5 ms·

Nah, it's a small quirk, but it exists in many other languages. Phrasal verbs are the real trap. Keep up, keep off, keep out, keep on, keep out,... Rather uncom

Nah, it's a small quirk, but it exists in many other languages. Phrasal verbs are the real trap. Keep up, keep off, keep out, keep on, keep out,... Rather uncommon in other languages and very easy to make mistake, sometimes very embarrassing one..

xpil 7y ago
My words exactly. There's over 3000 phrasal verbs in English and memorizing them is pain in the hole (plus it makes no sense). The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively. I'm Polish myself and hit a hard wall with phrasals when I moved over to Ireland 13 years ago. I still keep discovering new ones every now and then despite living here for over a decade.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I managed to learn the pronunciation and phrasal verbs, but prepositions still get me from time to time...
- V-2 7y ago
  We kind of do the same thing, only in the form of prefixes (podać, wydać, zdać, zadać, oddać, poddać, nadać, przydać etc. and on and on it goes). Ultimately it boils down to the same thing - little syllabic bits altering the meaning of the verb.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    Yes, It's exactly the same in German. So I guess I don't agree with this comment thread at all - It's just learning vocabulary. I never felt like this is a specific problem when learning English. I much more agree with the article: Spelling + pronunciation is just fubar and the greatest annoyance.
  - josefrichter 7y ago
    You are right, didn't realize we do the same in most Slavic languages and it's common in German too. It just always seemed to me that it's much more common in English. But I have no numbers to support that, so I might be completely wrong.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  > The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively. That's the only way to learn the quirks and idioms of any language really.
vadasambar 7y ago
Spelling is a difficult part of learning English language, more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages. Anything that uses Devnagari or other Indian scripts have one and only single way to pronounce things which is super consistent because every alphabet has one and only one sound and it does not vary with context.
- Avalaxy 7y ago
  > more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages I don't know Indian languages, but this can be subjective. A Mexican friend once told me that Spanish is easy because you pronounce it the way you write it... What he did not tell is that LL, J, H, B/V are all pronounced different in his language.
  - xpil 7y ago
    They may be pronounced differently than in English but at least they are pronounced in a predictable way i.e. the same letter (or diphthong) will always result in the same pronounciation.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    The rules in Spanish are easy. LL being different from l and rr different from r are the only hard ones (and r/rr is only different because you are allowed to do the advanced tongue roll, but it is correct without) J and H are different from the English pronunciation once you learn what is correct it always applies.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish#cite_note-Approximant-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish#cite_note-App... "/b, d, ɡ, ʝ/ are pronounced as fricatives or approximants [β, ð, ɣ, ʝ] in all places except after a pause, /n/, or /m/, or, in the case of /d/ and /ʝ/, after /l/. In the latter environments, they are stops [b, d, ɡ, ɟʝ] like English b, d, g, j but are fully voiced in all positions, unlike in English. When it is distinct from /ʝ/, /ʎ/ is realized as an approximant [ʎ] in all positions" Although the rules may be easy for native speakers who grasp them intuitively, they can be a lot more complex for speakers of other languages, who are used to different "easy" rules.
dundercoder 7y ago
Native English speaker here, this is my first time ever hearing about phrasal verbs. After learning French and Spanish (wow there is such a thing as a subjunctive tense?) I started to understand how ridiculous English is, but this? wow.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Subjunctive is a mood not a tense. And it is experiencing something of a revival in English. You can have subjunctive in the past as well as in the future. All languages are ridiculous to varying degrees. Why do tables have gender? Why do the French continue to write final t's and s's when they stopped pronouncing them two centuries ago? Why must adjectives agree with their nouns? Why do many languages not have any way of easily referring to someone without mentioning their sex. Why do declensions exist when auxiliary words can perform the same functions?
simion314 7y ago
I think a big reform to change the language to write how you speak would happen someday but postponing it will make it harder when it will have to be done or maybe a new artificial international language that is consistent would solve this. I personally have problems with the double L , I never know when to use 1 or 2, like in until and still , I always guess wrong and have to use spell check to fix the problem. Similar for other inconsistent usage of double letters.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I agree that having a more comprehensible writing system would help, but I also suspect that any serious attempt to change it now would be counter-productive. If you don't get all the countries with an official interest in the language to agree to the change in sync, you're going to create a mess for proficient speakers and an even worse mess for learners by increasing the volume of spelling you have to learn. And even if it does work out, you're still going to create a mess for learners - especially the ones who don't have enough money to replace all their materials all at once - by creating an orthographic horizon. I've also got my doubts about whether the end goal is even possible. 100 years ago, there was an effort in the UK to try and come up with a new native English alphabet in order to try and address this same problem. One of the reasons it failed was that, even within one country, the language's pronunciation wasn't regular enough to come up with a spelling system that's phonetic for all speakers. Since then, the gamut of pronunciation that can be considered official has only widened, meaning the possibility of creating a truly phonetic writing system for English has only become more remote.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  > write how you speak If you write how you speak I will not be able read what you write and vice versa. English has a wide range of dialects, nare you going to try to impose on on the rest of us. Someone like me used to broad West Country speech would spell rather differently than a Glaswegian for instance. Should we have diacritics to indicate stress? If so will you choose the common US (stress the ultimate syllable) or British practice (stress the ante-penultimate syllable)? In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English. I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language. There have been numerous attempts at consistent auxiliary languages. None have become very popular. The only 'widely' used auxiliary is Esperanto and that has already shown itself to be subject to all the same evolutionary forces that drive changes in natural languages; people must invent new words and then they disagree about how to spell them, how to use them, what gender they must have; slang is created and eventually becomes normalized in some communities but not in others, etc.
simiones 7y ago
I don't think there are many languages with a large disconnect between spelling and reading. There are some exceptions in most languages, but nowhere near as bad, in my experience. The Romance languages for example have pretty clear spelling rules. It's not 1 letter : 1 sound, but usually 1 group of letters : 1 group of sounds, such as "ll" in Spanish or "ill" in French or "ch" in Italian&Romanian. There are usually exceptions around loanwords and old names, and sometimes different sounds that native speakers don't realize they pronounce differently (e.g. in Romanian a final 'i' in a word is usually a semi-vowel, while 'i' in the middle of a word is a full vowel, but most Romanians you ask would tell you that it's the same sound, even if they pronounce and hear it differently ).
darkwater 7y ago
No, it's not a small quirk. It's a repeated error with several different, completely unrelated cases. Only English surnames need to be spelled when pronounced or pronounced when in written form because you can't possibly know how to pronounce them by just reading them (and don't blame this on immigration)

xpil 7y ago

My words exactly. There's over 3000 phrasal verbs in English and memorizing them is pain in the hole (plus it makes no sense). The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively. I'm Polish myself and hit a hard wall with phrasals when I moved over to Ireland 13 years ago. I still keep discovering new ones every now and then despite living here for over a decade.

StavrosK 7y ago
I managed to learn the pronunciation and phrasal verbs, but prepositions still get me from time to time...
V-2 7y ago
We kind of do the same thing, only in the form of prefixes (podać, wydać, zdać, zadać, oddać, poddać, nadać, przydać etc. and on and on it goes). Ultimately it boils down to the same thing - little syllabic bits altering the meaning of the verb.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Yes, It's exactly the same in German. So I guess I don't agree with this comment thread at all - It's just learning vocabulary. I never felt like this is a specific problem when learning English. I much more agree with the article: Spelling + pronunciation is just fubar and the greatest annoyance.
- josefrichter 7y ago
  You are right, didn't realize we do the same in most Slavic languages and it's common in German too. It just always seemed to me that it's much more common in English. But I have no numbers to support that, so I might be completely wrong.
ramblerman 7y ago
> The only effective way of learning them is to submerge yourself in the language by listening to plenty of audiobooks or moving abroad where English is spoken natively. That's the only way to learn the quirks and idioms of any language really.

vadasambar 7y ago

Spelling is a difficult part of learning English language, more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages. Anything that uses Devnagari or other Indian scripts have one and only single way to pronounce things which is super consistent because every alphabet has one and only one sound and it does not vary with context.

Avalaxy 7y ago
> more so if your language has a what-you-read-is-what-you-pronounce pattern like Indian languages I don't know Indian languages, but this can be subjective. A Mexican friend once told me that Spanish is easy because you pronounce it the way you write it... What he did not tell is that LL, J, H, B/V are all pronounced different in his language.
- xpil 7y ago
  They may be pronounced differently than in English but at least they are pronounced in a predictable way i.e. the same letter (or diphthong) will always result in the same pronounciation.
- bluGill 7y ago
  The rules in Spanish are easy. LL being different from l and rr different from r are the only hard ones (and r/rr is only different because you are allowed to do the advanced tongue roll, but it is correct without) J and H are different from the English pronunciation once you learn what is correct it always applies.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish#cite_note-Approximant-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish#cite_note-App... "/b, d, ɡ, ʝ/ are pronounced as fricatives or approximants [β, ð, ɣ, ʝ] in all places except after a pause, /n/, or /m/, or, in the case of /d/ and /ʝ/, after /l/. In the latter environments, they are stops [b, d, ɡ, ɟʝ] like English b, d, g, j but are fully voiced in all positions, unlike in English. When it is distinct from /ʝ/, /ʎ/ is realized as an approximant [ʎ] in all positions" Although the rules may be easy for native speakers who grasp them intuitively, they can be a lot more complex for speakers of other languages, who are used to different "easy" rules.

dundercoder 7y ago

Native English speaker here, this is my first time ever hearing about phrasal verbs. After learning French and Spanish (wow there is such a thing as a subjunctive tense?) I started to understand how ridiculous English is, but this? wow.

kwhitefoot 7y ago
Subjunctive is a mood not a tense. And it is experiencing something of a revival in English. You can have subjunctive in the past as well as in the future. All languages are ridiculous to varying degrees. Why do tables have gender? Why do the French continue to write final t's and s's when they stopped pronouncing them two centuries ago? Why must adjectives agree with their nouns? Why do many languages not have any way of easily referring to someone without mentioning their sex. Why do declensions exist when auxiliary words can perform the same functions?

simion314 7y ago

I think a big reform to change the language to write how you speak would happen someday but postponing it will make it harder when it will have to be done or maybe a new artificial international language that is consistent would solve this. I personally have problems with the double L , I never know when to use 1 or 2, like in until and still , I always guess wrong and have to use spell check to fix the problem. Similar for other inconsistent usage of double letters.

mumblemumble 7y ago
I agree that having a more comprehensible writing system would help, but I also suspect that any serious attempt to change it now would be counter-productive. If you don't get all the countries with an official interest in the language to agree to the change in sync, you're going to create a mess for proficient speakers and an even worse mess for learners by increasing the volume of spelling you have to learn. And even if it does work out, you're still going to create a mess for learners - especially the ones who don't have enough money to replace all their materials all at once - by creating an orthographic horizon. I've also got my doubts about whether the end goal is even possible. 100 years ago, there was an effort in the UK to try and come up with a new native English alphabet in order to try and address this same problem. One of the reasons it failed was that, even within one country, the language's pronunciation wasn't regular enough to come up with a spelling system that's phonetic for all speakers. Since then, the gamut of pronunciation that can be considered official has only widened, meaning the possibility of creating a truly phonetic writing system for English has only become more remote.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
> write how you speak If you write how you speak I will not be able read what you write and vice versa. English has a wide range of dialects, nare you going to try to impose on on the rest of us. Someone like me used to broad West Country speech would spell rather differently than a Glaswegian for instance. Should we have diacritics to indicate stress? If so will you choose the common US (stress the ultimate syllable) or British practice (stress the ante-penultimate syllable)? In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English. I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language. There have been numerous attempts at consistent auxiliary languages. None have become very popular. The only 'widely' used auxiliary is Esperanto and that has already shown itself to be subject to all the same evolutionary forces that drive changes in natural languages; people must invent new words and then they disagree about how to spell them, how to use them, what gender they must have; slang is created and eventually becomes normalized in some communities but not in others, etc.

simiones 7y ago

I don't think there are many languages with a large disconnect between spelling and reading. There are some exceptions in most languages, but nowhere near as bad, in my experience. The Romance languages for example have pretty clear spelling rules. It's not 1 letter : 1 sound, but usually 1 group of letters : 1 group of sounds, such as "ll" in Spanish or "ill" in French or "ch" in Italian&Romanian. There are usually exceptions around loanwords and old names, and sometimes different sounds that native speakers don't realize they pronounce differently (e.g. in Romanian a final 'i' in a word is usually a semi-vowel, while 'i' in the middle of a word is a full vowel, but most Romanians you ask would tell you that it's the same sound, even if they pronounce and hear it differently ).

darkwater 7y ago

No, it's not a small quirk. It's a repeated error with several different, completely unrelated cases. Only English surnames need to be spelled when pronounced or pronounced when in written form because you can't possibly know how to pronounce them by just reading them (and don't blame this on immigration)