this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Monolinugal people thinking that the pronounciation of some rare words is the big issue when learning languages...
Dude, try memorizing the correct grammatical gender for every single noun or every single exception to regular declinations. And that's just for a medium-difficulty language like German.
You know how there's simple English versions of news articles? The same thing exists with German. And the language in these Simple German articles is more difficult than the regular English version.
English is THE easy mode language of the world, which is why e.g. pretty much anyone in Europe defaults to it if they are speaking to anyone who speaks a different native language. Like, if someone from Austria speaks with someone from Ukraine, they will use English.
i mean, no, the reason english is the default language of the world is due to (british, and then american) imperialism
french and latin were once the default languages of europe for the same reason
and how hard a language is to learn is kinda irrelevant, because it will always depend on what language(s) you already know. for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
"for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem"
Not necessarily. I'm German and I still have to learn French grammatical genders by heart, because they don't necessarily match ours. Familiarity with the concept doesn't make it any easier, just less weird.
Example: The tower. LA tour, feminine. DER Turm, masculine.
That's more of a Germanic vs Latin languages. Most genders on french and Spanish match.
What? no
I know portugueses and spanish and I'm learning french and it make it all even more complex
Since in one language it's something, in anofher it's something else
Lol, they don't even match consistently between Portuguese and Spanish which are much closer, even when the noun is literally the same (e.g.a água vs el água)
They don't even match between Austrian German and German German.
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
The problem is not wrapping your mind around the concept of grammatical genders, but that you have to memorize them for every word. And they are different in any language with grammatical gender.
For example:
or
Knowing the grammatical gender of something in one language won't help you one bit when learning another language. In fact, it might be even detrimental, because it's different in every language.
tu penses mon nom d’utilisatrice vient de quelle langue?
of course not every language has the same grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with them, you don’t have to learn the concept, you already get it
when learning Spanish in school, grammatical gender was really not an issue, cause i already speak french (to be fair, french and spanish will often gender the same words the same way, which greatly helps ofc)
to me, it was much harder to grasp the distinction between ser and estar, for example. two fundamental verbs that, in french, get translated to the same thing
The ideia of gramatical gender is kept, but the specific genders may be different, so it's still pretty hard
At least that's how I felt when learning spanish or french
lol that's just so blatantly wrong
Americans don't memorize all that shit for English either. We just start using words. German is the same. Don't try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
... because it doesn't exist in English. Of course you don't remember things that don't exist.
Yep. That's why you can pick out every American stumbling through German even after they spent 20 years in the country, because they can't get any of the things that you have to memorize right.
If you think that what they teach in American schools in German, then maybe. But seriously, pronunciation is so not the hardest part about learning languages.
And as I said, German isn't even a hard language either. That goes to e.g. Finnish or Hungarian (at least for western languages). But English is an easy mode language.
If English was easy, then native speakers wouldn't make so many mistakes.
Maybe you mean English is forgiving? As in, even though you're bad at it, I can understand you.
Case in point: If English were easy.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/sentences/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
What the fuck do you think learning vocabulary by reading is, if not memorization? You're just doing it subconsciously rather than intentionally.
Language acquisition and rote memorisation aren't exactly 1:1.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
It's like the difference between reading a dictionary and only going forward after you've learned a page by heart vs simply starting to read simpler novels even when you don't understand all the words, and picking it up as you go along. Understanding form context.
That's not memorizing the genders. You see the word, you know the word.
I know that the Spanish word for table is mesa. I didn't sit there and think "the base part is mes and the a means it's female". The word is just mesa. And la mesa looks right because I've seen it. I didn't think "it needs to be la because it's feminine".
I don’t get why people keep saying German is harder to learn than english. I struggled much more learning english as a second language than German.
Well, they all speak it in western Europe because it is the language of the victors of WWII, and is since taught in schools.
We have English from class 5 (mandatory), French or Latin from class 7 (mandatory), then, optional, Latin or French (whatever you did not take) from class 9, and something like Italian or Spanish from class 11. Some schools offer wider selection like Polish or Russian, or even Greek like they did in my nephews school.
English isn't easy at all. It's an obnoxiously difficult, confusing, and contradictory mash up of half a dozen Mediterranean languages.
If you want an easy language, learn Esperanto. If you want a business language learn English.
Tell me you are an English Monolingual without telling me you are an English Monolingual.
笑死我了
ខ្ញុំក៏អាចប្រើការបកប្រែ googe
hahahaha, no, it is not. A significant amount of words are ambiguous if isolated from their context (take "fire": as in fire a shot, a flame, fire a worker, "this is fire"?), pronunciation is all over the place, it feels like there are more exceptions than rules when it comes to past-present-future verbs
That is how all languages works.
Only someone who has never learned a second language thinks that this is difficult or somehow special to English.
As someone who has learned four different languages and studied a dozen more, English is on the harder end of the spectrum to grasp phonetically. The nice thing about English (and other Romance languages) is the alphabet. Compare that to Chinese, with a laundry list of characters to absorb or Arabic which omits a bunch of vowel sounds, and you experience a lot of trouble.
But compare English to Spanish or German and you'll find it to be unusually confusing and difficult. Pronunciations, secondary meanings to certain terms, and the haphazard grammar all make English a game of learned reflexes rather than logical progressions.
That's not special to English, but it is more pronounced in what is effectively a mongrel outcropping of assorted Western European dialects.
The thing with English is you just have to learn phonetics by hearing, not by reading. It's quite simple actually. It only has a very limited amount of language-specific sounds, and you just learn the written and spoken forms of each word individually.
The really nice thing about English is that everything's prepositions not cases, there are no grammatical genders and half of the words are just Latin. If you know any other romance language, you can just re-use all the latin-based words you know and you'll be mostly fine. You only have to be aware of a handful of false friends and that's it.
I don't think that English has more words with secondary meanings than other languages or anything like that.
I, in fact, do speak German, Italian, Spanish, English and a bit of Welsh. German is my first language, so can't say how that is to learn as a second language, but English was by far the easiest to learn of these languages. Sure, it's the least phonetic one of these, but that's really the only disadvantage it has.
Sure. And you could say the same about Chinese, which is a fairly simple language to learn if you never want to be literate. But as so much of our communication is via text, the literacy angle is an insurmountable part of language learning.
English spelling is easy enough that in 95% of cases you can match up the spoken word with the written word.
How's the percentage of that for Chinese?
In fact, if you want a language where it's actually hard to know how a word is pronounced if you only ever see it in the written form, you gave yourself the answer.
I'd be curious to know if that's actually true.
If you know your radicals? We'll say "also 95%" just to be annoying.
But how do you learn the radicals? Same way you learn all the standard English pronunciations. Repetition.
I never implied those problems are special to English, but that English is not "THE easy mode language" due to those problems, plus many others I didn't mention
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
The old man the boat.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Lol the english monolinguals. Hungarian "Lóg"=to hang, "lóg az iskolából"=to skip school. Extremely common thing in every language. Also most languages are irregular just to different extents. English irregularity is mainly in some of the past tense forms and spelling. I would count gender as an irregularity(depending on how it works in the language) which english doesnt have for example. English doesnt have cases which are another struggle for a lot of people learning languages. Then there are languages that are not as irregular, but they have extremely complicated internal logic which is just harder to learn than just learning by a case by case basis. Id put hungarian here where there are usually reasons for why things happen but it just got lost in an older version of hungarian or its so complex theres no point to learning it. Also there are things that do actually seem to be completely fucking random and are even annoying as a native speaker.
English is my 2nd language 🤷