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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.
deleted by creator
Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.
As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word “yacht” is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: “The Chaos” (poem)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
It’s way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading.
Sure. And you could say the same about Chinese, which is a fairly simple language to learn if you never want to be literate. But as so much of our communication is via text, the literacy angle is an insurmountable part of language learning.
English spelling is easy enough that in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
In fact, if you want a language where it’s actually hard to know how a word is pronounced if you only ever see it in the written form, you gave yourself the answer.
in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
I’d be curious to know if that’s actually true.
How’s the percentage of that for Chinese?
If you know your radicals? We’ll say “also 95%” just to be annoying.
But how do you learn the radicals? Same way you learn all the standard English pronunciations. Repetition.
I never implied those problems are special to English, but that English is not “THE easy mode language” due to those problems, plus many others I didn’t mention
That is how all languages works.
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.
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 🤷
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
It’s what it’s
I dislike you
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.
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!
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.
Bitch please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Fuck censorship.
So… No one in here has tried to learn Mandarin in here huh?
Let’s talk about Hanji, heck worse let’s talk about:
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十；
谁把十四说“十适”，就打他十四；
谁把四十说“适十”，就打他四十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?
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.
