I took english in school, and I speak it all the time :3
Good job. English is a very hard language that barely uses logic.
All languages have their difficulties. English pronunciation and spelling is a mess but grammar is easy for example. My native language has 3 genders and 4 cases for example and there are languages with more.
7 cases in the standard version of my language, 8 in the dialect I speak :3
You didn’t mention genders so I guess you have none which leads me to Uralic or Turkic languages maybe?
Oh if we’re doing a guessing game then…
3 genders technically, though the 3rd one (neuter) is super rare, so it’s basically 2 in practice :3
That makes it harder. 7 is the limit of Balto-Slavic languages but I know that one Baltic language used to have more, loaned from Estonian or something, but lost them over time. So my guess is your local dialect preserved one? Otherwise I have no clue. I think modern Indo Aryan languages have less, Semitic languages have 2 genders and I don’t know how many cases. I could rule out some more to show off but not much.
Lithuanian! Im not sure if they were loaned from estonian :3 we used to have 10 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, illative, allative, adessive, and vocative) allative is basically dead outside of a few words like velniop, adessive is just dead (only really seen in old writings) but illative is the interesting one: it’s not used in standard lithuanian outside of some set phrases (kairėn, dešinėn, and in our anthem vardan), but it’s still used in dzūkija and east aukštaitija, so… Yeah that’s some lore :3
Yeah same. 6 cases, 3 genders and also dual form because why not.
I wish for spelling reform, but that’ll never happen.
It really is illogical lol :3 I tried teaching my parents before and trying to explain why all 3 Es in mercedes or all 3 Cs in pacific ocean make different sounds like “they just do”
Though my native language is quite hard for non-native speakers as well
mercedes
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
mɛrˈtseːdɛs
The “e” in the middle is long and stressed.
Edit: I would also say, that most of the times it is even pronounced like this:
məˈtseːdɛs
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
məˈtseːdɛs
Don’t know about other Germans but for me, the last e is a schwa. So it’s more [mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs] I think but I’m not completely sure.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
Me, an English teacher: nods somberly
Chinese, Arabic, and Russian speakers laugh at me when I say this.
Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.
Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).
English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!
The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
doesn’t count
I’ve tried no less than 4 times to learn Spanish. High school, twice out of school, and then uni. It’s just not getting through. I’m a communications graduate, so it’s not like language isn’t one of my strong points… Just doesn’t seem to carry over to any other language.
Maybe unsolicited advice but I have gotten my Spanish to a decent level, and I’ll paste a comment I made a year ago somewhere else below if you want to hear the method I used.
warning: long
So first, set your expectations. Learning a language takes a lot of time. A LOT. How long overall really depends on how much time per day you do it. But rest assured, if you do stick with it you are going to learn it. If you dedicated every waking hour, you could get to a high level in maybe half a year. But you’d have no life and would probably burn out. A more reasonable pace is 1.5-2 years. That sounds like a lot, but remember you don’t have to be fully fluent for it to be useful and to make connections in the language. Even after a couple months, you’ll be able to do a lot. And besides, two years is going to pass by anyway - the only question is do you want to be bilingual by the end of it?
I highly, super recommend checking out Dreaming Spanish - it’s a channel/site that teaches Spanish through a method called comprehensible input. Basically, all you do is watch, listen, and read in Spanish totally in Spanish, no translations whatsoever. That sounds intimidating, but the beginner stages they really talk at you like you’re a baby almost. They talk with their hands a lot and use drawings. That’s the most important part, because in the beginning you won’t be able to understand any Spanish or hardly any. But by making it so simple you can basically understand even though you don’t know the words. After a hundred or so hours of this, you can move on to slightly less easy content. And so on and so on until you can understand just regular media in spanish. At that point, your learning will really take off, because you can watch things that you’re actually interested in and that will capture your attention more.
They don’t do any explicit grammar or vocabulary practice. That’s on purpose, the arguments of comprehensible input is that language isn’t learned, it’s acquired. You didn’t learn English by rote memorization, you listened a lot. If you can hear a few words and make the connection to the meaning by watching, and then you hear that word dozens or hundreds of times more - you will have a better understanding of that word than a simple translation flashcard could ever give you. Because words don’t have just one meeting they’re complex and change in different situations. But the best part is through this method you won’t even realize that you’re learning these words. Same goes with grammar, with this method things just kind of sound right. You can use the correct grammar, but you might not necessarily be able to explain why. Just like native speakers.
I’ve personally listened, or watched over a thousand hours of things in Spanish in a bit over a year. And at this point most media is almost as easy to watch as English for me. I also read the full Harry Potter series in Spanish. (It was rough at first, but after I got used to the writing style a lot of the times I’d forget it was in Spanish in the more exciting sections) I need to practice speaking more, I can definitely do it and be understood but it lacks pretty significantly behind my understanding but that is really just a question of how much practice I can get. But once you’ve banked 1k, 1.5k hours the rate at which your speaking will improve is way faster than the process of learning so far.
Check out this this playlist of videos that really explains things in more depth. It has English subtitles you’ll have to turn on. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf
They have a ton of free content, and if you want more you can pay just $8 a month - but honestly if you do a few hours a day after a couple months you’ll be able to just watch some YouTube videos of native speakers and you won’t really need dreaming Spanish anymore. But the site does have a handy hour tracker that you don’t need to pay for at all that I still use to this day.
I’ve tried to learn French, german, and even Spanish before but until this try when I discovered this method, I didn’t really get anywhere. At this point I’m almost comfortable saying that I’m bilingual. And it really doesn’t take that much effort just make it a routine, and once you can get into more advanced and interesting videos just watch things that you’re interested in. When you really get good, you can just watch the TV shows and movies that you already like to watch, but put on the Spanish dub. It’s that easy. I’m not doing anything differently now than I was before I knew Spanish but I’m learning every day because I just do the things I normally did but in spanish!
You can start their Super Beginner (most basic level) here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GbOHc3siOGQ5KmVSngZucl
But I’d recommend doing it on https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ where it will automatically track your watch time, let you filter by person/accent/level/topic, etc.
The beginning is by far the hardest part. The least interesting videos, the least level of comprehension. It will feel like a chore. Luckily the beginning is where you have the most motivation to push through it.
I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Hi! I remember that side, and the thing that separates isn’t the knowledge of the words in the language it’s the lack of ability to think in that language. instead of trying and failing at “enable real time translation from x language to my mother tongue” you must practice the language enough to think it. in your dreams and outloud. it starts to happen faster with immersion. but practice is the only means of success either way. your brain has to hear yourself speaking it to replay it at night.
I think that’s a great point. That seems to be what the other person who replied to me is saying. Immersion is #1, changing my relationship to language and the voice in my head, so to speak.
Just move to Spain. Immersion is the best way to learn a language.
Watch Narcos lmao
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I took Latin in high school, but I pretend it’s esperanto to remain an oddball.
I took Latin too, but then I realised it was just French but even more boring too learn :/
I did but I had after-school classes because I sucked at taekwondo and football, lol. So I learned French and ended up moving to France, eventually becoming a national, and also learned English and ended up marrying a Brit. 🤷
I read in English many years ago, but I’m not fluid speaker. My English is rigid. Then, you’re not the problem nor your teacher.
Imagine that you are learning the Chinese language if from Latin based to Latin based is a nightmare.
I took Spanish from age 12-22 and German from 18-23 and 29-31.
I speak both those languages, though my Spanish is rusty, because I moved to Germany and don’t have much contact with Spanish speakers.
Most people don’t really understand how many total hours of purposeful learning and actual usage is needed to become proficient.
For Japanese, it typically takes people who can’t already read 漢字 about 1,325 hours to reach N3 (conversational), and 2,200 for N2 (roughly business). That means if you want to get to N2 in only one year, expect to study like five to eight hours a day.
So don’t feel too bad if you can’t.
Or do, and use that frustration to motivate your study.
Have you tried using it?
I did and the results were kinda hilarious.
I was working as a technician at the time and went to a theater I wasn’t familiar with, I needed to use the bathroom and saw a few people cleaning so I asked them if the knew where the bathroom was.
“No ingles, no ingles!”
Oh good I can try my Spanish! “Donde estas el bano?”
“No ingles, no ingles!”
…but I’m speaking Spanish now… Lol
That’s the hardest part of gaining conversational skills: being ok with not being understood, ok being laughed at a little bit. If you’re afraid of speaking the language you’ll never progress.
Yritän oppia suomen, mutta unohdin harjoitella kuukausin ajan
(If I made a mistake tell me)
I retained enough to provide basic information to my ESL kiddos/parents, at least in Spanish. Use it or lose it, I really think.
Et bien vous savez quoi, on peut s’entraîner un peu. Pourquoi pas s’entraider? Je vous parle en français et vous me répondez en espagnol ?
¿Que?
see I couldn’t respond to you verbally for that, but I am glad that my time learning french 15 years ago at least allows me to understand it when written out
although I did have to confirm entraider meant what it looked like it meant
I took German in primary school (0.5 or 1.5 years, I forget which), Spanish and Korean in late primary school/early high school (3 years), French (5 years) and Vietnamese (1 year) in high school. Of these, I can hold a very basic conversation in French and have good enough grammar to put together fairly sophisticated sentences, very slowly, using a dictionary; and can read the Korean script (the same way someone who speaks Turkish but has literally never heard a word of the language can “read English” because their language uses the same script) and barely any more than that, in any of those languages.
I blame the fact that I changed languages so much for my poor skill in all of them. (Though a lack of will or immersion certainly has a fair amount to do with it, too.)
I took one of my country’s official languages in high school and I still speak it like shit …
Belgian person?
Or Swiss, it sounds very familiar. My French sucks. I did get DELF B2 level at the time, but damn do I struggle when I need to work in Lausanne with locals nowadays.
Aaaaand that would be me
Countless hours of German and French and at best a few words remain
Time well spent?
Hallo. Wie geht’s, mon ami?
Sorry your school sucked, I guess?
