way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
I think there are at least three versions from the original author, IIRC.
Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
And for a foreigner, this is actually helpful.
When I learned that the proper pronunciation of the word queue is basically a letter q followed by a bunch of silent letters, I had to take a break for a while. I enjoy the sound of English language, so that kept me going afterwards, but I am still salty.
I once heard a native English speaker pronounce it as “the printer kweeyee.”
Keu.
You can thank the French for that one.
I can hear a word in Spanish and immediately know how to spell it. I can read a word in Spanish and know how to pronounce it. We can only dream of doing that in English.
Yeah but in English you can be self-satisfyingly smug about changing your spelling whether the original post is British, Canadian, American, Australian, or New Zealand English, even though nobody will notice or give a shit.
I hadn’t thought of the artistic license angle.
I was gonna mention the silent k, h, e but then I remember french. They have like 50% silent letters at random. I remember how flabbergasted I was to see millefeuille written the first time.
the pastry?
Instant downvote, you know why…
I genuinely don’t, can you elaborate?
The half-assed censoring of “fucking”. (People have just been getting annoyed of how silly and prevalent the attempts are)
I’m still confused though. Is it the mediocre ass-ratio that bothers you? or the censorship?
I for one will accept anything so long as it is 100% pure ass.
For any posts like this with censored anything, I just assume it’s taken from prude sites
I assume the OP doesn’t give a shit about what they post.
I for one am glad they censored the word “fuck”, so that my eyeballs wouldn’t have to see that disgusting fucking word, and my brain wouldn’t have to fucking think about such prurient good damned thoughts.
Ironic.
Monolinugal people thinking that the pronounciation of some rare words is the big issue when learning languages…
Dude, try memorizing the correct grammatical gender for every single noun or every single exception to regular declinations. And that’s just for a medium-difficulty language like German.
You know how there’s simple English versions of news articles? The same thing exists with German. And the language in these Simple German articles is more difficult than the regular English version.
English is THE easy mode language of the world, which is why e.g. pretty much anyone in Europe defaults to it if they are speaking to anyone who speaks a different native language. Like, if someone from Austria speaks with someone from Ukraine, they will use English.
try memorizing the correct grammatical gender
Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either. We just start using words. German is the same. Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either.
… because it doesn’t exist in English. Of course you don’t remember things that don’t exist.
Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
Yep. That’s why you can pick out every American stumbling through German even after they spent 20 years in the country, because they can’t get any of the things that you have to memorize right.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
If you think that what they teach in American schools in German, then maybe. But seriously, pronunciation is so not the hardest part about learning languages.
And as I said, German isn’t even a hard language either. That goes to e.g. Finnish or Hungarian (at least for western languages). But English is an easy mode language.
If English was easy, then native speakers wouldn’t make so many mistakes.
Maybe you mean English is forgiving? As in, even though you’re bad at it, I can understand you.
Case in point: If English were easy.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/sentences/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
What the fuck do you think learning vocabulary by reading is, if not memorization? You’re just doing it subconsciously rather than intentionally.
Language acquisition and rote memorisation aren’t exactly 1:1.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
It’s like the difference between reading a dictionary and only going forward after you’ve learned a page by heart vs simply starting to read simpler novels even when you don’t understand all the words, and picking it up as you go along. Understanding form context.
That’s not memorizing the genders. You see the word, you know the word.
I know that the Spanish word for table is mesa. I didn’t sit there and think “the base part is mes and the a means it’s female”. The word is just mesa. And la mesa looks right because I’ve seen it. I didn’t think “it needs to be la because it’s feminine”.
Well, they all speak it in western Europe because it is the language of the victors of WWII, and is since taught in schools.
We have English from class 5 (mandatory), French or Latin from class 7 (mandatory), then, optional, Latin or French (whatever you did not take) from class 9, and something like Italian or Spanish from class 11. Some schools offer wider selection like Polish or Russian, or even Greek like they did in my nephews school.
I don’t get why people keep saying German is harder to learn than english. I struggled much more learning english as a second language than German.
English is THE easy mode language of the world
English isn’t easy at all. It’s an obnoxiously difficult, confusing, and contradictory mash up of half a dozen Mediterranean languages.
If you want an easy language, learn Esperanto. If you want a business language learn English.
Tell me you are an English Monolingual without telling me you are an English Monolingual.
笑死我了
笑死我了
ខ្ញុំក៏អាចប្រើការបកប្រែ googe
English is THE easy mode language of the world
hahahaha, no, it is not. A significant amount of words are ambiguous if isolated from their context (take “fire”: as in fire a shot, a flame, fire a worker, “this is fire”?), pronunciation is all over the place, it feels like there are more exceptions than rules when it comes to past-present-future verbs
Lol the english monolinguals. Hungarian “Lóg”=to hang, “lóg az iskolából”=to skip school. Extremely common thing in every language. Also most languages are irregular just to different extents. English irregularity is mainly in some of the past tense forms and spelling. I would count gender as an irregularity(depending on how it works in the language) which english doesnt have for example. English doesnt have cases which are another struggle for a lot of people learning languages. Then there are languages that are not as irregular, but they have extremely complicated internal logic which is just harder to learn than just learning by a case by case basis. Id put hungarian here where there are usually reasons for why things happen but it just got lost in an older version of hungarian or its so complex theres no point to learning it. Also there are things that do actually seem to be completely fucking random and are even annoying as a native speaker.
English is my 2nd language 🤷
Only someone who has never learned a second language thinks that this is difficult or somehow special to English.
As someone who has learned four different languages and studied a dozen more, English is on the harder end of the spectrum to grasp phonetically. The nice thing about English (and other Romance languages) is the alphabet. Compare that to Chinese, with a laundry list of characters to absorb or Arabic which omits a bunch of vowel sounds, and you experience a lot of trouble.
But compare English to Spanish or German and you’ll find it to be unusually confusing and difficult. Pronunciations, secondary meanings to certain terms, and the haphazard grammar all make English a game of learned reflexes rather than logical progressions.
That’s not special to English, but it is more pronounced in what is effectively a mongrel outcropping of assorted Western European dialects.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading. It’s quite simple actually. It only has a very limited amount of language-specific sounds, and you just learn the written and spoken forms of each word individually.
The really nice thing about English is that everything’s prepositions not cases, there are no grammatical genders and half of the words are just Latin. If you know any other romance language, you can just re-use all the latin-based words you know and you’ll be mostly fine. You only have to be aware of a handful of false friends and that’s it.
I don’t think that English has more words with secondary meanings than other languages or anything like that.
I, in fact, do speak German, Italian, Spanish, English and a bit of Welsh. German is my first language, so can’t say how that is to learn as a second language, but English was by far the easiest to learn of these languages. Sure, it’s the least phonetic one of these, but that’s really the only disadvantage it has.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading.
Sure. And you could say the same about Chinese, which is a fairly simple language to learn if you never want to be literate. But as so much of our communication is via text, the literacy angle is an insurmountable part of language learning.
English spelling is easy enough that in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
In fact, if you want a language where it’s actually hard to know how a word is pronounced if you only ever see it in the written form, you gave yourself the answer.
in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
I’d be curious to know if that’s actually true.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
If you know your radicals? We’ll say “also 95%” just to be annoying.
But how do you learn the radicals? Same way you learn all the standard English pronunciations. Repetition.
I never implied those problems are special to English, but that English is not “THE easy mode language” due to those problems, plus many others I didn’t mention
That is how all languages works.
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
The old man the boat.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
i mean, no, the reason english is the default language of the world is due to (british, and then american) imperialism
french and latin were once the default languages of europe for the same reason
and how hard a language is to learn is kinda irrelevant, because it will always depend on what language(s) you already know. for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
The problem is not wrapping your mind around the concept of grammatical genders, but that you have to memorize them for every word. And they are different in any language with grammatical gender.
For example:
- Italian: La luna (female), il sole (male)
- German: Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)
or
- German: Das Huhn (neuter)
- Italian: il pollo (male)
- Spanish: la gallina (female)
Knowing the grammatical gender of something in one language won’t help you one bit when learning another language. In fact, it might be even detrimental, because it’s different in every language.
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
tu penses mon nom d’utilisatrice vient de quelle langue?
of course not every language has the same grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with them, you don’t have to learn the concept, you already get it
when learning Spanish in school, grammatical gender was really not an issue, cause i already speak french (to be fair, french and spanish will often gender the same words the same way, which greatly helps ofc)
to me, it was much harder to grasp the distinction between ser and estar, for example. two fundamental verbs that, in french, get translated to the same thing
The ideia of gramatical gender is kept, but the specific genders may be different, so it’s still pretty hard
At least that’s how I felt when learning spanish or french
lol that’s just so blatantly wrong
“for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem”
Not necessarily. I’m German and I still have to learn French grammatical genders by heart, because they don’t necessarily match ours. Familiarity with the concept doesn’t make it any easier, just less weird.
Example: The tower. LA tour, feminine. DER Turm, masculine.
That’s more of a Germanic vs Latin languages. Most genders on french and Spanish match.
Lol, they don’t even match consistently between Portuguese and Spanish which are much closer, even when the noun is literally the same (e.g.a água vs el água)
They don’t even match between Austrian German and German German.
What? no
I know portugueses and spanish and I’m learning french and it make it all even more complex
Since in one language it’s something, in anofher it’s something else
We have a park here…
Champoeg state park.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champoeg,_Oregon
Sham-pooie.
Because in Old Dutch, the letter g is pronounced like a y when it’s at the end of a word.
I’d have assumed that was a native name tbh
Stemmed from Native, but the spelling is Old Dutch. :)
Old English you mean? I’m Dutch and I’ve never heard of a word where g is pronounced like y in Dutch
Nope, Old Dutch. Same for names like Solveig.
That’s a Scandinavian name, not a Dutch word
you’re telling me martin solveig isn’t dutch? wait no he’s french
Though he aught to have picked a tougher word.
So you thought.
*ought (whoosh?)
Lol I can’t even spell my own language
That’s because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question “when you boat go water?” is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.
Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn’t incentivise you to learn. It’s something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.
Very true. I was born in Brazil and thus learned Portuguese as my first language. Then moved to the US when I was five. My parents sat me down in my grandparent’s basement and taught me English, it had to be done quick as school was starting very soon. Many years later I would return to Brazil and spent three months there. Starting with crude vocabulary and building it up as I went, over hundreds of interactions. The best way to learn a language, is out of necessity. Whether it really does hinge on you being able to communicate with others or if self-imposed. I wish more people saw it as something that must be done. Unfortunately, Google Translate enables laziness.
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