Norm MacDonald said, “I dunno, I find it the easiest.”
33 Comments on English is the Hardest Language
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Horrible – Horrific
Terrible – Terrific
Go figure …
I saw this earlier somewhere. Having taught classes on a technical subject in Venezuela many years ago, they were telling my how hard it is to learn English because of how words spelled basically the same are pronounced differently. This guy perfectly captures what they were trying to explain to me.
Imagine teaching like this in a European English school.
They’d all get up and walk out!
Flammable.
Inflammable.
Same thing.
There, their and they’re.
Ebonics is the hardest language but English is a close second
He missed the most difficult one:
“The sheriff is a… NEAR!”
Does a formerly disgruntled English student become gruntled?
“Choir” should be spelled “Chior”
Then it would be chi or.
How come Chicago is not pronounced Chycago or China as Chin a.
only in english: a windbreaker can be a jacket or someone with a digestive condition
Lie and lye, by, buy and bye. Liar and the musical instrument lyre, wood and would, knot and not and nought etc. etc. I love the English language.
Or call peeing passing water.
Rabbit, bunny, and coney are all the same thing.
Unless the rabbit is an old Volkswagen, the bunny worked for Hugh Hefner, and the coney was served in Cincinnati with onions and mustard….
Yacht.
’nuff sed.
Laughter-daughter.
My Dad would call my sisters his “dafters” to point out this inconsistency.
Farts are called passing gas and breaking wind.
Ghoti. Pronounced “fish”.
The gh from enough.
The o from women.
the ti from partial.
And that’s not even counting the cursive writing.
I’m trying to learn Spanish. I wouldn’t exactly call that easy. “Si” means “yes” and it means “if.”
“Derecho” means “straight” and it means “right.”
There are words that depending on the conjugation are the same as another word.
The first person of the present tense of a verb ends in an O and the third person ends in a letter such as an “E.” The first person past tense of a verb ends in a letter such as an “E” and the third person ends in an “O.”
And don’t get me stated on gender. I seemed to recall being told that you can tell the gender of a noun. If it ends in an “O” it is masculine and it’s feminine if it ends in an “A” it is feminine. Then why is it “el dia,” with “el” indicating the noun is masculine?
And if English is hard, then what about Japanese and Hebrew?
Yes, I know that English is difficult with its quirks, but that doesn’t mean others are easy.
So you have to engage your brain to speak English. Is that a bad thing?
If you don’t want to learn English go back to your shithole country.
@Manbearpig — Exactly! English is a power tool. You have to know what you’re doing or you’re a danger to yourself and others.
RadioMattM
Sunday, 25 August 2024, 11:03 at 11:03 am
“I’m trying to learn Spanish.”
…so you’re learning Spanish, eh? Watch out for the variants…
https://youtu.be/bFqu9YVuAgI?si=CMrUUjcXj6J4n7pC
…At a Chuy’s restaurant there were rough drawings of various things on the wall, all captioned in Spanish. I am terrible at spoken Spanish but read fairly well, so I was puzzled and disappointed in myself that I had a lot of difficulty reading these. I took pictures of them and showed them to a Hondurian woman at work, told her my issue and asked her to translate so I could learn.
She looked at the words and laughed.
She then told me the reason I was having so much trouble was because they were filled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and had apparently been written by someone barely literate in Spanish themselves.
…also, we have a LOT of Africans from all over the sub-Saharan nations. Africa grew up weirdly colonozed so folks from there generally speak some local language specific to their region (Twi is fun), but to communicate with each other BETWEEN nations they use French. I know enough French to get me in trouble (Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?), and some basic words, but what THEY were doing sounded as French as Ebonics does English. I talked to my EHS guy who being of Haitian extraction knows French very well and has to translate warning signs into it, and he told me that, again, this was French as learned from parents or on the street, not formal French so both the pronunciations and the grammar were basically local argots, the French of the uneducated that would be as incomprehensible at the Tuileries as it was to me in Cincinnati.
The more time I spend surrounded by all the worlds languages, the less I think they even understand each other.
And the more I see Democrats warp English, the less confident I am that Im understood in that as well.
Ive learned to mostly comminicate by gesture.
Some of THOSE arent universal either.
…but a lot of them are…
RadioMattM
Sunday, 25 August 2024, 11:03 at 11:03 am
“And don’t get me stated on gender. I seemed to recall being told that you can tell the gender of a noun. If it ends in an “O” it is masculine and it’s feminine if it ends in an “A” it is feminine. Then why is it “el dia,” with “el” indicating the noun is masculine?”
…you should try German, where they throw in a neuter gender (Das) on top of the masculine (Der) and feminine (Die)
This makes German so difficult that the only thing you can do is invade neighboring countries as a distraction from it…
https://youtu.be/gaXigSu72A4?si=1E5lV__gkqPs6xVe
Your, you’re and yore.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times: Written english does not use phonetic spelling. At all. Not even a little bit.
remember this one?: Hookt on fonix werkt for mee
I helped my Russian wife to learn English when she came here twenty years ago. In two years, she went to work as an accountant. She’s as smart as a whip, but we had some funny moments. I came home from work one day and she told me she spent all day cleaning the chicken. On a car trip to San Antonio, she declared that she was hungry for kitchen nuggets from Mcdonalds.
Hour and our.
In Spanish, “Si” means yes, but in French “Si” is an obsolete, emphatic “Non!”.
The ebonics pronunciation of “picture” is “pitcher”. Drives me crazy! Sometimes the spelling of an English word gives you a clue about how to say it properly.
SNS: I had three years of German and know about the neuter nouns. They confuse me, too. At least adjectives and adverbs don’t take different forms the way they do in Spanish.
Reading German throws me because of the long nouns such as stereolangspielenplatten (Stereo long playing record). I get lost in those words.
Spanish and German also have formal and informal.
I might go back and try German again after I am done with Spanish. I have a couple of German movies that I would love to be able to understand more than a smattering of the dialog.