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People who started learning a second language, how has it made you aware how broken English is ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by x4740N@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language

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[-] philthi@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I noticed how many of the verbs in English can mean different things depending on what word comes next, e.g.

Put
Put down
Put up
Put upon
Put on (wear)

English has so many words that mean the same thing, it's amazing, astonishing, bewildering and flabbergasting, there was a thief, mugger, robber, bandit... Who stole, robbed, nicked, thieved from me... I don't know how anyone ever learns all the English words for stuff, I honestly don't know how I have.

It also made me reflect on how languages are just noises we've all agreed to make at each other. The rules try to match the language and fail, not the other way around.

Recently I was also thinking about how interesting it is that some words we use are SO OLD, and we just... use them like it's no big deal, but if we we're transported back thousands of years, people were still calling vanilla something very similar to vanilla and arteries something very similar to arteries, and that is super cool to me.

[-] MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub 6 points 5 months ago

English-learning books call those phrasal verbs and there are entire chapters focused on them. I remember them as the most hated part of English lessons.

[-] extrangerius@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Phrasal verbs can often feel weird and arbitrary.

Many of them are more or less intuitive:

Put down
Put in
Put on

But then there’s:

Put up (with)
Put out
Put off

Putting out the fire is pretty strange taken literally. Out where?

The fact that they’re the exact opposites of the above doesn’t help.

this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024

118 points (77.6% liked)

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