Times People Were Incredibly Frustrated With How Bizarre The English Language Is

[highplainsdem]

Last edited Wed Jan 25, 2023, 08:05 PM - Edit history (1)

EDIT: Just remembered something I posted about a year ago when someone asked about words with similar (partial) spellings being pronounced differently. This is on the Oxford English Dictionary website:

https://public.oed.com/blog/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/

[brush]

1. We're lucky it's our first language.

Other languages have more standard grammatical rules, but then some have pronunciation difficulties too — not that easily mastered.

[Mr.Bill]

5. My excuse for my failure to learn a second language

is that I'm still busy learning my first one.

[brush]

8. Same here, although a second language is on my bucket list.

[3catwoman3]

2. That was very entertaining!

I love things like this.

[wnylib]

3. I have studied Latin, German, and Spanish.

Latin was not difficult as long as I remembered the rules and followed them. Plus, speaking and listening were not issues.

Spanish was the easiest of the 3 languages for me to learn.

German was as difficult for me as English must be for non native English speakers. Compared with Latin, German has parallel gender articles for nouns, gender declensions for pronouns, case declensions for nouns, and verb ending conjugations.

But Latin is orderly in its pronoun and noun changes and use of gender with articles and nouns. German is not. Too complicated to explain here if you never studied either of those languages, but I found German so frustrating that I told the instructor that I finally realized why my g-grandparents left the German Empire for the US. It was not politics or finances. They wanted to escape the language.

So I can empathize with people learning a language like English.

I have taught English to native Spanish speakers who were new to the US. Sometimes their mistakes were amusing and I reassured them with stories of my mistakes with Spanish. One time a student got frustrated with another student who was trying to convince her of something that she did not believe. She said, "Stop it. You are washing my brain." Perfectly logical misuse of the word brainwashing.

Sometimes I felt foolish when they asked about strange ways of saying things in English that I take for granted as a native English speaker and I could not explain it to them.

[Wicked Blue]

6. What drove me crazy about learning German

is "die, der and das." How the heck are we supposed to remember if a cat is female or an apple is neutral?

[wnylib]

7. That's why I said that there is no

consistent orderliness in German compared to Latin. In Latin, the gender of the articles is more logical. Also, the ending of a word indicated its gender, too, so you knew which article to use with it. There were a few exceptions, but not many.

Occasionally in Latin the gender forms of the article overlapped. So the article and ending of a word could be the same in both the plural of one gender and possessive of another, making it a little confusing, but there were contextual clues.

In German, there is no ending of the word to tell gender, only the article. And the form of one gender article could be the same as another gender in a different case. So, as you know, der is masculine and die is feminine in the nominative case. But, in another case (I forget which one now), the article for a masculine noun could be die. Very confusing and frustrating.

It was decades ago when I studied German for 2 years in high school. I had Latin for 2 years prior to that. I remember some of the German but have forgotten most of the Latin.

I had Spanish in college and majored in it, so I feel more comfortable with Spanish and am more fluent in it, although it's been a few years since I used it regularly so I have some lapses with it.

One thing I remember about Spanish since I studied it longer and in more depth so that I read literature from different time periods. Some sayings, when translated, are the same in both Spanish and English. For example, there was a Spanish novel from the 1500s that used the expression, "the pot calling the kettle black." So that long ago, even in another country, culture, and language, the expression existed.

[pansypoo53219]

4. merriam-webster explained why pineapples are name that.

[nuxvomica]

9. When I learned about the order of adjectives, it blew my mind

The order of adjectives is something non-native English speakers learn that English speakers are usually not aware of, yet we pretty much adhere to it.

The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary