• I Cast Fist
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    -210 days ago

    English is THE easy mode language of the world

    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

    • @squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      310 days ago

      Only someone who has never learned a second language thinks that this is difficult or somehow special to English.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        110 days ago

        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.

    • @cepelinas@sopuli.xyz
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      110 days ago

      Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.

    • @leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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      110 days ago

      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.

    • AItoothbrush
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      110 days ago

      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.