Come on, English is not that bad. No real verb conjugation in response to gender, person, or (to an extent) number. There are irregular verbs, sure, but due to a simpler conjugation you have to memorize way less than for eg Spanish or French. Simpler morphology - no significant agglutination, prefixes or suffixes. Only 26 glyphs. One downside is complicated phonetics though. Not just the sounds, but all the inconsistencies (like “dough”, “through”, “rough”, or “head”, “heat”, “read”).
In Spanish when a 5 or 6 yr old learns to read, they can read virtually any word correctly, no crazy phonetics, vowels are very distinct, the language has somewhat complex but strict rules. Compared to it, English looks like spaghetti thrown to the wall.
In Greek, all letter combinations always have the same pronunciation. My Greek teacher told me she learned English by reading alone. When she first met an American, she apologized for arriving early, but she pronounced "early" like "yearly" because in her native Greek, the "ea" combination would always produce the same sound.
“Read” - lol I did not miss that one, just did not elaborate. I really could go on and on :-) I personally struggled with “bear” vs “hear” (and “heard” vs “beard”), voicing of “th” (“this” vs “thin”, “than” va “thanks”), accent change in verb vs noun (“prOgress” vs “”progrEss”). But not with silent letters as in “psychology” or “bomb” because compared to Russian and French that is a piece of cake.
English also has phrasal verbs, which are basically a group of inconsistent, illogical idioms that you need to learn by heart in order to understand them.
For example:
"come around" (apparently change your mind?)
"come down on" (apparently this means "attack or punish harshly", not oral sex)
"come down with" (get sick with some disease, ok you go down because you lay in bed, although you dont lie "on" the bed)
"come up" (you come up with new ideas, for example that one can "calm down"; why up and down?)
There are tons of those phrasal verbs that are easy to natives, but those are so illogical who has to learn them. For example when Tony Soprano tells to "do someone in", maybe you can figure it out from the context, but without context it is just a mess.
Yeah English pronunciation is probably the only part I'd say is difficult or annoying to learn. As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
Overall it feels like a simple language though, none of the annoying stuff such as
gendered nouns and declension.
> As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
And even more tellingly, there's so many words in english where native speakers don't even agree how it's pronounced since there's no consistent pattern. Just depends how each person first heard it and got used to it.
In finnish pronounciation and spelling are 1:1, competely predictable with no exceptions. The english language game of a spelling bee would be extremely boring in finnish as there are no trick spellings. It's always written the way it is said.
Is that not just regional accents? Don't most countries with a reasonably sized population have differences in punctuation? Or are you referring to something different?
As an English person, there are parts of my own country where it will take me a bit of time to get my ear tuned to the local accent and dialect (just this evening my wife's mother, from south yorkshire, used a word I'd never heard). But I was under the impression this is pretty common, at least across Europe. I've heard French people complaining about how people from some other part of France speak, the same for Germany. Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
I'm not being defensive or anything, this is a genuine question. As someone who struggled to spell at school I'm well aware of what a mess English is.
> Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
AFAICS, I'd say yes, it is.
There are some dialects (way up north, and in the East) where stuff is pronounced differently, but that's so hilariously different that I think speakers of those dialects are themselves fully aware that the way they pronounce stuff, it oughta be spelled differently. And conversely, what with only the "official" spelling being taught in school, they automatically learn the "correct" nationwide pronunciation from that -- thanks to the "everything is spelled as it's pronounced, and vice versa" phenomenon.
I believe English has an easier to reach basic level, but it is perhaps the hardest language to master out of all of them.
Comparatively, learning German to a level where you can get by is a bit harder, but building on top of that to master the language is not an extraordinary amount of work.
Like, one would get much further with natural language processing based on a purely mechanistic approach targeting German, while English would have more exceptions than contenders where a rule applies.
English is the superior language because of its infinite number of states.
It will beat and humiliate the learner, leading them to feel accomplished when they have finally attained proficiency.
By the master, English can be beaten and humiliated into submission and used to accomplish amazing feats of literary insanity.
Think rules matter? In some languages grammar rules (and their exceptions) are strict. When you start to mess around, things fall apart. Meaning evaporates. People don't understand you.
In English? Verbing weirds language.
Logic and reason are the refuge of the unimaginative and dispassionate. The people who don't understand or appreciate the satirical nature of the above article.
