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> English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the inconsistencies in it, as well as the different ways you can pronounce any given letter.

by Timpy 7y ago

> English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the inconsistencies in it, as well as the different ways you can pronounce any given letter. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The writer hedges this statement with the passive voice, and "master" is difficult to qualify, but generally speaking English is not a difficult language. I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages.

mmhsieh 7y ago
we don't have an academy to regularize rules, like the french for instance. this is why foreigners struggle because of all the exceptions. this is only if they actually care to speak english properly.
- afroboy 7y ago
  Despite all that exceptions in french language is mush more than in English.
  - mmhsieh 7y ago
    french has fourteen verb tenses, which is not optimal. it has been proven that the human mind can only handle six tenses efficiently.
    - thedirt0115 7y ago
      I haven't heard about this six tense efficiency thing before, do you have any more information?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - 0xff00ffee 7y ago
    I think you meant "much", but "mush" works when "Je ne sais pas" becomes "junsaypa", which is most of french to my ear, just a mushy blur.
nkrisc 7y ago
Funny anecdote, when I was in Central America learning Spanish, everyone from the country I was in thought that learning Spanish would be way harder than learning English, what with 14 different verb tenses to learn and all that. The folks I talked to thought generally English was much simpler than Spanish.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
That irks me as well because in Japanese, Kanji readings have can have dozens of meanings (On and Kun), and even first year Kanji of about 30 symbols turns out to be 200 different words for the same group. I lived in Vietnam for 6 months with a host family. They said native speakers don't get upset that people don't bother to learn it because they only people that speak it correctly are Vietnamese. It is too hard (it is more complex tonally than Chinese - six tones vs 3). During my travels: An Italian market clerk wouldn't sell me food until I repeated his sentence correctly; in Cyprus they wouldn't sell me sunscreen because I couldn't count (they refused to break a large bill and laughed that I couldn't count out my change...), and Panama I got literally yelled at for not asking for the Wi-Fi key correctly in Spanish.
samatman 7y ago
In an article about writing systems, you could, perhaps, have assumed the author was talking about written English. Which is, indeed, quite a bit more challenging than most languages written with a Latin script.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
Correct; English is one of the standard examples given in support of the theory that languages learned by large numbers of adults become simpler to accommodate those adult learners. (Other standard examples being Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili.)
ddebernardy 7y ago
> I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages. Actually it is. And it's not just a matter of opinion, either. Going by objective criteria: 1. English has most of the grammar exceptions of German and French combined, plus a few others gained from other languages it borrowed words and/or constructs from -- which is to say more than most if not all other languages. 2. Phonics are, to echo your thoughts, not just a mess but an utter, complete mess. 3. English's lexical similarity with other languages (whether European or not) is below [0] the typical value you'll find when probing into languages spoken by neighbors. 4. Depending on how you define what a word is, English is widely considered to have the richest set of words to pick from. It's straightforward to learn International English. But to learn English at a high level is, in fact, very hard. Consider spending some time with a Modern English major from a good university if you need any convincing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
- Timpy 7y ago
  I'm really not interested in the opinion of an English major on the subject, unless they're also familiar with linguistics or they've learned a foreign language to a high level. This is a heuristics issue monolingual English speakers are susceptible to. I spend most of my time with non-native English speakers (Italians, Germans, and Japanese people), and they all report that English is less complex than their native language. Of course English (and especially the mastery of English) is complex, but it's not exceptionally complex. Your "objective criteria" is sometimes not very objective, and sometimes not very good criteria for language complexity. 1. This point isn't objective. Borrowing grammar from German and French does not mean that we've accumulated more exceptions in our grammar than any other language, it doesn't mean that other languages have not also borrowed, and this does not objectively prove that English has more exceptions than any other language. Russian requires you to decline a noun by grammatical number (single/plural), one of six cases, and one of three genders. Even after you take these three axises into consideration and find the proper declension in your declension matrix there's still a chance that it doesn't follow the rules that you learned. You can either call this a system of 3 different noun types (one for each gender) with a ton of exceptions, or you can classify it as 18 different noun types with a ton of complex rules, and nearly no exceptions. English is like this as well (particularly phonetics, which is related to the next point). It's hard to be objective about language. 2. We agree on this point, but I want to point out that Chinese and Japanese are an order of magnitude more complex when it comes to phonetics. You need to learn several thousand characters to be considered literate as an adult. I can't read Chinese, but in Japanese the pronunciation of these characters changes depending on context. High frequency examples: 上 - 18th most common Kanji used on Wikipedia, 8 different pronunciations (9 if you consider ショウ and ジョウ different) 生 - 27th most common Kanji on Wikipedia, 12 different pronunciations 3. Lexical similarities isn't a relevant criteria. The inverse to your point, nobody would say "Russian isn't a complicated language because it's lexically similar to Ukrainian." Both can be complex if they're lexically similar, and a lexically unique language could be utterly uncomplicated. The most charitable interpretation I can speak to this point is that lexical similarities definitely help language acquisition, because you get a lot of words "for free" so to speak. 4. Again, I don't think vocab size is a great criteria for language complexity, and it's not very objective. We could inflate this number with a huge dictionary full of words that nobody uses. Some times words are "buy two get one free," like "wind, shield, windshield". Many languages have this (必ず without fail、勝つ victory、必勝 certain victory) and it doesn't reflect complexity in any consistent way.

by Timpy 7y ago

mmhsieh 7y ago

we don't have an academy to regularize rules, like the french for instance. this is why foreigners struggle because of all the exceptions. this is only if they actually care to speak english properly.

afroboy 7y ago
Despite all that exceptions in french language is mush more than in English.
- mmhsieh 7y ago
  french has fourteen verb tenses, which is not optimal. it has been proven that the human mind can only handle six tenses efficiently.
  - thedirt0115 7y ago
    I haven't heard about this six tense efficiency thing before, do you have any more information?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  I think you meant "much", but "mush" works when "Je ne sais pas" becomes "junsaypa", which is most of french to my ear, just a mushy blur.

nkrisc 7y ago

Funny anecdote, when I was in Central America learning Spanish, everyone from the country I was in thought that learning Spanish would be way harder than learning English, what with 14 different verb tenses to learn and all that. The folks I talked to thought generally English was much simpler than Spanish.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

That irks me as well because in Japanese, Kanji readings have can have dozens of meanings (On and Kun), and even first year Kanji of about 30 symbols turns out to be 200 different words for the same group. I lived in Vietnam for 6 months with a host family. They said native speakers don't get upset that people don't bother to learn it because they only people that speak it correctly are Vietnamese. It is too hard (it is more complex tonally than Chinese - six tones vs 3). During my travels: An Italian market clerk wouldn't sell me food until I repeated his sentence correctly; in Cyprus they wouldn't sell me sunscreen because I couldn't count (they refused to break a large bill and laughed that I couldn't count out my change...), and Panama I got literally yelled at for not asking for the Wi-Fi key correctly in Spanish.

samatman 7y ago

In an article about writing systems, you could, perhaps, have assumed the author was talking about written English. Which is, indeed, quite a bit more challenging than most languages written with a Latin script.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

Correct; English is one of the standard examples given in support of the theory that languages learned by large numbers of adults become simpler to accommodate those adult learners. (Other standard examples being Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili.)

ddebernardy 7y ago

> I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages. Actually it is. And it's not just a matter of opinion, either. Going by objective criteria: 1. English has most of the grammar exceptions of German and French combined, plus a few others gained from other languages it borrowed words and/or constructs from -- which is to say more than most if not all other languages. 2. Phonics are, to echo your thoughts, not just a mess but an utter, complete mess. 3. English's lexical similarity with other languages (whether European or not) is below [0] the typical value you'll find when probing into languages spoken by neighbors. 4. Depending on how you define what a word is, English is widely considered to have the richest set of words to pick from. It's straightforward to learn International English. But to learn English at a high level is, in fact, very hard. Consider spending some time with a Modern English major from a good university if you need any convincing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

Timpy 7y ago
I'm really not interested in the opinion of an English major on the subject, unless they're also familiar with linguistics or they've learned a foreign language to a high level. This is a heuristics issue monolingual English speakers are susceptible to. I spend most of my time with non-native English speakers (Italians, Germans, and Japanese people), and they all report that English is less complex than their native language. Of course English (and especially the mastery of English) is complex, but it's not exceptionally complex. Your "objective criteria" is sometimes not very objective, and sometimes not very good criteria for language complexity. 1. This point isn't objective. Borrowing grammar from German and French does not mean that we've accumulated more exceptions in our grammar than any other language, it doesn't mean that other languages have not also borrowed, and this does not objectively prove that English has more exceptions than any other language. Russian requires you to decline a noun by grammatical number (single/plural), one of six cases, and one of three genders. Even after you take these three axises into consideration and find the proper declension in your declension matrix there's still a chance that it doesn't follow the rules that you learned. You can either call this a system of 3 different noun types (one for each gender) with a ton of exceptions, or you can classify it as 18 different noun types with a ton of complex rules, and nearly no exceptions. English is like this as well (particularly phonetics, which is related to the next point). It's hard to be objective about language. 2. We agree on this point, but I want to point out that Chinese and Japanese are an order of magnitude more complex when it comes to phonetics. You need to learn several thousand characters to be considered literate as an adult. I can't read Chinese, but in Japanese the pronunciation of these characters changes depending on context. High frequency examples: 上 - 18th most common Kanji used on Wikipedia, 8 different pronunciations (9 if you consider ショウ and ジョウ different) 生 - 27th most common Kanji on Wikipedia, 12 different pronunciations 3. Lexical similarities isn't a relevant criteria. The inverse to your point, nobody would say "Russian isn't a complicated language because it's lexically similar to Ukrainian." Both can be complex if they're lexically similar, and a lexically unique language could be utterly uncomplicated. The most charitable interpretation I can speak to this point is that lexical similarities definitely help language acquisition, because you get a lot of words "for free" so to speak. 4. Again, I don't think vocab size is a great criteria for language complexity, and it's not very objective. We could inflate this number with a huge dictionary full of words that nobody uses. Some times words are "buy two get one free," like "wind, shield, windshield". Many languages have this (必ず without fail、勝つ victory、必勝 certain victory) and it doesn't reflect complexity in any consistent way.