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u/Soulborg87 1d ago
The English language is 3 languages in a trench coat with a fake ID
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u/dabunny21689 1d ago
Beating up other languages in dark alleys and rifling through their pockets for loose grammar.
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u/iusecactusesasdildos 21h ago
Someone needs to give both these comments an award that was hilarious
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u/Greatlarrybird33 22h 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 21h ago
And one wealthy guy deciding Grammer so the wealthy didn't sound like the poors
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u/stillerStieglitz 15h ago
Is there any background on the last 2 comments that I should read about, or watch on YouTube?
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u/FingerSlamGrandpa 16h ago
After watching his videos I genuinely don't understand how I learned English.
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u/WittyBonkah 14h ago
Same. My brother once told me I hadn’t made my first coherent sentence until I turned 8. I don’t feel bad about it anymore.
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u/Gadi-susheel 23h 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/saumanahaii 18h 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/samwan405 14h ago
Arguably more...
"Same same", "cool cool" - Korean-English
"Long time no see" - Chinese-English
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u/Swervin69 1d 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 1d ago
Lose and loose
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u/Loldungeonleo 22h 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/save_the_winos 22h ago edited 22h ago
Lose: the opposite of win
Loose: your mom
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u/NikNakskes 21h 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 18h ago
Effect/affect
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u/angry640 16h 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/allnaturalfigjam 22h 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 18h ago
How often are you meeting people who others think you need to be cautious of?
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u/allnaturalfigjam 18h ago
I live in Australia, it's less the people and more the place
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u/Silent_Yesterday_671 9h ago
I believe you meant to say "How often are you meeting people of whom others think you need to be cautious?"
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u/sleepytoday 18h ago
I have noticed that people who pronounce wander and wonder as homophones tend to confuse the spelling, too.
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u/blewawei 11h ago
That's why most spelling mistakes happen, generally. Historical linguists use those kinds of errors to figure out past pronunciations from before we could record voices.
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u/ewixy750 22h 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/SomPolishBoi 1d ago
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u/fantasyxviii 14h ago
Took me 30 sec to get it, probably my English is still not good enough
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u/ceefour4 12h ago
Don't feel bad, I've only spoken English for 36 years and it still took me a second.
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u/SimCity290596 12h ago
Could someone explain me please? Is it grammatically correct? Or does it just says "there are no rules"?
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u/sliferra 12h ago
It’s “there are no rules” with the incorrect spellings
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u/ZOEzoeyZOE 1d ago
"you don't see how?" 👁️👄👁️
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u/tired_of_old_memes 20h ago
Dang, I was wondering what the heck he was saying. Sounded like Ignacio or something. Thanks.
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u/Nevermore_Novelist 1d 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 20h 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/Bovoduch 7h ago
What did that sound like
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u/Buckle_Sandwich 4h ago
"ɣ"
(I'm being a smartass. It's that back-of-the-throat sound I associate with German and Arabic)
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u/WalmartGreder 17h 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/Admirable_Hunter_703 1d 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/DavidBrooker 1d ago
Knock knock
Who's there?
"To"
To who?
It's "to whom", actually.
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u/branch397 1d 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 1d 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/Ok_Builder_4225 19h 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/Nevermore_Novelist 1d 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/blewawei 11h ago
It sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. "The shoes that/which I saw yesterday" is fine either way, but if it's a non-defining clause (i.e. the information is an extra, not essential) then we tend to only use which; "The shoes, which I saw yesterday, are..."
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u/ManWhoIsDrunk 13h ago
Good example, but you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.
With whom would you want to go for lunch?
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u/blewawei 11h ago
Why shouldn't you end a sentence with a preposition? We speak English, not Latin.
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u/random_fucktuation 11h ago
Ending sentences with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
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u/rda1991 11h ago
This is such a weird little easter egg in English. It's easy for me to grasp, because my first and second languages conjugate similarly to this, with suffixes. The rest of English doesn't though, so I get why especially natives might find it odd or unnecessary.
Having briefly looked it up, it is indeed claimed to be a non-native conjugation element.
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u/HumongousBelly 1d 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 1d ago edited 23h 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/HumongousBelly 21h ago
I think learning German and than Latin (Roman) played an extended role in my ability to understand grammar and Languages in general as an abstract concept.
Maybe listening to rap music, as a kid, was also an accelerator in developing English language skills. They don’t teach you colloquialisms and idioms in school. But that’s exactly what defines a living and spoken language.
Learning French is a bitch. The language sounds beautiful, but the grammar is so unforgiving, declination and conjugation completely transforming nouns and verbs, and the pronounciation itself is difficult. Add words like de/de la/du or a/au/aux/a la and frustration for teens is guaranteed.
I’ve never learned Spanish because where I grew up there were no Spaniards or Latin people. I grew up around Turkish, Asian and sub Saharan African immigrants/refugees.
So, I can’t really compare any of it to Spanish.
But learning German and French is more difficult than learning English imho. And those languages are supposedly easy to learn in comparison to learning Chinese or Korean or Farsi.
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u/Wank_my_Butt 21h ago
Ask 90% of native English speakers when to use a semicolon; they can’t tell you the right answer. Even looking up the answer, it’s still hard to say for sure.
I just guess.
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u/WeAreTotallyFucked 10h ago
Separate but related thoughts. In other words, something that is still tangentially related to the first part, but could standalone as it's own piece of information.
Example; I'm too tired to do anything today; I'm just going to go home and take a nap.
We must never give up in our fight for freedom; admitting defeat is one way to guaranteed the battle is lost.
Etc..
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u/SkydivingSquid 1d 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_ 21h ago edited 11h ago
I always remember, "Read" rhymes with "Lead" but not with "Lead" and "Lead" rhymes with "read" but not with "read"!
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u/Fartout92 1d 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 20h 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 20h 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 18h 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 1d ago
though, thought, through, tough; I can't imagine learning this crap as an adult.
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u/EarlyEarth 22h 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/Lezarkween 14h 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/blewawei 10h ago
"where we don't pronounce some letters because other letters exist nearby"
This can absolutely be applied to English, mind. Think about the E in words like "time", "dome", "cube" etc. It modifies the other vowel, but it isn't pronounced.
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u/Safe_Distance_1009 23h 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 23h 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/Roam_Hylia 22h 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/AudioAnchorite 18h ago
I had a French teacher who did that to my class with
- Through
- Though
- Trough
- Slough
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u/EvilNoobHacker 6h ago
It's like the Gallagher sketch,
Bomb is pronounced differently than Tomb
Tomb is pronounced differently than Comb
Comb is pronounced the same as Poem
Poem is pronounced the same as Home
Home is pronounced differently than Some
Some is pronounced the same is Numb
The whole fucking thing is Dumb
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u/Impossible_Act2804 1d 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 23h 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 23h ago
“… that’s why” after saying something that clarifies absolutely nothing is my new go to.
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u/Bee_kind_rewind 22h 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 22h ago edited 22h 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 21h ago edited 21h ago
Reminds me of the two japanese people on youtube shorts discussing weirdness in Japanese language
Real Real Japan
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u/bionica1 14h ago
My fiancé is Bosnian and learned English when he came here after the war. It’s no wonder he learned by watching TV and isn’t so great with writing it even now. I don’t blame him. This video is hilarious😆Never saw these before!!
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u/LadyYennefer_rQg 10h ago
Every time I see his videos, I can't help but giggle and cackle! Our English language makes noooooooooo sense!
Ps: 👇🏻 In case anyone else needs a "br-eee-k" after the insanity going on in our "heeds". 🤣
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u/jk844 7h ago
“To make an English language you start with a base of Germanic Anglo-Saxon. Mix in a healthy dash of Old Norse, a huge dollop of Norman French and just a barely detectable hint of Celtic, trust me it’ll make all the difference. Stir it up for hundreds of years until the vowels really start to shift and then……….eNgLiSh”
-Jay Forman
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u/battlerumdam 3h ago
lead and lead, two different words with different pronounciation.
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u/ahlmemes 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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/LennoxIsLord 23h ago
We all have our problems. Don’t get me started on that onomatopoeia hellscape that is Japanese.
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u/kawaiinessa 23h 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 22h 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/HopefulPlantain5475 22h 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/jingle-is-dead 1d ago
NNooooOoO