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It’s what it’s
I dislike you
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.
Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
And for a foreigner, this is actually helpful.
I think there are at least three versions from the original author, IIRC.
Shit like this is why I doubt it when people say you can learn English by learning the spelling of sounds, because no you can’t.
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.
The word for yacht is jacht in Dutch, so that one’s easy.
What makes it slightly harder is that jacht can also mean hunt.
However, the hardest part of learning English when you’re Dutch is trying not to sound like Mark Rutte.
Louis van Gaal has entered the chat.
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。They are not all the same sound. And that is very important in Mandarin.
I mean, that’s just because Europeans (and places Europeans colonized) are not used to tonal languages. I started leaning mandarin recently, and while the tones take some getting used to, they are quite clear to differentiate
This sound like something someone who only speaks English would say.
Yeah, it is an extremely typical native English speaking monolinguist take. They always manage to find examples that are common in basically all languages and assuming it is some esoteric English language quirp.
You don’t have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
Me to the Japanese every day.
Someone beat you to it but they deleted their comment :(
fucking!
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.
deleted by creator
Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.
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.
Fuck censorship.
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.
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
“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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
That is how all languages works.
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
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
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 🤷
I’m so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn’t.
Imagine bad language on the internet.
Capitalism is ruining our greatest gift, language.
We have a whole ass generation growing up having to learn to use weird euphemisms for everything and anything remotely controversial and it’s totally normal to them. If I were really conspiracy-minded I would be screaming how “They” are doing this on purpose so they can better control us… but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
This is absolutely correct. It’s so tiring to hear people constantly misattribute the fundamental consequences of the machine itself to some mysterious cabal of operators.
But for the rest, eh. Always has been. Kids have always been censored by parents and authority figures. They find their way around it and evolve the language with each new generation.
For example, the youths have taken to the words “raw dog” in the funniest way. It’s some kind of reverse euphemism for “without the help of drugs” - the most offensive way possible to say something innocuous and wholesome.
Like, “I raw dogged my date last night” means “I decided to stay sober despite my insecurities”
I’m terrified of the impact the onset of LLM’s will have on our already failing education systems and willfully ignorant culture, but not because of the censors.
rawdogging implies more than to just stay sober. You can rawdog an exam, which just means you enter with no learning. You can rawdog a meeting, meaning no preparation, you can rawdog a dish, meaning no recipe used. Rawdogging is much more philosophical than people attribute it to
Fascinating! The more you know. Thanks.
I’ve never heard raw dogging meaning to stay sober.
The first I heard it, long ago, was referring to sex without a condom.
Yeah, I’m typically fine with language changing over time, and yeah you’re right it’s just how language evolves.
I guess my fear here is that the methods and means for changing language right now might not be evolution as much as de-evolution in this particular intersection of culture and technology.
When kids naturally develop ways to express themselves, it leads to new generations of minds coming up with new art and expressions.
But I’m not at all sure what the LLM’s and internet culture and the state of politics is going to do to a generation of kids already growing up in an anti-intellectual environment, with growing popularity of phrases like “just put the ___ in the bag” or “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” etc. It really worries me, because a lot of what makes us special as a species is our ability to take complex sets of ideas and concepts and make them into quantifiable abstractions through language, letting us manipulate complicated topics in our minds.
If you don’t have adequate language skills, you’re going to have a harder and harder time performing essential human functions, or even just communicating with others.
if the Zeitgeist is dumbing down, you as an intellectual will stick out like a sore thumb, and you might lose the ability to communicate your ideas efficiently. So, if you are not actively promoting knowledge, you are just complaining into the void like the rest of us
you are just complaining into the void like the rest of us
“Just put the thing in the bag”
“I ain’t reading all that”
“The curtains were just blue.”
It’s to prevent an algorithm from deranking the content, not to prevent humans from seeing it. Obviously pointless on the Fediverse, but many people do it on other social media platforms.
And the algorithm is programmed to follow particularly American puritanical values, as they are aimed at the American consumer market, but of course on account of the universal nature of the internet, we all get to enjoy the results of it now.
No shit!
It’s easier than Dutch at least
Lol absolutely not
Dutch is a normal, sane language like any other
English is a clusterfuck. Simple on the surface but a complete mess underneath
I think English native speakers are heavily overestimating the weirdness of their own language and severely underestimating the weirdness of other languages.
Sincerely, a German.
Nee, Englisch ist tatsächlich idiotisch. Deutsch mag auf den ersten Blick kompliziert erscheinen ist aber erstaunlich regulär.
Inwiefern ist deutsch bitte ein weniger chaotischer clusterfuck als Englisch?
Wenn du ein unbekanntes deutsches Wort liest, kannst du es sogleich richtig aussprechen. Dies ist in Englisch selten der Fall, auch für Muttersprachler.
Das H in “gehen” wird nicht als h ausgesprochen. (ˈɡeːən) Hier die Lautschrift, falls du mir nicht glaubst. Ich habs am Anfang auch abgestritten. “Der Weg” und “weg” verwenden identische buchstaben, aber die Aussprache ist unterschiedlich. Das “ch” in machen und michael sind zwei verschiedene Laute. Das “ch” in “Chef” ist ein sch ( ʃɛf ). Nur kleine, schnelle Beispiele.
Nichts gegen die Eigenheiten vom Englischen beim Lesen. Ich sitze nur gerade in einer Fortbildung um Deutsch als Zweitsprache zu unterrichten und du würdest dich wundern, wie abgedreht unsere Sprache ist.
Beispiel Zeitformen: wir verwenden für die Zukunft beim Sprechen in der Regel das Präsens. “Ich gehe morgen zur Schule”. Für die Vergangenheit benutzen wir beim Sprechen eine andere Zeitform (Perfekt) als beim Schreiben (Präteritum) - beides natürlich mit Ausnahmen. Erklär das alles mal einem Engländer.
Von willkürlich gegenderten Artikeln (nicht nötig auf englisch) und unseren Fällen (oh man) will ich gar nicht erst anfangen.
Englisch hat Auspracheeigenheiten, aber deutschsprachige sollten echt nicht mit Steinen werfen.
Zum H: der ist dazu da die Vokale zu trennen. Wir sagen nicht geen, wir sagen ge’en, wie du selber richtig geschrieben hast. Für solche Vokal-Konsonant-Kombinationen gibt es einfache Regeln, genauso für die Diphtonge. Versuch mal Ausspracheregeln zu English zu finden. Es ist einfacher, die Aussprache eines jeden Wortes auswendig zu lernen.
Zu Zukunft mit Präsens: völlig regulär, gibt’s auch in vielen anderen Sprachen, zB die Slawischen. Ich behaupte nicht dass unsere Grammatik für einen Engländern sinnvoll und intuitiv einfach erscheint, ich sage dass die deutsche Grammatik - allem voran die Schreibweise - sehr viel regulärer ist. Normalerweise ist eine Sprache je einfacher zu lernen desto regulärer sie ist, minus die flektierenden vs synthetisierenden.
Die Artikel sind nicht willkürlich, sie folgen dem Laut. Ich bin aber einverstanden dass sie genausogut willkürlich sein könnten. Dies ist aber bei allen mir bekannten Sprachen mit grammatikalischen Geschlecht der Fall, lateinische sowie slawische, Deutsch ist hier keine Ausnahme.
Die Fälle sind sehr nützlich, da ohne sie vieles zweideutig wäre, so wie in Englisch. Die Inpräzision ihrer Sprache scheisst mich ehrlich gesagt etwas an.
My japanese teacher: Mein japanischer Lehrer, mein Japanischlehrer, mein japanischer Japanischlehrer? Wer weiss!
Dann solche Sachen:
Dutch is also a complete clusterfuck with no ryme or reason half the time
