Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
I noticed how many of the verbs in English can mean different things depending on what word comes next, e.g.
- Put
- Put down
- Put up
- Put upon
- Put on (wear)
English has so many words that mean the same thing, it’s amazing, astonishing, bewildering and flabbergasting, there was a thief, mugger, robber, bandit… Who stole, robbed, nicked, thieved from me… I don’t know how anyone ever learns all the English words for stuff, I honestly don’t know how I have.
It also made me reflect on how languages are just noises we’ve all agreed to make at each other. The rules try to match the language and fail, not the other way around.
Recently I was also thinking about how interesting it is that some words we use are SO OLD, and we just… use them like it’s no big deal, but if we we’re transported back thousands of years, people were still calling vanilla something very similar to vanilla and arteries something very similar to arteries, and that is super cool to me.
English-learning books call those phrasal verbs and there are entire chapters focused on them. I remember them as the most hated part of English lessons.
When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”
Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.
Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what’s spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
I’m doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese
I’m learning French so I’m not the best person to ask.
Consider these terms vs words:
Site / look
An overlook / overlooked
An oversight / [provide] oversight
When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.
I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.
Learning Mandarin. The stereotype of a Chinese person saying “Me no English” makes sense now considering the word is literally 我(Me)不(No)英文(English)
“Do you speak English?”
“I profusely beg your forgiveness, old chap, but my linguistic skills do not reach to the Anglican sphere and thus I am unable to converse in anything but my native language, Mandarin.”
“So… yes or no?”
" 甚麼?"
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.
I know a few languages, English not being the first one. But I too have learned that not only might English be broken, but so might my mental and cultural skills with it. Though I figure priority one is whether what I say follows grammatical rules. Political manifestos, which this place is all too familiar with, don’t even have that, yet people seem to understand what they’re saying if people are going around saying how wise they are.
?
Something wrong?
Even after repeated attempts, I’m failing at understanding your point
Hehe. I don’t think English is that broken. I mean it’s definitely broken. But still one of the easier languages to learn. It’s my second language, so my perspective might be a bit different. But I also had French in school. And oh my, that’s a proper hassle to memorize all the articles, specifics and numerous exceptions to every rule there is… English was way easier (for me.)
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.
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.
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
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’?
It’s so broken it’s the current meta.
Devs, English is OP, please nerf.
Teaching English to non-native speakers will fully open your eyes to how broken and outright ridiculous the English language is. “To” and “too”. “Through” and “threw”…
Relevant vsauce short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ipFdRfFvK4
English is a difficult language. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though.
