matrix3509: You want a hard language to understand? Try Finnish.
Nah, Finnish is actually pretty simple. Little kids learn it faster than other European languages. Finnish is just so different to other languages that it seems hard to other people.
Beetlejooce: The advantages with English is that there are SO MANY foreigners in England, if you speak the language really badly it's accepted as normal, and in fact many people who speak correct English are shunned and considered posh.
French is ridiculous though. Some of the words are basically identical, but if you mispronounce a hundredth of a syllable the French have no idea what your talking about. In English you can mispronounce something and due to the wide range of accents it makes sense. In France if you mispronounce something they'll all 'WTF' you until you feel bad
The only french i know is retard which means late. guess why i learnt that? :p
The_root_of_all_evil: I think Leicester is the king of odd place names though (Lesta to others)
Loughborough pronounced Lufbra
And not far from Loughborough there's Zouch pronounced Zoch (I maintain that it should be 'ouch' with a z on the front) and Gotham pronounced goat-ham (not to be confused with Batman's home of Gotham city).
Oneone was a racehorse, Tutu was one too. Oneone won one race and Tutu won one too.
Also vaguely on topic;
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? A: Trilingual. Q: What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? A: Bilingual. Q: What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language? A: English.
Every day in English our teacher brought out a paper that said "this this that this these those" And we'd talk about it. Is that that that that we talked about this day with those along with this and that that.
matrix3509: You want a hard language to understand? Try Finnish.
Nah, Finnish is actually pretty simple. Little kids learn it faster than other European languages. Finnish is just so different to other languages that it seems hard to other people.
Maybe thats why its so hard for me.
Of course Wikipedia says that Hungarian is hardest for native English speakers.
The_root_of_all_evil: I think Leicester is the king of odd place names though (Lesta to others)
Loughborough pronounced Lufbra Rothley pronounced Rowthlee Groby pronounced Grewby And my favourite Belvoir pronounced Beaver
I had a Leicester near where I used to live, but we pronounced it "Lester". We had an on going joke that 'ice' is actually spelled 'iceice', due to the silent 'ice' in Leicester setting the standard.
Beetlejooce: The advantages with English is that there are SO MANY foreigners in England, if you speak the language really badly it's accepted as normal, and in fact many people who speak correct English are shunned and considered posh.
French is ridiculous though. Some of the words are basically identical, but if you mispronounce a hundredth of a syllable the French have no idea what your talking about. In English you can mispronounce something and due to the wide range of accents it makes sense. In France if you mispronounce something they'll all 'WTF' you until you feel bad
The only french i know is retard which means late. guess why i learnt that? :p
One that I know is the difference between "ou" (with \ over the u, I don't know how to put that on) and "ou" (without an accent). The first means "Where" the second means "or"
xitel: Well, people keep mentioning homonyms, but there's also homophones that make listening to it even harder. I can see the sea in the shape of a c.
The only one I had trouble with is the bass drum one...bass is the first proununtiation(see what I did there?) that pops in my head when I think of that...
The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.
In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.
Charlie-two-zero: All languages have this, at least the germanic and romantic languages do. I don't know anything about eastern languages.
Japanese is a very simple language to speak, because there is only one way to say each letter. The sentence structure is quite simple, because there aren't nine different versions of any singular tense(past, present, future). It's very difficult to read, because there are 3 types of characters, Kanji, Kanagata, and Hirigata.
implodingMan: The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.
In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.
The reason why I love Polish. Everything is pronounced like it's spelt. The only difficulty is learning the accents but once you've got them it's simple.
Cadren: There are a bunch of reason that English is hard to understand.
Mainly, English spelling makes no sense at all.
Seriously, have you ever thought for a while about the concept of silent letters? Letters are supposed to represent sounds, but some of them represent nothing. If that's the case, why have them at all?
Or could you ever imagine having to teach how to read 'ough' to somebody and making sense of it? Dough, rough, through, cough, bough... none of them sound anything a like.
That would be one reason I love German. Every word is spelled exactly how it sounds. :D
implodingMan: The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.
In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.
The reason why I love Polish. Everything is pronounced like it's spelt. The only difficulty is learning the accents but once you've got them it's simple.
Dobrze się czujesz? :)
Polish is one of the hardest languages in the world. The grammar alone is two times harder than in English not to mention orthography with all the "ó" "ą" "ż" etc. As for "everything is pronounced as it's spelled" try telling a person speaking English to pronounce "W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie"...
Japanese, for instance, not content with having no less than four complete alphabets, each of which is used for different types of words (one of them, handily, is the standard Roman alphabet), even has two different readings for each character in one of them, depending on whether they appear on their own or next to another character of the same alphabet.
That is only kinda right. There is no standard Roman alphabet for the Japanese. They have one syllabary for native words, one for foreign words, and then they borrow kanji from Chinese. The kanji usually have two meaning and pronunciations but some of them have up to twenty...it's quite a bitch. On top of that the kanji are mixed with the native word syllabary in writing.
implodingMan: The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.
In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.
Well, in that example, the "e" isn't purposeless, it tells you to pronounce it "tet" instead of "teh", as well as that its feminine (in most cases, this being one of them).
naftali1: That is only kinda right. There is no standard Roman alphabet for the Japanese.
There clearly is, hence it's use in for instance, product branding. It's not used for "normal" writing, but it's understood well enough to use for brand names and some shop/business signs.
english is complex because it has the most words in it by far, it has also morphed over the years and changed a lot
look at colour and color. there are odd ones like center (middle of something) and centre (a building like an arena)
also with japanese it depends on who is actually speaking who they are speaking to. so funnily enough a lot of guys who learn japanese from their gf's are actually learning the female version of japanese
naftali1: That is only kinda right. There is no standard Roman alphabet for the Japanese.
There clearly is, hence it's use in for instance, product branding. It's not used for "normal" writing, but it's understood well enough to use for brand names and some shop/business signs.
Where did you get your info about Japanese?
Learning it for a year, albeit some time ago.
Oh, I misunderstood what you meant when you were talking about the Roman alphabet...damn English and all its confusingness.
implodingMan: The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.
In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.
The reason why I love Polish. Everything is pronounced like it's spelt. The only difficulty is learning the accents but once you've got them it's simple.
Dobrze się czujesz? :)
Polish is one of the hardest languages in the world. The grammar alone is two times harder than in English not to mention orthography with all the "ó" "ą" "ż" etc. As for "everything is pronounced as it's spelled" try telling a person speaking English to pronounce "W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie"...
It's all about subject-verb agreement. Whereas most languages have clearly defined rules (like just changing the ending of the main verb), English has bizarre changes that often don't follow any sort of logic.
Flap Jack452: what about that crazy clicking language that people speak in the jungles?
Are you thinking of Swahili? It's full of clicking, and it's spoken in Eastern Africa.
Yes english can be difficult to understand if you are foregin, stupid, american, et cetera. Yes alot of it does rely on context. But how is this different to any other language? I tried reading I think it was finnish or norwegian and dear god. Their words used 37 letters, most of the alphabet and thrown around at random and the actual spoken word was two unitelligable grunts that sounded nothing like the letters used. Dont even get me started on freaking japanese. The same word can differ depending on the context, surrounding words, gender of the speaker, age of the speaker, what they had for breakfast that morning, area its spoken in, whether theres any clouds in the sky or even the freaking allignment of the planets. No wonder the japs are soo freaking smart. You have to be a super genius just to learn how to talk over there so if you dont you end up starving to death.
How do you think you'd pronounce Wymondham, Americans?