7 ms·

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When

by altacc 5y ago

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in comparison.

rich_sasha 5y ago
I sympathise with the view (non-native English speaker from Europe). While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy. French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples: - French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own - German has noun cases, and you have to remember what verb comes with which cases - Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. It's fiddly to learn which one to use, but it's a plug-and-play use after that. By contrast, French has similar tenses, but spread around (not homomorphic to the nice Cartesian product, if you like). Plus, agreeing tenses ("sequence of tenses" apparently), OMG - Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender. - English is very economical with words; nouns, derived verbs and adjectives are often the same word (e.g. "speed" the noun and "to speed", i.e. drive too fast). No such luck other side of the Channel. Similarly, "mouse"+"trap" -> "mousetrap". In French -> "piege a souris" ("trap for mouse"). - Comparing to Polish is a bit futile, but let's just mention nasty things English doesn't have: double numbers, in addition to singular and plural (one hen, two hens, ten hens will be "[one] kura", "[two] kury", "[ten] kur"), verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not), 7 noun cases, 22 conjugation groups, stem mutation on conjugation and inflection), nouns conjugate differently by gender, and of course genders have to be agreed between nouns and adjectives... just to name a few :)
- eesmith 5y ago
  > Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms: - auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow") - auxiliary verb going to for intentions ("We're going to buy a new car next month.") - present continuous for arrangements; arrangement = a plan for the future that you have already thought about and discussed with someone else. ("I'm meeting my mother at the airport tomorrow") - present simple for scheduled events ("The train departs in 10 minutes.") That's in addition to the future continuous ("Don't call me after 10 o'clock. I'll be sleeping." and future perfect ("I hope my mother will have finished cooking dinner by the time I get home.") Your Cartesian doesn't include negatives, where English uses the auxiliary verb do. (Compare "I do not know Spanish." with "I know not Spanish".)
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Do those future forms really matter? You could just use will or going to in all cases and nobody would know you aren't a native speaker: * The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow * We will buy a new car next month * I will meet my mother at the airport tomorrow * The train will depart in 10 minutes All perfectly fine.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      What really matters is that there isn't a single simple "Cartesian" future tense with only {simple, perfect, continuous} forms. Here's an example where "will" cannot be substituted with "going to". "If you sit down then the movie will start." <-- makes sense "If you sit down then the movie is going to start." <-- ??? In the earlier list, that's "will" because it's a prediction or statement of fact.
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        True, but also seems like a pretty minor mistake? I feel that I've heard worse offenses from native English speakers. Maybe I feel exceptionally tolerant having lived a year in eastern Kentucky. Also, "The movie will start when you sit down" is probably better form all 'round.
jamil7 5y ago
From my perspective, despite inconsistencies it's one of the easier languages to learn at a basic level as you can ramp up and start using a working subset of it pretty quickly. German in comparison has a steep up-front learning curve and requires a lot of investment to get anything out of.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  Yep. It's an easy language to speak on a functional level, but very difficult to master on a native level. Lots of native speakers never master all the nuances.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    > but very difficult to master on a native level The same can be said for all of the languages being discussed in this thread. I'm skeptical that English is any harder to learn at a native level than French, German or Polish.
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      I say, on the phonological level at least, French, German, and even Polish are easy. Their phonetics, both the consonants and the vowels, are straightforward. English, in contrast, is out of this world. (Its origin lies in the language of an island nation, after all.) So much so that it looks like their neighbors, the French, have huge difficulty with English pronunciation (and native English speakers, especially the Americans, seem all too happy to return the favor - their atrocious French pronunciation is, in fact, what they are taught, just look at the transcription of French words in conversation guides, it is amazing how bad it is, ‘é’ is transcribed as ‘ay’, etc.)
      - ziml77 5y ago
        It doesn't help that we screw with the pronunciation of loan words and then label anyone who pronounces them properly pretentious. One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way since they are proper nouns and whoever is using that proper noun defines how it is pronounced when referring to them.
nkrisc 5y ago
Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear rules for verb conjugation and tenses, few irregular words I needed to learn, and very regular pronunciation. If I wasn’t so rusty I might still even remember all 14 tenses.
- mlinhares 5y ago
  Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese and know how to pronounce it but now that I see even natives struggling i don't mind it that much anymore HAHAHA!
  - elboru 5y ago
    You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      English spelling is also inconsistent with diacritics. You can write ‘facade’ but also ‘façade’, just like ‘naive’ and ‘naïve’. The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.
    - ziml77 5y ago
jeroenhd 5y ago
I think English is actually not that hard to master. What's difficult is writing it down. For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can link back to your own language. Learning all the different words meaning the exact same thing is kind of a chore to really master it, but it's really not a bad language to quickly get started in and have a conversation in for a native speaker of many European languages. The writing rules are completely arbitrary, though. Written English and spoken English rarely corresponds in any way that makes sense. The easiest example is that you can't tell if "read" is past or present tense, because -ea- has two entirely different pronunciations that are used arbitrarily. There's a good reason for many of these problems (the great vowel shift comes to mind) but that doesn't make the language any more usable in practice. This makes the learning experience a lot more challenging, because without the ability to somewhat reasonably sound out the words you're reading on paper, the learning process takes a lot more time and resources. Languages with easier to grasp spellings just come with better tools. Every language has is peculiarities and inconsistencies. Even Latin, which at some point in history was standardized as much as possible has exemptions on exemptions to its many rules upon rules. As people speak a language, the language changes, so the older then language, the weirder it becomes. I don't think there are (natural, not invented) languages that are "hard" or "easy" to learn from a general standpoint, because if the language was actually hard and illogical, humans would've changed the way they used the language automatically already. From what I can tell, all languages can be easy to learn as long as your mother tongue is related to them in some way. It could be the grammar structure (like featuring nominative, accusative, etc.) or the way verbs are used, but as long as you can fine some match between your own language and the one you're trying to learn, you'll have an advantage. I would think English is nearly impossible to teach to a Chinese person, but shouldn't be hard to teach to a French or German person at all. The same goes the other way around: there is much more overlap between Japanese and Chinese then there possibly could be between English and Chinese, so learning those languages becomes terribly complicated for many westerners. As much as I despised having to learn different languages in middle/high school, I do think that everyone should be taught at least one other language. It'd help the students if that language was something similar to the local language, but for American or English kids it wouldn't matter if that second language was Spanish, German, French or Italian. What matters is the insight you get when you start thinking about language rather than using it. You start to get a feeling for why certain parts of the language are like they are, rather than just being told that this is just how the language works and you should deal with it. For example, explaining the use of "who" and "whom" to someone without an understanding of grammatical cases, which many Indo-European languages still feature today, might be an impossible task even native speakers sometimes struggle with. You could go it about another way and teach Middle English in English-speaking countries to explain these systems, but I don't think anyone would be interested in that.
azangru 5y ago
> I do pity anyone trying to learn it. Depends on the age of the learner and the duration of the instruction. If you start learning a second language in elementary school or even in kindergarten and spread it out over the rest of the school years, then there's nothing to it. If, on the other hand, you start as an adult and want to learn a language over a short period of time, then my pity goes to you regardless of which language you are learning.
ScarletEmerald 5y ago
Along these lines, there is a wonderful quote from James D. Nicoll from back in the days of Usenet: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

by altacc 5y ago

rich_sasha 5y ago

I sympathise with the view (non-native English speaker from Europe). While it's true English has a ton of inconsistencies, complications etc. they tend to happen at a slightly higher level I think. There is a reasonably big subset of English that is quite easy. French and German, not to mention Polish, are much harder to learn IMO, since the difficulties are up-front. Some examples: - French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own - German has noun cases, and you have to remember what verb comes with which cases - Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. It's fiddly to learn which one to use, but it's a plug-and-play use after that. By contrast, French has similar tenses, but spread around (not homomorphic to the nice Cartesian product, if you like). Plus, agreeing tenses ("sequence of tenses" apparently), OMG - Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender. - English is very economical with words; nouns, derived verbs and adjectives are often the same word (e.g. "speed" the noun and "to speed", i.e. drive too fast). No such luck other side of the Channel. Similarly, "mouse"+"trap" -> "mousetrap". In French -> "piege a souris" ("trap for mouse"). - Comparing to Polish is a bit futile, but let's just mention nasty things English doesn't have: double numbers, in addition to singular and plural (one hen, two hens, ten hens will be "[one] kura", "[two] kury", "[ten] kur"), verb aspect (whether an action is completed or not), 7 noun cases, 22 conjugation groups, stem mutation on conjugation and inflection), nouns conjugate differently by gender, and of course genders have to be agreed between nouns and adjectives... just to name a few :)

eesmith 5y ago
> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms: - auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow") - auxiliary verb going to for intentions ("We're going to buy a new car next month.") - present continuous for arrangements; arrangement = a plan for the future that you have already thought about and discussed with someone else. ("I'm meeting my mother at the airport tomorrow") - present simple for scheduled events ("The train departs in 10 minutes.") That's in addition to the future continuous ("Don't call me after 10 o'clock. I'll be sleeping." and future perfect ("I hope my mother will have finished cooking dinner by the time I get home.") Your Cartesian doesn't include negatives, where English uses the auxiliary verb do. (Compare "I do not know Spanish." with "I know not Spanish".)
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Do those future forms really matter? You could just use will or going to in all cases and nobody would know you aren't a native speaker: * The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow * We will buy a new car next month * I will meet my mother at the airport tomorrow * The train will depart in 10 minutes All perfectly fine.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    What really matters is that there isn't a single simple "Cartesian" future tense with only {simple, perfect, continuous} forms. Here's an example where "will" cannot be substituted with "going to". "If you sit down then the movie will start." <-- makes sense "If you sit down then the movie is going to start." <-- ??? In the earlier list, that's "will" because it's a prediction or statement of fact.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      True, but also seems like a pretty minor mistake? I feel that I've heard worse offenses from native English speakers. Maybe I feel exceptionally tolerant having lived a year in eastern Kentucky. Also, "The movie will start when you sit down" is probably better form all 'round.

jamil7 5y ago

From my perspective, despite inconsistencies it's one of the easier languages to learn at a basic level as you can ramp up and start using a working subset of it pretty quickly. German in comparison has a steep up-front learning curve and requires a lot of investment to get anything out of.

acjohnson55 5y ago
Yep. It's an easy language to speak on a functional level, but very difficult to master on a native level. Lots of native speakers never master all the nuances.
- jamil7 5y ago
  > but very difficult to master on a native level The same can be said for all of the languages being discussed in this thread. I'm skeptical that English is any harder to learn at a native level than French, German or Polish.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    I say, on the phonological level at least, French, German, and even Polish are easy. Their phonetics, both the consonants and the vowels, are straightforward. English, in contrast, is out of this world. (Its origin lies in the language of an island nation, after all.) So much so that it looks like their neighbors, the French, have huge difficulty with English pronunciation (and native English speakers, especially the Americans, seem all too happy to return the favor - their atrocious French pronunciation is, in fact, what they are taught, just look at the transcription of French words in conversation guides, it is amazing how bad it is, ‘é’ is transcribed as ‘ay’, etc.)
    - ziml77 5y ago
      It doesn't help that we screw with the pronunciation of loan words and then label anyone who pronounces them properly pretentious. One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way since they are proper nouns and whoever is using that proper noun defines how it is pronounced when referring to them.

nkrisc 5y ago

Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear rules for verb conjugation and tenses, few irregular words I needed to learn, and very regular pronunciation. If I wasn’t so rusty I might still even remember all 14 tenses.

mlinhares 5y ago
Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese and know how to pronounce it but now that I see even natives struggling i don't mind it that much anymore HAHAHA!
- elboru 5y ago
  You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    English spelling is also inconsistent with diacritics. You can write ‘facade’ but also ‘façade’, just like ‘naive’ and ‘naïve’. The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.
  - ziml77 5y ago

jeroenhd 5y ago

I think English is actually not that hard to master. What's difficult is writing it down. For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can link back to your own language. Learning all the different words meaning the exact same thing is kind of a chore to really master it, but it's really not a bad language to quickly get started in and have a conversation in for a native speaker of many European languages. The writing rules are completely arbitrary, though. Written English and spoken English rarely corresponds in any way that makes sense. The easiest example is that you can't tell if "read" is past or present tense, because -ea- has two entirely different pronunciations that are used arbitrarily. There's a good reason for many of these problems (the great vowel shift comes to mind) but that doesn't make the language any more usable in practice. This makes the learning experience a lot more challenging, because without the ability to somewhat reasonably sound out the words you're reading on paper, the learning process takes a lot more time and resources. Languages with easier to grasp spellings just come with better tools. Every language has is peculiarities and inconsistencies. Even Latin, which at some point in history was standardized as much as possible has exemptions on exemptions to its many rules upon rules. As people speak a language, the language changes, so the older then language, the weirder it becomes. I don't think there are (natural, not invented) languages that are "hard" or "easy" to learn from a general standpoint, because if the language was actually hard and illogical, humans would've changed the way they used the language automatically already. From what I can tell, all languages can be easy to learn as long as your mother tongue is related to them in some way. It could be the grammar structure (like featuring nominative, accusative, etc.) or the way verbs are used, but as long as you can fine some match between your own language and the one you're trying to learn, you'll have an advantage. I would think English is nearly impossible to teach to a Chinese person, but shouldn't be hard to teach to a French or German person at all. The same goes the other way around: there is much more overlap between Japanese and Chinese then there possibly could be between English and Chinese, so learning those languages becomes terribly complicated for many westerners. As much as I despised having to learn different languages in middle/high school, I do think that everyone should be taught at least one other language. It'd help the students if that language was something similar to the local language, but for American or English kids it wouldn't matter if that second language was Spanish, German, French or Italian. What matters is the insight you get when you start thinking about language rather than using it. You start to get a feeling for why certain parts of the language are like they are, rather than just being told that this is just how the language works and you should deal with it. For example, explaining the use of "who" and "whom" to someone without an understanding of grammatical cases, which many Indo-European languages still feature today, might be an impossible task even native speakers sometimes struggle with. You could go it about another way and teach Middle English in English-speaking countries to explain these systems, but I don't think anyone would be interested in that.

azangru 5y ago

> I do pity anyone trying to learn it. Depends on the age of the learner and the duration of the instruction. If you start learning a second language in elementary school or even in kindergarten and spread it out over the rest of the school years, then there's nothing to it. If, on the other hand, you start as an adult and want to learn a language over a short period of time, then my pity goes to you regardless of which language you are learning.

ScarletEmerald 5y ago

Along these lines, there is a wonderful quote from James D. Nicoll from back in the days of Usenet: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”