As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word “yacht” is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: “The Chaos” (poem)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
It’s way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
You don’t have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
Me to the Japanese every day.
I’ll say fudge-diddly-darn if I want to and you can’t stop me.
Lookout guys, we got a badbutt over here.
fucking!
This is almost certainly copied from Facebook, not blurred especially for Lemmy.
They should unblur it before posting it here.
This sound like something someone who only speaks English would say.
Fuck censorship.
I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it’s easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
As a Hungarian I can confirm. We mostly read words letter-by-letter. No weird shit like “rebel” and “rebel” sounding different because one is a noun, other is a verb 🤡
Or “queue”, are you drunk, English? And the native speakers’ favourite mixups, “there” and “their”, “it’s” and “its”.
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.
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
but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
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:
- Italian: La luna (female), il sole (male)
- German: Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)
or
- German: Das Huhn (neuter)
- Italian: il pollo (male)
- Spanish: la gallina (female)
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.
Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
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
try memorizing the correct grammatical gender
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.
Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either.
… because it doesn’t exist in English. Of course you don’t remember things that don’t exist.
Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
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.
And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
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.
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.
English is THE easy mode language of the world
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
笑死我了
ខ្ញុំក៏អាចប្រើការបកប្រែ googe
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 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
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 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.
Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
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.
The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl. jachten), which means “hunt”, and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we’d have yacht airplanes.
Yes, and a Polish person tells me this is the correct way to make the Yah sound at the start of the English word, yacht.
I imagine it’s the same for the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Though perhaps not for the French or Spanish.
fun fact: the word “Yacht” derives from old german “Jagd”, which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as “Yacht” and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
Yacht is also feminine in german (instead of the more pleasing das Yacht…) for the same reason as you say:
https://lemmy.ml/post/31227837/19058439
(thanks to @ephera@lemmy.ml and @barsoap@lemmy.ee for the explanations)
Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
- die Fregatte, die Trireme, und die Galeone unter anderen sind aber auch weiblich und sind auch Fremdwörter für bestimmte Arten Schiffe.
Yeah I’m non-native. Natur is another one that triggers me, mostly because of the mother nature connotation in english
I’m so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn’t.
Imagine bad language on the internet.
Capitalism is ruining our greatest gift, language.
We have a whole ass generation growing up having to learn to use weird euphemisms for everything and anything remotely controversial and it’s totally normal to them. If I were really conspiracy-minded I would be screaming how “They” are doing this on purpose so they can better control us… but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
This is absolutely correct. It’s so tiring to hear people constantly misattribute the fundamental consequences of the machine itself to some mysterious cabal of operators.
But for the rest, eh. Always has been. Kids have always been censored by parents and authority figures. They find their way around it and evolve the language with each new generation.
For example, the youths have taken to the words “raw dog” in the funniest way. It’s some kind of reverse euphemism for “without the help of drugs” - the most offensive way possible to say something innocuous and wholesome.
Like, “I raw dogged my date last night” means “I decided to stay sober despite my insecurities”
I’m terrified of the impact the onset of LLM’s will have on our already failing education systems and willfully ignorant culture, but not because of the censors.
rawdogging implies more than to just stay sober. You can rawdog an exam, which just means you enter with no learning. You can rawdog a meeting, meaning no preparation, you can rawdog a dish, meaning no recipe used. Rawdogging is much more philosophical than people attribute it to
Fascinating! The more you know. Thanks.
Yeah, I’m typically fine with language changing over time, and yeah you’re right it’s just how language evolves.
I guess my fear here is that the methods and means for changing language right now might not be evolution as much as de-evolution in this particular intersection of culture and technology.
When kids naturally develop ways to express themselves, it leads to new generations of minds coming up with new art and expressions.
But I’m not at all sure what the LLM’s and internet culture and the state of politics is going to do to a generation of kids already growing up in an anti-intellectual environment, with growing popularity of phrases like “just put the ___ in the bag” or “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” etc. It really worries me, because a lot of what makes us special as a species is our ability to take complex sets of ideas and concepts and make them into quantifiable abstractions through language, letting us manipulate complicated topics in our minds.
If you don’t have adequate language skills, you’re going to have a harder and harder time performing essential human functions, or even just communicating with others.
if the Zeitgeist is dumbing down, you as an intellectual will stick out like a sore thumb, and you might lose the ability to communicate your ideas efficiently. So, if you are not actively promoting knowledge, you are just complaining into the void like the rest of us
It’s to prevent an algorithm from deranking the content, not to prevent humans from seeing it. Obviously pointless on the Fediverse, but many people do it on other social media platforms.
No shit!
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
Bitch please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän. Actual word for an actual job that existed until 1991. Welcome to German.
eh people always point to German but they just use compound words more often. if you know the parts that make up the word it shouldn’t be hard to parse.
that makes german easier than most other languages, for example french, where they just invent new sounds to fuck with foreigners and use a new or loanword for any complex situation, instead of just compounding the information
German is wild! I never managed to get I to stick.
What does that mean
Skipper for steamship companies on the Danube.
Fascinating- I don’t speak Danish but I can _almost_read that. Enough to assume it has to do with thyroids and lymph nodes.
It is a medical word for getting tested for breast cancer. I didn’t bring it up because it is a difficult word to understand, but because it is difficult to pronounce correctly without stumbling over it. Yacht is not difficult in any way since our word for yacht is also yacht and because the spellings and sounds are pretty common in for example German, which is another language we are being taught from an early age.
Of course, all languages and their difficulties are relative depending on where in the world you live, but if you’re European, especially western European, then it is pretty silly to be impressed that people can pronounce yacht.
Having a long word like skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse is a lot more tricky since it’s a bit of a tongue twister to pronounce and if you aren’t well versed in Danish, you will also not know when or how to pronounce each letter, as several of them have different sounds or no sounds at all at different places in the word. That is why I brought it up.
Hottentottententententoonstelling in Dutch. It means hottentot tent exhibition
Elektriciteitsproductiemaatschappij or basically electricity producing company.
I prefer “angstschreeuw” as word to annoy foreigners with. 7 consonants in a row!
I mean, ‘sch’ is basically one consonant
I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O’s in the middle.
“Sentinel lymph node examination.” Probably not a word that comes up much day-to-day.
Nope, but it does come up if you get tested for breast cancer.
Point is, that yacht isn’t a difficult word at all. Especially not if you’re European, since the word for yacht in many European languages is… yacht.
true, but most European languages will pronounce it “ya-cht” and not… “yot”
Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。They are not all the same sound. And that is very important in Mandarin.
I mean, that’s just because Europeans (and places Europeans colonized) are not used to tonal languages. I started leaning mandarin recently, and while the tones take some getting used to, they are quite clear to differentiate
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of “Simone Giertz” from Sweeden whose name’s pronunciation sounded like ‘yecht’ to me.
My favorite has to be “read” (to read a book) and “read” (previously read a book)
What about the fact that ‘set’ has several hundred different definitions?
