this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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No, instead you have to learn to read and spell in a system that often sounds quite different to what is written. I want to read a book that's never been read. I want to live a life alive at a live show. Anything ending in ~ough which has something like 6 or 8 different sounds. I'm a native speaker trying to work with my wife on English (we speak Japanese at home). It's insane for any reading/spelling.
Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?
As soon as I stop hiccoughing and cut this bough
*needing to laugh
Oh yeah, unlike French where 2/3 of each word is silent.
I think liason is the harder part about trying to transcribe someone's spoken words as a new learner without a good grasp on vocabulary.
At least with French, a lot of those silent letters are a lot more predictable than English. English has French borrowings (from two different time periods), Latin borrowings (some of which were borrowed via Norman or Old French first), Greek, Germanic, etc. and we did various levels of preserving the native spelling. This is neat for etymology and maybe figuring out a word one doesn't know, but kinda sucks for spelling. A lot of words from Normal and Old French are now spelled differently in modern Parisian, but the more recent loans are closer. It's a hot mess.
Liaison, but also did you mean to use that word there or was it a weird autocorrect?
And then you also have to get the correct stress on the syllables which are also unguessable. Ask for a banana instead of a banaaaaaaaana and people won't understand.
That's the only hard thing about English. Many other languages have this difficulty plus many more (gender, tenses, complex rules, exceptions...).
English has no shortage of exceptions to "rules" (sometimes the rule only seeming such because it applies to the subset most frequently used rather than the whole set of whatevers). English's most common verbs are irregular. That's not necessarily too crazy (be, have, do/make are often weird in most languages because they resist change the most since they are most used). We have all kinds of things that aren't "correct" (prescriptive view) that native speakers get wrong all the time. "I have went" rather than "I have gone" is one that grates to me, but I accept that language changes. A lot of verbs are also losing their endings and patterns and gradually going to the dominant ~ed ending where previously they did not (Tom Scott has a good video on this).
Then by that metric, Chinese must be incredibly easy. Simple genders, no articles, simple grammar, no verb conjugation whatsoever, very simple tenses. Probably the easiest language out there!
Pronunciation is still incredibly difficult unless you are immersed in it. I'd argue that it's legitimately one of the most difficult languages to pick up in a classroom simply because of how completely different it sounds in the real world versus on tapes.
I didn't list all possible difficulties. Chinese have this never ending list of very complex characters and probably more subtility that I don't know of. If it is close to Japanese though, yes the grammar doesn't seem complicated compared to European languages.
Chinese grammar seems to me to be simpler than Japanese, though I studied Japanese for about a year and have lived here speaking the language daily (primary language at home) for the better part of a decade and have only scratched the surface on Mandarin.
Plus every word has like 10 different meanings while other languages sometimes have 10 different words for the same thing.
runis my personal favorite. Run for office, run off a copy, run out of something, run into something, run over something, etc.I don't necessarily think this is uncommon in language (particularly with the most common ~20 or so verbs).