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u/dogsledonice 21h ago edited 9h ago
I've taught ESL. You don't truly grasp how stupid a language English is until you try to explain parts of it to someone in words they can understand
or why these all sound different: bough, bought, through, thorough, slough, tough, hiccough
(edit: I think two of them do rhyme; not sure which)
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u/chintakoro 19h ago
meanwhile, native English speakers: "I can't believe Chinese has a different character for EVERY word!" So do we, folks. So do we.
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u/elyankee23 18h ago edited 10h ago
The most pathetic I've ever felt was when I taught English in Korea and my Korean partner (we worked in pairs, the classes saw us both back to back) asked me to pronounce a word and I said "I dunno" and she looked at me like I was a tiny dumb child. "But it's written, right there. What do you mean, you don't know"
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u/Bishopkilljoy 15h ago edited 8h ago
Trying to explain to my friends Vietnamese mother that Buick and Quick do not rhyme was hard to convey
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u/MisanthropyIsAVirtue 19h ago
The order of adjectives has to be: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose. If you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.
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u/dogsledonice 19h ago
But white great grandparents do
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u/MisanthropyIsAVirtue 18h ago
Yeah, but that’s easy to explain since the great is part of the noun and not an adjective.
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u/spacewarp2 18h ago
Tbf this is like every language. I remember taking Japanese and wondering why a certain pattern didn’t exist that would’ve made sense before remembering English has plenty of those. I’m guessing every language has those.
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u/dogsledonice 18h ago
Also funny with Japanese: the people there will argue for hours that Chinese characters are necessary to comprehend their language; they can't use solely a phonetic alphabet.
Then I ask if they speak in Chinese characters. Then I remind them that *I* don't know which Chinese characters are used for the words I'm speaking, but still can speak it with them. Their brains can't wrap around that.
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u/Queen_Euphemia 17h ago
Sure, I mean you could write Japanese in cyrillic and it would work too, it isn't really a language well suited to characters like Chinese is, but if you use the same tactics that Japanese does to adapt them then we could use them in English.
Why should we have spaces in our sentences when "I棲in米利堅for現在." seems like a perfectly reasonable way to write a sentence?
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u/dogsledonice 9h ago
Because learning 26 characters is far easier and more productive than learning 3,000
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u/Adventurous-Bee4823 20h ago
When I was learning English (thirty some years ago. Immigrated from Russia, legally, with not a lick of English under my belt) reading it was so confusing. I still to this day do not understand the pronunciation of “Colonel”.
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u/dayburner 18h ago
That's because colonel is a french word, the real issue is English doesn't know how to properly borrow words.
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u/Azaana 13h ago
The best way i heared it is English waits in dark corridors to beat up other languages then rummages through their pockets for words and grammar.
But also for the writing blame the Dutch for why it is so bad. Many languages go through a great vowel shift ours just happened at the time the Dutch came over with printing presses. So the printing presses standardise writing, yet this is happening at the same time how it is all said is changing and then applied through how the Dutch would do it. I know the gh combination is affected by this but there are some others as well.
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u/AnArdentAtavism 9h ago
English also received its word order (SVO) from the vikings. Old English and Frisian used SOV, but then the vikings conquered the northern part of England for 300 years. They called the area "The Danelaw" because that's where the Danes lived, and the languages mixed.
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u/Kwentchio 7h ago
Yeah that mixing is one of the reasons we got rid of cases I think? Basically tried to make things simpler because so many people were mixing. I loved studying Anglo Saxon literature, it's a difficult language but I think it just looks beautiful. They had too many words for 'the' lol.
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u/Queen_Euphemia 17h ago
I would argue that it is more that English doesn't have a governing body to do spelling reform. If you look at Dutch you realize just how badly we spell our language.
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u/kitsunde 12h ago
It’s always funny to me when Americans will insist on pronouncing Casadia the Spanish way and then absolutely butcher Ombudsman or Smorgasbord.
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u/dayburner 9h ago
I think in part it has to do with your neighbors and actually hearing the words pronounced. Ombudsman has been butchered so long without anyone to correct them it's just stuck that way.
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u/Moppo_ 8h ago
The thing with French words is that it depends when they entered English. If they were introduced by the Normans, they they're from an old, particularly Germanicised, dialect that's distinct in some pronunciations from more typical French of the time. And sometimes, we have two words, one derived from Norman French and another derived from Middle French, or Modern French.
And the words we changed the spellings of to look French, for a laugh.
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u/samahiscryptic 16h ago
Colonel
I struggled a lot with reading in elementary school and I absolutely hated this word.
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u/SnooRegrets1386 19h ago
So, so you process English through translation in your brain still? A friend once explained to me she hears the words in English, translates it into Spanish in her head, answers it in Spanish in her mind and then translates it back into English to speak. Ever since I’ve been in awe of multilingual people. Tried Spanish in high school, twice, same class. Failed miserably both times
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u/Adventurous-Bee4823 11h ago
No, I fully “think” in English and have for a very long time. When I was learning it though, yes.
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u/GravityBlues3346 9h ago
So your friend is not an efficient bilingual if she still translates in her head. I'm multilingual, I think in the language I'm currently speaking/writing. If I'm just thinking on my own, the brain picks the language it wants. The best way to learn a language is to learn it like a child. Think about your mastery of English, you don't translate "water" in your head by example, you know what water is and that the sounds for "water" mean this thing. You apply this to all languages. That's also not efficient because languages are rarely literally translatable into one another.
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u/JelloBelter 22h ago
The funniest part is that is that nobody questions the idea of a Redsox fan needing to take an ESL class
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u/SgtHulkasBigToeJam 20h ago
Technically, “head” is “heed” in Australian, which is a form of English (I think)
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u/SnooRegrets1386 19h ago
Dunno, let’s ask that Scottish guy
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u/brandontaylor1 21h ago
English is a nonsense language cobbled together from other better languages.
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u/ToriYamazaki 16h ago
English is so hard to learn... because of shit like this.
I mean:
I did read that flutes use a reed.
I have read that the car is red.
"Three languages mashed together, wrapped in a trenchcoat" or something like that ^_^
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u/Azaana 13h ago
You start with a germanic base then slap a load of Latin in. Parts of the country then get seasoned with some Scandinavian. Lots of exchange with French sometimes anglicising it sometimes not depending on what mood we are in. Couple of vowel shifts along the way and bam one English language. Then for writing have that interpreted by the ducth when they bring the printing presses over and start standardising it.
Yet of you get a few key words people will understand you.
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u/lucwin2020 19h ago
I used to think that English was easy but I learned better in HS. I went to a boarding school where we had kids from MX that came here to learn English. This post shows what the Mexican kids pointed out to me; English words might look similar but they're pronounced differently. When you look in the dictionary, you see that words in English have origins in various languages. And while they look similar, the origin changes how they're pronounced.
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u/Delicious-Pea-7594 18h ago
Any idea what channel this is and where I could find it? This guy is hilarious.
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u/Prestigious_Tennis82 17h ago
If I was a teacher, that would be the ONLY way to tell a kid no and would look forward to it every time
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u/CraftyKuko 17h ago
I never get tired of seeing this guy's videos
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u/DarkSeneschal 17h ago
English is what you get when a German guy learns Latin and Greek from a drunken Frenchman.
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u/RealUltrarealist 8h ago
Yeah, I can lie. I'm glad I learned the most overly complicated language first.
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u/lonelychapo27 21h ago
i need a sound bite of this guy saying “noooOHoo” so i can use it at my text message tone