Ask Lemmy

When you start a new language, you learn "The Rules" first, and wonder why your first language doesn't have such immutable "Rules."

Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.

English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.

Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.

Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.

Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean "to hope". 克 can mean "to restrain". The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like "bahcoo" (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like "buck".

It isn't broken. It's quirky, and they all are.

What I appreciate about Spanish over English is the ease of spelling and pronouncing new words. What I appreciate about English over Spanish is the ease of creating new words.

I have some limited ability/understanding in other languages, but not enough to judge. Except for French.

It isn't broken, it's just preserved

Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.

English's changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you're being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.

There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.

Put together this all means that the English language isn't remotely broken, it's just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.

Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they're all about as "broken" as English looks too, because they're forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.

Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.

On the contrary - it has made me appreciate how many different traditions the English language draws from and how flexible it actually is.

When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English's letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn't always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of "i before e except after c..." rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it's a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates... Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.

Hehe. I don't think English is that broken. I mean it's definitely broken. But still one of the easier languages to learn. It's my second language, so my perspective might be a bit different. But I also had French in school. And oh my, that's a proper hassle to memorize all the articles, specifics and numerous exceptions to every rule there is... English was way easier (for me.)

Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.

We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.

ITT: Loads of monolingual native English speakers who has no knowledge of linguistics or even how their own language is not unique in all the ways that they think it is.

It's made me aware of how much I appreciate reliable consistent pronunciation in Spanish (at least compared to English). And it's given me a huge amount of sympathy for people who are learning English and trying to speak to native English speakers :)

But I wouldn't say it's shown me how broken English is. I mean, I think it's more broken than Spanish, but that could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P

Well, I suppose it made me realise how useless articles are in a statement.

«где здесь кинотеатр?» (where here movie theatre?)

"where is the movie theatre around here?"

Without articles the point comes across in a much simpler form. that being said, a lot of other languages also have a terrifyingly complex case system or pointlessly gendered language or both. I don't think any language is "broken" but they all definitely have quirks.

This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we've known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.

The problem is, that's not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn't prepare future language learners for reality.

This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We're talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it's nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don't get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they're irritating to memorize.

And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you'll find it in every language, sorry.

All languages that are used are kinda broken, except the synthetic ones, like Esperanto.

The amount of exceptions and weird rules in non-English languages I speak (Lithuanian and Swedish) and kinda know (Russian) proves it.

I don't feel it's particularly broken honestly. Some languages are more consistent with their rules and therefore easier to learn but English is surprisingly consistent in practice/sound throughout the world. You also don't need to memorize the gender of a washing machine...

I noticed how many of the verbs in English can mean different things depending on what word comes next, e.g.

• Put
• Put down
• Put up
• Put upon
• Put on (wear)

English has so many words that mean the same thing, it's amazing, astonishing, bewildering and flabbergasting, there was a thief, mugger, robber, bandit... Who stole, robbed, nicked, thieved from me... I don't know how anyone ever learns all the English words for stuff, I honestly don't know how I have.

It also made me reflect on how languages are just noises we've all agreed to make at each other. The rules try to match the language and fail, not the other way around.

Recently I was also thinking about how interesting it is that some words we use are SO OLD, and we just... use them like it's no big deal, but if we we're transported back thousands of years, people were still calling vanilla something very similar to vanilla and arteries something very similar to arteries, and that is super cool to me.

I learned Latin and in the process learned that quite a lot if what makes English fucked up was a movement a couple of hundred years ago to make it more like Latin.

For me it was the inconsistency with sounds in the English language

Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of "the" with it is crazy.

Gotten the hang of Southern Sotho at this point, and one thing that strikes me is how exact I can be with English and how I've always taken for granted how much access we have to things that allow us to give our words different meanings and implications. It just doesn't exist to that extent in many other languages. It's like when you hear the Eskimos have 50 words for snow or whatever. I don't know if it's true or not, but those words would describe different states or types of snow that speakers of that language recognize as distinct.

Also I watched this recently: https://youtu.be/NJYoqCDKoT4?si=Ppsm10i4ovI6M99g

I started Russian Duolingo a while back. You can make English sentences that would take five or six words in two words under first impressions the language doesn't f*** around it gets right to the point.

But then I started getting to conjugations and it turns into a dumpster fire real quick.

It's so broken it's the current meta.

Devs, English is OP, please nerf.

I started learning Japanese 2 weeks ago but I already knew how fucked English was because I learned English first.

Japanese seems weird and hella foreign at first because the alphabet it uses, but it's way more straightforward than English. What's weird is being at a point where I know most of the alphabet, but barely any words or grammar. So I can sound out entire sentences and say them aloud but not know what it actually says lol

Not that it doesn't have its own problems... There are over 60 characters in the Unicode standard that, apparently, nobody knows the meaning of. And it's because there would be small communities or areas that have their own characters for things that have fallen into obscurity and also caused by things like photocopier artifacts, etc. So far 12 have been identified as meaning nothing at all.

It’s 3 languages stacked up in a trench coat. The annoying thing about Gaeilge, it uses all the same letters but everything is pronounced differently

Learned English as my second language instead.

Yeah it's broken, but y'all have tenses that sorta make senses (in Estonian we have present and past - future is implied by context!) and you don't need 14 noun cases because y'all have prepositions.

At the same time, English borrows words from over 9000 different languages, nothing is pronounced the way it's written, and to be quite honest, I never bothered learning any of the rules in school. The rule for ordering adjectives so they wouldn't sound off was impossible to remember, but because I've been terminally online since I was like 7, it just came naturally.

TL;DR: English is a great language to just know natively, horrifying one to learn systematically.

Learning Mandarin. The stereotype of a Chinese person saying "Me no English" makes sense now considering the word is literally 我(Me)不(No)英文(English)