• BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    61
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is my go to response when people are trying to claim that English is hard… Well at least I don’t have to remember what gender has randomly been assigned to every noun I want to use.

    • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      1 year ago

      No, instead you have to learn to read and spell in a system that often sounds quite different to what is written. I want to read a book that’s never been read. I want to live a life alive at a live show. Anything ending in ~ough which has something like 6 or 8 different sounds. I’m a native speaker trying to work with my wife on English (we speak Japanese at home). It’s insane for any reading/spelling.

      • Slovene@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        20
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?

        • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I think liason is the harder part about trying to transcribe someone’s spoken words as a new learner without a good grasp on vocabulary.

          At least with French, a lot of those silent letters are a lot more predictable than English. English has French borrowings (from two different time periods), Latin borrowings (some of which were borrowed via Norman or Old French first), Greek, Germanic, etc. and we did various levels of preserving the native spelling. This is neat for etymology and maybe figuring out a word one doesn’t know, but kinda sucks for spelling. A lot of words from Normal and Old French are now spelled differently in modern Parisian, but the more recent loans are closer. It’s a hot mess.

      • saroh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        And then you also have to get the correct stress on the syllables which are also unguessable. Ask for a banana instead of a banaaaaaaaana and people won’t understand.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        That’s the only hard thing about English. Many other languages have this difficulty plus many more (gender, tenses, complex rules, exceptions…).

        • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          English has no shortage of exceptions to “rules” (sometimes the rule only seeming such because it applies to the subset most frequently used rather than the whole set of whatevers). English’s most common verbs are irregular. That’s not necessarily too crazy (be, have, do/make are often weird in most languages because they resist change the most since they are most used). We have all kinds of things that aren’t “correct” (prescriptive view) that native speakers get wrong all the time. “I have went” rather than “I have gone” is one that grates to me, but I accept that language changes. A lot of verbs are also losing their endings and patterns and gradually going to the dominant ~ed ending where previously they did not (Tom Scott has a good video on this).

        • callyral [he/they]@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          English word order is also pretty weird.

          “The man gave a bone to the dog”, “The dog was given a bone by the man”, “The bone was given by the man to the dog”, etc etc

          These are all valid sentences* expressing the same thing.

          *They may not be gramatically correct, I am not a grammar professional

          edit: I had forgotten that you can also do that in other languages

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think that’s very specific to English, I could write the same subject swap in French, Spanish and maybe Japanese.

            • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, we can do it in Japanese. Particles change. Passive voice and subjunctive mood can also be done without too much trouble.

          • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            If you task your male dogsitter to give your dog a treat while you are away and somebody asks you whether your pet is taken care of during your vacation, you can say: “Don’t worry. When I return, the bone will have been given by the man to the dog.”

        • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Then by that metric, Chinese must be incredibly easy. Simple genders, no articles, simple grammar, no verb conjugation whatsoever, very simple tenses. Probably the easiest language out there!

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I didn’t list all possible difficulties. Chinese have this never ending list of very complex characters and probably more subtility that I don’t know of. If it is close to Japanese though, yes the grammar doesn’t seem complicated compared to European languages.

            • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Chinese grammar seems to me to be simpler than Japanese, though I studied Japanese for about a year and have lived here speaking the language daily (primary language at home) for the better part of a decade and have only scratched the surface on Mandarin.

          • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Pronunciation is still incredibly difficult unless you are immersed in it. I’d argue that it’s legitimately one of the most difficult languages to pick up in a classroom simply because of how completely different it sounds in the real world versus on tapes.

      • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Plus every word has like 10 different meanings while other languages sometimes have 10 different words for the same thing.

        • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          run is my personal favorite. Run for office, run off a copy, run out of something, run into something, run over something, etc.

          I don’t necessarily think this is uncommon in language (particularly with the most common ~20 or so verbs).

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      Your anglocentric view is common, but also completely wrong - speakers of strongly gendered languages (Latin, German, Portuguese, French, etc) don’t have to remember a word’s gender either, it just comes naturally as you become fluent.

      • Slotos@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Nope. You just grow confident to not notice the blunders, and learn to recover fast enough to not persist when it would be detrimental.

        Native speakers making mistakes or not caring to stick to the rules is one of the forces behind languages’ evolution.

      • CookieMonsterDebate@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m semi-fluent in German and Spanish, and my strategy is guesstimate. I figure that I’ve probably read/heard the word before, so I just test out the genders on it and whichever one “feels more natural” or “sounds less weird”, it’s probably because I’ve heard it that way before, so I go with that.