The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl.jachten), which means "hunt", and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we'd have yacht airplanes.
fun fact: the word "Yacht" derives from old german "Jagd", which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as "Yacht" and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
die Fregatte, die Trireme, und die Galeone unter anderen sind aber auch weiblich und sind auch Fremdwörter für bestimmte Arten Schiffe.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
eh people always point to German but they just use compound words more often. if you know the parts that make up the word it shouldn't be hard to parse.
that makes german easier than most other languages, for example french, where they just invent new sounds to fuck with foreigners and use a new or loanword for any complex situation, instead of just compounding the information
It is a medical word for getting tested for breast cancer.
I didn't bring it up because it is a difficult word to understand, but because it is difficult to pronounce correctly without stumbling over it. Yacht is not difficult in any way since our word for yacht is also yacht and because the spellings and sounds are pretty common in for example German, which is another language we are being taught from an early age.
Of course, all languages and their difficulties are relative depending on where in the world you live, but if you're European, especially western European, then it is pretty silly to be impressed that people can pronounce yacht.
Having a long word like skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse is a lot more tricky since it's a bit of a tongue twister to pronounce and if you aren't well versed in Danish, you will also not know when or how to pronounce each letter, as several of them have different sounds or no sounds at all at different places in the word. That is why I brought it up.
Nope, but it does come up if you get tested for breast cancer.
Point is, that yacht isn't a difficult word at all. Especially not if you're European, since the word for yacht in many European languages is... yacht.
I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O's in the middle.
It's a medical term or word or whatever. But it is not easy to pronounce at all. That's the thing with Danish. We have a lot of letters that are silent or changes sound depending on what letters they are next to and sometimes just because.
Even if you have skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse broken down for you, I doubt you'd be able to pronounce it correctly because several repeat letters in that word are pronounced differently and some of them are silent.
Words like: ord, ost, mos, mos and orden all have vastly different ways of pronouncing the o and mos and mos are completely different words with completely different pronunciations where you can literally only tell which one it is based on context in the text. By themselves, you will not know.
Every language has their little quirks like that, but everybody knows how to pronounce yacht as yacht is the word for fancy boat in many languages.
The post above is basically like being impressed that a foreigner knows how to pronounce "okay".
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.
Meanwhile I learned this weekend how to pronounce "dandelion" from watching a Beavis and Butthead clip. And I haven been speaking English for decades, in both professional and social settings.
I agree that English is easier to learn than German (spelling excluded), and word genders are an annoying facet of learning German, but it does get easier. Eventually you can develop a language sense and you can infer the gender from the form, meaning, and origin of the word with a pretty high success rate.
Grammatical genders are one of these points where you can pick up that someone's not a native speaker even if after they lived in the country for 30 years. Their only real point seems to be to trip up foreigners.
Yeah, I should have been more clear. It can be learned, with a good basis of language instruction and ongoing effort. It’s relatively easy to communicate effectively without mastering word gender, so for people who don’t care about correctness, people who learned exclusively on their own, or people who don’t delve into the theory of German grammar much, it’s also very possible to otherwise master German without a good understanding of genders. (Given the actual history of migration in Germany, the vast majority of people who have been here 30+ years were unfortunately not given a good basis of instruction, but that’s very slowly changing.)
My intent in saying that it can be learned is not to shame anyone who hasn’t internalized the patterns of genus (the point of learning a language is communication, after all, and most communication is not hampered by incorrect gender usage), but rather to note that they’re not actually random. I was always taught that the gender of a word is random unless it ends in -heit, -keit, -tion, -ung, -tät, -schaft, or -chen, but that’s just not the case. There are exceptions, but general rules do exist (materials are generally neutral, single syllable words that gain an umlaut when pluralized are generally masculine, emotions are generally feminine, but types of anger are typically masculine, etc.).
I read a fascinating book about this, that I’ll try to find when I get home, because it completely changed my view of genus. It explicated a lot of the rules that native speakers and nonnative speakers with a highly developed (oof at that word, but I can’t think of a better one) language sense have internalized.
A friend, originally Hungarian but speaks numerous languages describes English as "easy to speak, hard to write".
We really need a do-over with a better alphabet that allows a reader to know exactly how a word is said - one letter, one sound. Of course, I realise that it's far too late to work - even on our tiny island we can't agree on how words are pronounced.
On the other hand, maybe the British should have conquered less.
If the Brits didn't, the French would have. Or the Germans. Or the Spaniards. Etc. I'm not going to shame the British for being especially good at conquering when conquering was in vogue.
What do people think the French and Spanish were doing?
It's like they forget that Spain financed Columbus, and it was Spain that rampaged through what is now Central America, and destroyed all the works (who knows how much of history was lost?) of the Mayans and Aztecs.
Spain then went on to install Maximillion as king of Mexico.
There's a lot more in between there that I've forgotten, but holy hell the Conquistadors put the English to shame when it comes to outright brutality and destruction.
And "yacht" or variations of it are used in the exact same way in a lot of other languages. It is really an exceptionally unfortunate example the monolinguistic OOP chose to be their point.
Brings back a fun memory. On a business trip in France, I was driving and with my coworker (French national).
I had the GPS set to English pronunciation of the signs etc. My coworker spent most of the two hour drive a complaining about the pronunciation and begging to change the settings. I spent the trip laughing my ass off at him and refusing to change it.
French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this
There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I'm sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.
No I mean the minor difference ones. Or how I am supposed to memorize 5000 hanzi to be considered college literate. This is a bunch of repeating but good Lord there is a lot of individual characters out there.
It's sorta like memorizing the word encyclopedia. I'm sure if there were a handful of letters missing or wrong you could still read it. Because you don't memorize the letters but what it looks like. Exactly how Chinese works.
Fair enough. I like that a pot looks like a pot, fire looks like fire, and a house is little house but it's still confusing. You can't really sound it out you have to have the shape memorized.
I'll try to keep this in mind if I ever try to expand past my 100 character brain limit but I'm not sure I have the capacity for all that anymore, if I ever did.
I don't know all the words in this, but I doubt it; it's a classic Chinese tongue twister.
The first line translates to "four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty.
On the second & third line it's something along the lines of "whoever says 40/14 says <X>, <sth> 40/14", as far as I can tell.
::: spoiler Spoiler
No, I don't want to use a translator, where's the fun in that?
:::
I recognized 打 as something on the lines of hitting or striking, but wasn't sure if it actually had that meaning here, or something (seemingly) unrelated as in 打的.
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.
As a person who learned English as an adult, u can tell you that the word that gave me the most trouble early on was "weather". I mean these sounds are impossible!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"
As a native English speaker I can pronounce English words I've never seen before pretty easily. I'd say that there is a general system to it, but it just has a metric fuckton of exceptions. Though to be honest, it's not really all that different from having to learn the genders for every single noun in gendered languages coming from a non-gendered language. At least pronunciation in English follows a certain kind of logic (albeit one heavily influenced by loanwords). Gendering of nouns has always seemed completely arbitrary and is just straight memorization.
Yeeeah maaaybe still I would think that at least in my language is easier in english seems to be more crazy maybe I'm biased IDK.
See gendering in spanish has a general rule with few exceptions
Ends with -N, -O, -R, -S, -L, -U -I 99% chance of Male gendering
Ends with A, -DAD, -TAD, -ED, -SION, -CIÓN, -DEZ, -TIS, -IZ
95% female gendering. Some words that end with -MA, -PA and -TA can be male many exceptions there watch out. Now you would be asking there should be many more endings to words... And I'd say male gender for everything unless the subject is established to be female.
Now yes there are tricky ones that change the meaning with the gender
El cura - the priest
La cura - the cure
El papá - the dad (note it also has a tilde)
La papa - the potato
I believe anyway the ambiguos ones are not many really if they are more than a hundred I'd be surprised more than 2 hundred nearly impossible but I'm no linguist.
Now I think this would be a summed up version of the rule but I'd say is pretty close to the thing and fits a paragraph, personally for what I've seen I think the hard thing is getting used to handle gendering without thinking in gender. That's confusing for many English speakers and some Japanese complaint bout the same.
I have advice below if you’re interested, but if you’re just ranting, that’s totally fair and feel free to ignore the rest.
Honestly, just treat English as a pictographic language. The pronunciation rules have so many exceptions, that you can either get well informed about the history of English spelling and the etymology of new vocabulary, or you can just assume the spelling is decoupled from the pronunciation. Spelling is probably less important than pronunciation generally (though it depends on how you use English) because spellcheck is pretty good nowadays.
I remember when I was a kid and we started learning foreign languages in school. My class got divided into two halves, ones that study English and other that study German. Few month later I was walking down the street with my classmate and he went like:
Oh, so you're studying English, huh? What does DUHR mean?
What?
DUHRR
Oh, you mean door? It's spelled do-o.
Bro, there's an R in there and two O's. DUHR. Even I know that, and I'm not even the one studying English. If door was do-o, then would you spell TOH DOH as "to do"?
Little did the bro know... I hope he at least got German well enough, AFAIK there's little bullshit like that
I think English native speakers are heavily overestimating the weirdness of their own language and severely underestimating the weirdness of other languages.
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!
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of "Simone Giertz" from Sweeden whose name's pronunciation sounded like 'yecht' to me.
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.
Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.
We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we'd have yacht airplanes.
Yes, and a Polish person tells me this is the correct way to make the Yah sound at the start of the English word, yacht.
I imagine it's the same for the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Though perhaps not for the French or Spanish.
fun fact: the word "Yacht" derives from old german "Jagd", which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as "Yacht" and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
Yacht is also feminine in german (instead of the more pleasing das Yacht...) for the same reason as you say:
https://lemmy.ml/post/31227837/19058439
(thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected] for the explanations)
Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
Yeah I'm non-native. Natur is another one that triggers me, mostly because of the mother nature connotation in english
Well you’re in luck, it’s die Natur!
Edit: that’s also a pretty like-native way to think about articles, so well done!
oh wow, I guess I only hear it referenced in dative and assumed it was masculine
As in English.
Why are Yachts called she
isnt that just all boats/ships in english?
Yes.
TIL that Jägermeister and Yacht have the same root.
Linguistics is fun and weird.
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.
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
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:
or
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.
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
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.
... because it doesn't exist in English. Of course you don't remember things that don't exist.
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.
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".
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
ខ្ញុំក៏អាចប្រើការបកប្រែ googe
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.
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
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.
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.
I'd be curious to know if that's actually true.
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
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.
Šovė į kažką = shot at something, 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 🤷
That is how all languages works.
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.
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
I've never heard raw dogging meaning to stay sober.
The first I heard it, long ago, was referring to sex without a condom.
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
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!
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.
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.
Hm the word yacht is easy, it means Jacht :-)
Now pronounce it
Like yogurt without the 'ur'
It's pronounced "yoh-gurt" in English.
Yes, and yacht yohgt
Just like it's spelled if you omit the "ch" because English people are unable to fathom unusual digraphs.
https://voca.ro/1j3aWaVZBOPo
It is pronounced pretty much the same way in a number of different languages.
Except German, which the commenters instance points at
Bitch please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän. Actual word for an actual job that existed until 1991. Welcome to German.
eh people always point to German but they just use compound words more often. if you know the parts that make up the word it shouldn't be hard to parse.
that makes german easier than most other languages, for example french, where they just invent new sounds to fuck with foreigners and use a new or loanword for any complex situation, instead of just compounding the information
German is wild! I never managed to get I to stick.
What does that mean
Skipper for steamship companies on the Danube.
Hottentottententententoonstelling in Dutch. It means hottentot tent exhibition
Elektriciteitsproductiemaatschappij or basically electricity producing company.
I prefer "angstschreeuw" as word to annoy foreigners with. 7 consonants in a row!
I mean, 'sch' is basically one consonant
Fascinating- I don’t speak Danish but I can _almost_read that. Enough to assume it has to do with thyroids and lymph nodes.
It is a medical word for getting tested for breast cancer. I didn't bring it up because it is a difficult word to understand, but because it is difficult to pronounce correctly without stumbling over it. Yacht is not difficult in any way since our word for yacht is also yacht and because the spellings and sounds are pretty common in for example German, which is another language we are being taught from an early age.
Of course, all languages and their difficulties are relative depending on where in the world you live, but if you're European, especially western European, then it is pretty silly to be impressed that people can pronounce yacht.
Having a long word like skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse is a lot more tricky since it's a bit of a tongue twister to pronounce and if you aren't well versed in Danish, you will also not know when or how to pronounce each letter, as several of them have different sounds or no sounds at all at different places in the word. That is why I brought it up.
"Sentinel lymph node examination." Probably not a word that comes up much day-to-day.
Nope, but it does come up if you get tested for breast cancer.
Point is, that yacht isn't a difficult word at all. Especially not if you're European, since the word for yacht in many European languages is... yacht.
I think it's a Germanic vs. Latin-based thing, since "yacht" is Germanic in origin.
true, but most European languages will pronounce it "ya-cht" and not... "yot"
I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O's in the middle.
It's a medical term or word or whatever. But it is not easy to pronounce at all. That's the thing with Danish. We have a lot of letters that are silent or changes sound depending on what letters they are next to and sometimes just because.
Even if you have skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse broken down for you, I doubt you'd be able to pronounce it correctly because several repeat letters in that word are pronounced differently and some of them are silent.
Words like: ord, ost, mos, mos and orden all have vastly different ways of pronouncing the o and mos and mos are completely different words with completely different pronunciations where you can literally only tell which one it is based on context in the text. By themselves, you will not know.
Every language has their little quirks like that, but everybody knows how to pronounce yacht as yacht is the word for fancy boat in many languages. The post above is basically like being impressed that a foreigner knows how to pronounce "okay".
I see your Danish and raise you a German bureaucracy:
Rindfleischettikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
It means: Law for the transfer of the task of the monitoring of the labelling of beef.
I googled. I understand none of the results but it looks like that's an actual word 🤯
k
Think I found the version Lemmy really wants
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."
You can thank the French for that one.
Keu.
In a sick way I'm glad it's the language I was raised with. On the other hand, maybe the British should have conquered less.
I feel the same just for German. English is the simpleton language of the world. Nothing complicated about learning it.
Meanwhile I learned this weekend how to pronounce "dandelion" from watching a Beavis and Butthead clip. And I haven been speaking English for decades, in both professional and social settings.
You just have to learn the pronounciation of words from audio/video instead of the spelling.
It's way easier than having to memorize the grammatical gender of each and every noun or all the word-specific exceptions for irregular declinations.
I agree that English is easier to learn than German (spelling excluded), and word genders are an annoying facet of learning German, but it does get easier. Eventually you can develop a language sense and you can infer the gender from the form, meaning, and origin of the word with a pretty high success rate.
Grammatical genders are one of these points where you can pick up that someone's not a native speaker even if after they lived in the country for 30 years. Their only real point seems to be to trip up foreigners.
Yeah, I should have been more clear. It can be learned, with a good basis of language instruction and ongoing effort. It’s relatively easy to communicate effectively without mastering word gender, so for people who don’t care about correctness, people who learned exclusively on their own, or people who don’t delve into the theory of German grammar much, it’s also very possible to otherwise master German without a good understanding of genders. (Given the actual history of migration in Germany, the vast majority of people who have been here 30+ years were unfortunately not given a good basis of instruction, but that’s very slowly changing.)
My intent in saying that it can be learned is not to shame anyone who hasn’t internalized the patterns of genus (the point of learning a language is communication, after all, and most communication is not hampered by incorrect gender usage), but rather to note that they’re not actually random. I was always taught that the gender of a word is random unless it ends in -heit, -keit, -tion, -ung, -tät, -schaft, or -chen, but that’s just not the case. There are exceptions, but general rules do exist (materials are generally neutral, single syllable words that gain an umlaut when pluralized are generally masculine, emotions are generally feminine, but types of anger are typically masculine, etc.).
I read a fascinating book about this, that I’ll try to find when I get home, because it completely changed my view of genus. It explicated a lot of the rules that native speakers and nonnative speakers with a highly developed (oof at that word, but I can’t think of a better one) language sense have internalized.
A friend, originally Hungarian but speaks numerous languages describes English as "easy to speak, hard to write".
We really need a do-over with a better alphabet that allows a reader to know exactly how a word is said - one letter, one sound. Of course, I realise that it's far too late to work - even on our tiny island we can't agree on how words are pronounced.
LOL, do you have any idea how many times that's been tried?
If the Brits didn't, the French would have. Or the Germans. Or the Spaniards. Etc. I'm not going to shame the British for being especially good at conquering when conquering was in vogue.
Right?
What do people think the French and Spanish were doing?
It's like they forget that Spain financed Columbus, and it was Spain that rampaged through what is now Central America, and destroyed all the works (who knows how much of history was lost?) of the Mayans and Aztecs.
Spain then went on to install Maximillion as king of Mexico.
There's a lot more in between there that I've forgotten, but holy hell the Conquistadors put the English to shame when it comes to outright brutality and destruction.
To be fair, most of the weirdly spelled words come from other languages. Especially French.
Yup, in this case: Yacht comes from the Dutch word "jacht" (hunt). Named after fast sailing vessels to hunt down pirates and enemies.
And "yacht" or variations of it are used in the exact same way in a lot of other languages. It is really an exceptionally unfortunate example the monolinguistic OOP chose to be their point.
hear here. and now we're building the largest yacht for bazos
Brings back a fun memory. On a business trip in France, I was driving and with my coworker (French national).
I had the GPS set to English pronunciation of the signs etc. My coworker spent most of the two hour drive a complaining about the pronunciation and begging to change the settings. I spent the trip laughing my ass off at him and refusing to change it.
Sure we did that. But look at how you spell and pronounce them ! What a slaughter.
French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this
English is the most common
I think phonetic alphabets are a pretty good idea (though I suppose they're mostly phonemic).
I'm surprised more people don't make fun of abjads.
There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I'm sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.
“Strictly phonetic”—no. But more-or-less-strictly phonological, yes. Finnish is also one of those.
Uncensored.
Just do a search for a bit of the text before posting this stuff. It's super easy to find the uncensored version.
POST THAT. Let's kill off this censored trash.
Yeah, I have no issue with newer generations mangling language - but doing it because capitalism? Gross. Don't stand for that shit.
So.... No one in here has tried to learn Mandarin in here huh?
Let's talk about Hanji, heck worse let's talk about:
Which is pronounced like:
sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí;
shéi bǎ shísì shuō “shíshì”, jiù dǎ tā shísì,
shéi bǎ sìshí shuō “shìshí”, jiù dǎ tā sìshí.
This is China-nese. Original Chinese, its
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十； 誰把十四說“十適”，就打他十四； 誰把四十說“適十”，就打他四十
Thank you for helping my point. Also.... Aaaaaa... Why is the so many characters?!
Its honestly only a handful of characters.
No I mean the minor difference ones. Or how I am supposed to memorize 5000 hanzi to be considered college literate. This is a bunch of repeating but good Lord there is a lot of individual characters out there.
It's sorta like memorizing the word encyclopedia. I'm sure if there were a handful of letters missing or wrong you could still read it. Because you don't memorize the letters but what it looks like. Exactly how Chinese works.
Fair enough. I like that a pot looks like a pot, fire looks like fire, and a house is little house but it's still confusing. You can't really sound it out you have to have the shape memorized.
I'll try to keep this in mind if I ever try to expand past my 100 character brain limit but I'm not sure I have the capacity for all that anymore, if I ever did.
Oh this is the lion rock pasta cave thing?
I don't know all the words in this, but I doubt it; it's a classic Chinese tongue twister.
The first line translates to "four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty. On the second & third line it's something along the lines of "whoever says 40/14 says <X>, <sth> 40/14", as far as I can tell.
::: spoiler Spoiler
No, I don't want to use a translator, where's the fun in that? :::
Oohh thanks
I've found the poem, I thought it was this one because of the amount of "shi"s. But yours is way bigger
Yeah, so that last bit is supposed to be
"If someone says 14 like 40 hit them 14 times, if they say 40 like 14, hit them 40 times."
Ooh nice, thanks :)
I recognized 打 as something on the lines of hitting or striking, but wasn't sure if it actually had that meaning here, or something (seemingly) unrelated as in 打的.
Though he aught to have picked a tougher word.
*ought (whoosh?)
Lol I can't even spell my own language
So you thought.
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
I dislike you
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)
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.
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.
Ironic.
As a person who learned English as an adult, u can tell you that the word that gave me the most trouble early on was "weather". I mean these sounds are impossible!!
oh you mean whether
both weather and whether. I mean they sound the same. also "w" and "th" sounds are hard to pronounce.
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.
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?
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。
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
They are not all the same sound. And that is very important in Mandarin.
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?
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.
Relevant "Raymond Luxury Yacht" Monty Python sketch https://youtu.be/tyQvjKqXA0Y
Fuck censorship.
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
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
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.
As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"
As a native English speaker I can pronounce English words I've never seen before pretty easily. I'd say that there is a general system to it, but it just has a metric fuckton of exceptions. Though to be honest, it's not really all that different from having to learn the genders for every single noun in gendered languages coming from a non-gendered language. At least pronunciation in English follows a certain kind of logic (albeit one heavily influenced by loanwords). Gendering of nouns has always seemed completely arbitrary and is just straight memorization.
Yeeeah maaaybe still I would think that at least in my language is easier in english seems to be more crazy maybe I'm biased IDK.
See gendering in spanish has a general rule with few exceptions
Ends with -N, -O, -R, -S, -L, -U -I 99% chance of Male gendering
Ends with A, -DAD, -TAD, -ED, -SION, -CIÓN, -DEZ, -TIS, -IZ 95% female gendering. Some words that end with -MA, -PA and -TA can be male many exceptions there watch out. Now you would be asking there should be many more endings to words... And I'd say male gender for everything unless the subject is established to be female. Now yes there are tricky ones that change the meaning with the gender
El cura - the priest
La cura - the cure
El papá - the dad (note it also has a tilde)
La papa - the potato
I believe anyway the ambiguos ones are not many really if they are more than a hundred I'd be surprised more than 2 hundred nearly impossible but I'm no linguist.
Now I think this would be a summed up version of the rule but I'd say is pretty close to the thing and fits a paragraph, personally for what I've seen I think the hard thing is getting used to handle gendering without thinking in gender. That's confusing for many English speakers and some Japanese complaint bout the same.
I have advice below if you’re interested, but if you’re just ranting, that’s totally fair and feel free to ignore the rest.
Honestly, just treat English as a pictographic language. The pronunciation rules have so many exceptions, that you can either get well informed about the history of English spelling and the etymology of new vocabulary, or you can just assume the spelling is decoupled from the pronunciation. Spelling is probably less important than pronunciation generally (though it depends on how you use English) because spellcheck is pretty good nowadays.
Yeah that's what I did basically. It's a good advice at the end of the day.
Lol in Polish
Mandarin
What about thought, through, tough, though... wtf?! It took me many many years to finally understand this crazyness lol
you forgot thorough and trough
of course lol
I remember when I was a kid and we started learning foreign languages in school. My class got divided into two halves, ones that study English and other that study German. Few month later I was walking down the street with my classmate and he went like:
Oh, so you're studying English, huh? What does DUHR mean?
What?
DUHRR
Oh, you mean door? It's spelled do-o.
Bro, there's an R in there and two O's. DUHR. Even I know that, and I'm not even the one studying English. If door was do-o, then would you spell TOH DOH as "to do"?
Little did the bro know... I hope he at least got German well enough, AFAIK there's little bullshit like that
I think "Eunuch" might be a worse offender of this
Not really, the only thing that is harder to pronounce is the 'ch'
Oiseau
Oiuwotm8
Oh hi Mark
its funny how people hold that word as a super complicated and incomprehensible word even tho it’s perfectly regular and follows basic rules
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!
Also, how do you pronounce 'stingy'... 'Raphael'...
"Raphael" is of Hebrew origin. Can't fault English for that one.
Can't really fault English for nearly all of it.
Much of the difficulty comes from the fucked-up French language, courtesy of the Norman Invasion in 1066.
So we're talking about a nearly 1000-year old thing here.
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
It's the same word in my native language.
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of "Simone Giertz" from Sweeden whose name's pronunciation sounded like 'yecht' to me.
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.
I did that unintentionally. Cmon.
All Yakked Up
Try looking up "colloquially". That's going to be a rabbit hole. Oh, speaking of. Idioms. English is one of the hardest languages to learn.