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.
You don't have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
Me to the Japanese every day.
This sound like something someone who only speaks English would say.
Fuck censorship.
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
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
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.
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.
Hottentottententententoonstelling in Dutch. It means hottentot tent exhibition
Fascinating- I don’t speak Danish but I can _almost_read that. Enough to assume it has to do with thyroids and lymph nodes.
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。
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.
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?
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.
I think "Eunuch" might be a worse offender of this
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 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
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