Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of “the” with it is crazy.
And then you also have different meanings depending on pronunciation, here some examples:
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umfahren: to drive around something or to run over something
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Montage: the act of assembling or the plural of Monday
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übersetzen: to ferry across a river or to translate into another language
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umschreiben: to rewrite or to paraphrase
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durchschauen: to look through something or to understand
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unterstellen: to place something underneath or to imply or accuse someone of something
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unterhalten: to hold something underneath or to support or to converse with someone or to entertain
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wiederholen: to fetch something back or to repeat something
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As a German myself who tried to learn French a while ago, I gave up because that language has the same issue, but the genders for nouns are different and I just can’t be bothered to memorize two different genders for every noun 💀
It’s 3 languages stacked up in a trench coat. The annoying thing about Gaeilge, it uses all the same letters but everything is pronounced differently
English’s biggest problem as a language is the efforts to break it even further. This idea that popular things push that state of the ever-evolving language is why we have ‘mid’ and ‘based’, which are completely detrimental no matter how fetch they seem. People who find apostrophes hard to use should not be driving the evolution of a language on some famewhore channel.
That sort of change is how we got every version of the language at every point in history. Whichever version of English you think is the best, it was made the same way.
All languages that are used are kinda broken, except the synthetic ones, like Esperanto.
The amount of exceptions and weird rules in non-English languages I speak (Lithuanian and Swedish) and kinda know (Russian) proves it.
Yeah, if humans use it long enough, any language becomes bastardized. Every generation comes up with new slang with only minor regard for the rules. Some of that slang becomes permanent.
Learned English as my second language instead.
Yeah it’s broken, but y’all have tenses that sorta make senses (in Estonian we have present and past - future is implied by context!) and you don’t need 14 noun cases because y’all have prepositions.
At the same time, English borrows words from over 9000 different languages, nothing is pronounced the way it’s written, and to be quite honest, I never bothered learning any of the rules in school. The rule for ordering adjectives so they wouldn’t sound off was impossible to remember, but because I’ve been terminally online since I was like 7, it just came naturally.
TL;DR: English is a great language to just know natively, horrifying one to learn systematically.
On the contrary - it has made me appreciate how many different traditions the English language draws from and how flexible it actually is.
It certainly does show how many traditions, with their own sets of rules, English pulls from. That said, watching my poor kid learning how to spell and read has been painful. All the rules only exist to be broken. An example today was him trying to pronounce AMC. A fun word for spelling that came up recent was skool.
Learning a second language hasn’t made me think English is broken. I already thought English was messed up but know a little of it’s history so have a general idea why. Learning Spanish means learning the flaws of a second language. I thinking all languages are flawed, but English just goes the extra mile.
Conversely, when we Spanish have to learn English, the thing we hate the most is that words are not pronounced the way they’re written. In Spanish, however, we’ve got some weird rules with irregular verbs and articles, but the former is common to both languages
It’s made me aware of how much I appreciate reliable consistent pronunciation in Spanish (at least compared to English). And it’s given me a huge amount of sympathy for people who are learning English and trying to speak to native English speakers :)
But I wouldn’t say it’s shown me how broken English is. I mean, I think it’s more broken than Spanish, but that could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P
Same with consistent pronunciation in Indonesian - it’s so much better. I feel sorry for little kids learning to read English and getting told to ‘sound it out’. Sure thing, which of the five to nine sounds shall I use for the letter ‘a’?
That could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P
Gotten into verbal tenses yet…? 😉
But, hey, at least it doesn’t have [weak pronouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_personal_pronouns#:~:text=The weak pronouns (Catalan%3A pronoms,different element of the sentence.) as we do in Catalan… Those can be confusing even for native speakers! 😅
I knew English was broken well before I learned a second language
It’s so broken it’s the current meta.
Devs, English is OP, please nerf.
It isn’t broken, it’s just preserved
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English’s changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you’re being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn’t remotely broken, it’s just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they’re all about as “broken” as English looks too, because they’re forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
Not Arabic. It is pronounced as it is written. Except a handful of words that have a different transcription to make them easily distinguishable.
As someone who is learning Arabic right now this is the vaaaaastest oversimplification I have ever seen on that subject in particular.
For starters, dialects
We only refer to MSA when talking about Arabic. Most Arab speakers consider dialects side languages to Classical Arabic. They have never had a transcription throughoutout history. People started writing in their dialects only recently with the arrival of SMS and the internet.
I get that as a new comer to Arabic you probably have come across learning materials for dialects like Egyptian and levantine. But in reality you won’t find uni courses for those dialects because academics don’t consider them to be proper languages with clear grammar and an established vocabulary.
Actually I chose to learn dialect first because literally everyone who knows anything about the language cautions that native speakers will swear up and down that you should learn MSA and then be completely incomprehensible to you because of how little anyone actually uses it in the Arab world.
I’ve been working with my teacher for a year and a half now and she agrees that MSA is basically pointless unless you intend to start consuming arabic language news or listening to arabic language political speeches.
BTW this is from a professional cultural expert who’s literal job is to prep government workers and businessfolks to be able to engage successfully with the Arabic world, something she’s been doing for 20 years now, so I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s talking about.
You do you. And you have to take into consideration what your goal is by learning Arabic.
Dialects are definitely easier to learn and more rewarding as it allows you to converse with people and test your advancements. But you won’t be able to easily transition to another dialect. Because MSA is the glue that make the intelligible.
Learning MSA will take you triple the time. And I imagine your teacher is both proud of his dialect. But also doesn’t want you to drop learning if you were to have chosen MSA
With Japanese, it’s more-so that the standardised version is widely used in politics, to strangers, to acquainted superiors, and just in general by default
It’s only between friends, within most families (and to acquaintances who regard you as their superior) that you speak… Whatever, really.
This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we’ve known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.
The problem is, that’s not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn’t prepare future language learners for reality.
This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We’re talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it’s nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don’t get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they’re irritating to memorize.
And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you’ll find it in every language, sorry.
Ghoti
quite simple: I learned english
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.
