this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?
As soon as I stop hiccoughing and cut this bough
*needing to laugh
Oh yeah, unlike French where 2/3 of each word is silent.
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.
Liaison, but also did you mean to use that word there or was it a weird autocorrect?
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.
That's the only hard thing about English. Many other languages have this difficulty plus many more (gender, tenses, complex rules, exceptions...).
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).
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
I don't think that's very specific to English, I could write the same subject swap in French, Spanish and maybe Japanese.
Yeah, we can do it in Japanese. Particles change. Passive voice and subjunctive mood can also be done without too much trouble.
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."
It's not like you can't say that in french.
They have almost a hundred ways to conjugate each verb too (even if there are about a hundred groups).
English is a walk in the park compared to French IMO.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Plus every word has like 10 different meanings while other languages sometimes have 10 different words for the same thing.
runis 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).
I rarely hear people saying English is hard, except for the pronunciation.
German has this too.
And then, when you're learning French, you have to watch out for words that have a different gender than in German.
la lune - der Mond
le soleil - die Sonne
Yep, that's how I know. The struggle was real for 3 years.
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.
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.
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.
Oh no it doesn't!
In Swedish you can figure out the gender of a new word because the phrase hints at what it is. In french there is no such luxury, and even worse, it's a Bel (sounds like belle which is feminine) avion not a beau(masc.) avion even if avion is masculine...
Lots of french people don't know the gender of the ocean and other voyel starting words because of that.