r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Upstairs_Cash8400 • 13h ago
English for Beginners
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u/Soulborg87 12h ago
The English language is 3 languages in a trench coat with a fake ID
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u/dabunny21689 10h ago
Beating up other languages in dark alleys and rifling through their pockets for loose grammar.
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u/iusecactusesasdildos 6h ago
Someone needs to give both these comments an award that was hilarious
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u/Greatlarrybird33 7h ago
Nothing like having a Bunch of Belgians, working for a German, ruled by Frenchmen who operated the first printing presses in England, basically deciding how to spell English words on the fly.
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u/townmorron 6h ago
And one wealthy guy deciding Grammer so the wealthy didn't sound like the poors
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u/Gadi-susheel 9h ago
an English literarian told me that back in 16-17th century people used to look down on those who speak English and spanish, latin, french were well recognized languages.
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u/FingerSlamGrandpa 1h ago
After watching his videos I genuinely don't understand how I learned English.
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u/saumanahaii 3h ago
So if you speak any of those languages it tricks you I to believing you're a third of the way there.
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u/Swervin69 12h ago
Don’t feel bad beginners, fluent speakers still don’t know how to tell their, there, and they’re apart.
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u/ciopobbi 10h ago
Lose and loose
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u/Loldungeonleo 7h ago
I know the difference between the 2 and still messed it up in a different sub like 20min ago.
Lose: You no longer have something
Loose: Something is barely attached
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u/NikNakskes 6h ago
And how to remember this: loose has two o because it is stretched out, lose has one o because it lost the extra stretchy one.
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u/evios31 3h ago
Effect/affect
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u/angry640 2h ago
Weather whether, Then than, bare bear, Insight incite, Hole whole, Flower flour, Apparently they are called homophones as in "words that sound the same but mean different things"
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u/Technical-Outside408 6h ago
I hate it so much. There is such a dissonance between the sounds those two make. It's awful.
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u/allnaturalfigjam 7h ago
Is it just me or do a lot of fluent English speakers use "weary" and "wary" interchangeably? I keep hearing people saying "be weary of that" and I'm starting to think I'm the crazy one.
I had a boyfriend in uni who pronounced "wander" the same as "wonder". Drove me up the wall.
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u/hhfugrr3 3h ago
How often are you meeting people who others think you need to be cautious of?
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u/allnaturalfigjam 3h ago
I live in Australia, it's less the people and more the place
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u/ewixy750 7h ago
The number of people here using then instead of than is annoying me way more than anything else, and English is my 4th language...
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u/warfaceisthebest 2h ago
Funny thing is there, their and they're are not that confusing for ESL people.
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u/SmokingLimone 2h ago edited 2h ago
ESL learn on textbooks first while natives learn by speech first, so they have no doubt how they're supposed to be spelt but they might have trouble hearing the difference
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u/gamerjerome 15m ago
I know the difference but that doesn't mean I always use the correct one in a sentence. My brain is fighting the idea that we need three different spellings for something we can differentiate by context.
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u/Admirable_Hunter_703 13h ago
English is so hard to learn that even native speakers argue over whether it's "who" or "whom"—and then just avoid the sentence altogether by saying, "That guy!"
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u/branch397 12h ago
My seventh grade teacher taught us two "Indian" names: iweheshetheywho and meushimherthemwhom. So for me, my hair stands on end when someone tries to be literate and says "He is the guy whom taught me english", which sounds exactly as bad as "me learned a lot today".
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u/EnigmaFrug0817 11h ago
“Who” and “Whom” isn’t actually that hard
It’s related to the answer to the question.
“Who is there?” -> “He is there!”
“Whom do you want to go for lunch with?” -> “I want to go to lunch with him!”
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u/Nevermore_Novelist 9h ago
I'm forever looking up when to use "that" and "which", because it does make a difference... and I can never remember. Same with "who" and "whom".
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u/Ok_Builder_4225 4h ago
Gonna be honest, I just use "who" for both and be done with it. "Whom" sounds archaic, even if technically correct.
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u/HumongousBelly 12h ago
It’s not really that hard to learn. I learned English as my third foreign language. And it was a lot easier to learn than German or French.
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u/CallMePepper7 11h ago edited 8h ago
I don’t know German and French, but I took a Spanish class and can honestly say if you give me an English word I’ve never seen and a Spanish word that I’ve never seen, I’m much more confident I’ll be able to pronounce the Spanish word correctly before the English one.
This is because with Spanish, letters have set rules on how they are pronounced, which helps prevent what we see in this video when it comes to certain English words. The difficulty of Spanish over English, imo, comes from how many plurals there are and how their verbs will change based off your plural (ex, yo hablo “I talk”, tu hablas “you talk”, él/ella habla “he/she talks”, hablamos “we talk”, ellos hablan “they talk”) which to me was very complicated.
Are German and French the same as Spanish? Where the rules for pronunciation are more concise? Or is it like English where trying to pronounce a new word can be difficult? Did you find English to be more complicated than German and French in certain aspects? Or if you learned German and/or French before English, do you think that helped make it easier to learn English as a third language? Whereas it may have been more difficult to learn as a second language.
I know that I kind of just hit you with an essay, but I just love to learn and you seem like you’ve got a lot of first hand knowledge to share here.
Edit: from “soy” to “yo.” Thank you to the Redditor that corrected me.
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u/NashKetchum777 11h ago
Yeah. This is just going to get people giving their anecdotes on how they learned ___ and English and English was much harder. English isn't generally difficult to learn. That's why we only see the same words/scenarios being nitpicked
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u/hhfugrr3 3h ago
I don't think I've ever heard a native speaker - except one trying to be terribly posh - say 'whom'. It's one of those words that feels like it's becoming antiquated.
Had an argument on here recently about whether it should be 'who' or 'whom' in a Duolingo sentence. I guess technically 'whom' was correct, but it sounded so unnatural and just wrong that I think anyone saying that sentence to a stranger on the street would get a weird look.
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u/ZOEzoeyZOE 11h ago
"you don't see how?" 👁️👄👁️
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u/tired_of_old_memes 6h ago
Dang, I was wondering what the heck he was saying. Sounded like Ignacio or something. Thanks.
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u/SkydivingSquid 11h ago
I thought he was going to drop the 'b' in bread and just have "read". . .
And how do you say this?
"Uh - read?"
No! It's read. . . Try again.
"Uh, okay.. read."
Nope. It's read.
"Bro, wtf?!"
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u/lazerbreath_ 7h ago
I always remember, "Read" rhymes with "Lead" but not with "Lead" and "Lead" rhyms with "read" but not with "read"!
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u/Nevermore_Novelist 9h ago
The way he says, "NOOOOHHHHHH" kills me!
Though
Through
Cough
Bough
Enough
None of these words sound the same, despite each of them ending in ough. This is one of many reasons I never get mad at someone who is clearly speaking English as a second language.
English doesn't fuck around. If it wasn't my first language, I would refuse to learn it.
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u/Decent_Cow 6h ago
All of these words used to end with a velar fricative, but when we lost that sound it got replaced with several different things.
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u/WalmartGreder 2h ago
Height and Weight got my friends learning English (I lived in France for 4 years).
They wanted to say Hate and Weight or Height and White. Nnooooo!!
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u/Fartout92 11h ago
I've learned English as a second language by myself throughout my life just by watching and hearing it from movies, videogames, music and TV shows. I've searched for this specific issue several times and I couldn't find a clear answer for it. Is there an actual set of rules for vowel pronunciation other than short and long sounds? Can't take a "is an exception to the rule" as an answer anymore lmao.
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u/xXLordGabbenXx 5h ago
Think about it like this England had ancient Germanic tribes, the Romans (parts of which used Greek), the anglicans, the saxons, a bunch of Germanic tribes and Vikings, the French, the Dutch, and then the old English. Add on the new terms from globalization and Native American words and you get American English But in general, look for the origin of the word: Germanic, Latin, or Greek (and sometimes Anglo-Saxon)
That’s why the grammmer and vocabulary are funky
At least it’s not French: Eye = œil Eyes = yeux
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u/Giordano86 6h ago
Get the book Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy Paperback – July 20, 2012 by Denise Eide
As much as people say there's so many exceptions to English, that's not actually true.
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u/puppyenemy 3h ago
There are a lot of reasons why English is messed up, but the biggest reason I'd say would be because of French. About 60% of English has Romance origin (French and Latin). A lot of words were imported by the Norman upper class, which then later had to be pronounced by the English, who spoke a Germanic language. Sometimes, the same words were even reintroduced again but with a slightly different pronounciation/spelling.
Another big reason was also the Great Vowel Shift, where some vowels started being pronounced more and more like different vowels, which in turn shifted those vowels to be pronounced differently, and so on it went. The spelling of the words often remained, but the pronunciation was now different.
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u/branch397 12h ago
though, thought, through, tough; I can't imagine learning this crap as an adult.
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u/Bulky_Imagination727 4h ago
I had to read 5 times before i've recognised the words. And i thought(oh god) i was kinda good at english.
Moments like this makes me wish to go and cry in the dark corner where nobody will see me.
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u/EarlyEarth 8h ago
Oh come on now
English is weird but don't even get me started on French where we don't pronounce some letters because other letters exist nearby.
Yeah bread drake and beard might be a little odd.
Explain how x works, France.. I dare you.
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u/hhfugrr3 3h ago
I'm learning French now and when you drop letters has been a challenge. I've found that putting on my most outrageous french accent seems to make it sound right 9/10... according to the app anyway.
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u/Lezarkween 28m ago
French is the opposite of English in the sense that spelling is hard but pronunciation is easy (as in, if you see a word written, you know how it's pronounced). There are some exceptions of course otherwise it's no fun, but apart from those, if someone invents a new french word and I read if for the first time, I'll know how to pronounce it.
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u/AudioAnchorite 4h ago
I had a French teacher who did that to my class with
- Through
- Though
- Trough
- Slough
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u/Safe_Distance_1009 9h ago
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
....
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u/fast_t0aster 8h ago
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead—
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose —
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart —
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!
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u/Impossible_Act2804 11h ago
Can you really expect a Red Sox fan to have an understanding of the English language?
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u/Curious-Spell-9031 9h ago
people make fun of english when french is 2 languages, one spoken one and one sneaky one that you dont pronounce hidden inside the first one
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u/NoCatAndNoCradle 8h ago
“… that’s why” after saying something that clarifies absolutely nothing is my new go to.
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u/Bee_kind_rewind 8h ago
That’s why other languages use accent marks lmao. We just need to know the nuances naturally, poor children this is how frustrating it is to learn how to read in 1st and 2nd grade.
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u/Tailsmiles249 7h ago edited 7h ago
This is why I feel bad for those who not simply learn English as a second language, but when because it's a requirement in their education system. When I started learning Japanese and found out words are more or less pronounced how they are written, I thought back at all the weird vowel usage there is in English. It's annoying! "Thorough, through, tough." All of those "-ough" have different pronunciations and it must be rough going through it when learning the difference.
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u/Suspicious_Future_58 6h ago edited 6h ago
Reminds me of the two japanese people on youtube shorts discussing weirdness in Japanese language
Real Real Japan
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u/ahlmemes 12h ago
"Get down, check it out, B-O-M-B bomb, T-O-M-B tomb, no tomb! If T-O-M-B is tomb, that's bomb, the bombs over"
- Leo Gallagher
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u/SomethingAbtU 11h ago
we're not even getting to the words with completely silent letters or which have entirely foreign pronounciations (don't follow English language pronounciations rules)
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u/Dragondudeowo 9h ago
To be fair my pronunciation in English is fucking broken already as is with my french accent and i already struggle to talk in general, i don't mind being innacurate from time to time and i'm not gonna pretend like i can do better.
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u/Upstairs_Cash8400 3h ago
French usually is a soft spoken language. English is has heavier and greater impact especially with the accent
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u/LennoxIsLord 9h ago
We all have our problems. Don’t get me started on that onomatopoeia hellscape that is Japanese.
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u/kawaiinessa 9h ago
honestly theres frustrating things about a lot of languages dont get me started on how frustrating japanese kanji is or how so many characters look alike
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u/Cleigne143 8h ago
So glad I learned English as a kid because I'm not sure how I'm going to fare if I tried to learn it as an adult lmao. I'll probably just give up like I did with French and Japanese. 😂
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u/dubiously_mid 7h ago
come on bro jp is easy, you just gotta sink around 2000 hours of learning into it
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u/HopefulPlantain5475 7h ago
I am furious to discover that the most succinct and accurate reasoning for why bread is pronounced/spelled the way it is is because "it's like head, not like heat."
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u/Roam_Hylia 7h ago
I teach English as a foreign language in Asia. I just tell my kids that English can be stupid. Sometimes you just have to memorize which words sound different than others with the same spelling.
Once they get further along I explain that most of English is just borrowed from other languages and duct-taped together, and occasionally, still stupid.
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u/butterpopkorn 7h ago
As non native speaker I hate that queue is pronounced as "Kyu" but quay is pronounced as "key". Tf
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u/BeenEvery 7h ago
Oh boy, I sure do love being the first human to settle in what's now England.
I sure hope a dozen languages aren't introduced to this region, thereby making a mishmash of speech that both does and doesn't make any sense.
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u/Muted-Desk8737 2h ago
yea english man and americans try to make their language sound difficult again...... it is still one of the eassiest to learn...
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u/Capital-Platypus-805 2h ago
This also happens in Spanish. I tried teaching Spanish once and I stopped after my first student because she was just as confused and I don't know enough grammar to explain why it works like this 😂
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u/ACrazyCreative 2h ago
I feel like the most effective way to learn English is just to learn the individual words. Cause the rules make no sense
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u/RendolfGirafMstr 51m ago
I usually just brush it off when people say English is a hard language to learn, but we truly don’t follow our own rules huh. I wanted to say that there was an easy way to know how each one is pronounced and that would be… knowing how they’re pronounced….
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u/-Redstoneboi- 41m ago
imagine that a perfectly logical language did exist.
take this perfect language, and teach it to 5 different countries of different cultures whom you colonized. then let it simmer with the citizens teaching each other for a couple hundred years.
still perfect?
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u/RepresentativeCup902 30m ago
Gallagher used to have a bit like this
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u/Upstairs_Cash8400 21m ago
I checked it out today
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u/RepresentativeCup902 3m ago
When I was little I would do it for my mom and she would crack up. Can’t remember it all now.
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u/ZarKiiFreeman 22m ago
I've been having a bit of trouble learning Kanji recently but seeing this made me cheer up, English is also dumb lol Don't ask why... memorize!
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u/jingle-is-dead 13h ago
NNooooOoO