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.
Just have to memorize all these irregular verbs. It’s so easy.
You think English has many irregular verbs? Don’t make me laugh. Compared to which language exactly?
You think English has many irregular verbs? Don’t make me laugh. Compared to which language exactly?
It’s not a competition in being the least coherent system
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 what it’s worth, all the ‘e’ in mercedes pronounced in swedish sound the same (first can sound ‘ä’ in some regions though).
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
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
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.
You can get away with lots of things in English too! Just curious, do you speak another (than english) second language ?
I speak Japanese, and can still read German and understand most of it. German’s the secondary language I studied.
I’m a native Swedish speaker so technically English is my second language, and the others came after.
Tjena malena, en annan svenne på lemmy 💕 !
Ja vi “fick” ju engelska på köpet kan man väl säga, sverige var world nr 1 i engelska i andraspråk för några tiotals år sen om jag inte missminner mej, men dom hänger i bra nuförtiden också. Stack -95 till Frankrike så va tvungen att lära mej franska, vansinnigt språk men fantastiskt kultur!
Tjosan! :) Vi har ju haft det som kärnämne sedan 50-talet. Min mor är i 70-års åldern och är yngre än engelska som kärnämne. Så om vi inte var bra på engelska måste ju något ha gått fel någonstans.
Have you tried French?
doesn’t count
Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).
The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.
Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.
As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you’re probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.
That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.
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信じられないよ。
Va fungulo ti, cretino
Idk learning Chinese could be really beneficial, especially over the next 50 years.
Probably should start with leaning the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese
Je ne parle pas Francais.
Language classes in school are horrible. You’re going for an hour a day for 180 days, with significant gaps every few months, and moving at the rate of the slowest learners in the class.
500 hours of constant, immersive study would likely get you most of the way there, which is not the same as being immersed for 500 hours without study :)
I thought I was doing well with Duolingo once, then realized, 40 hours in, that I had almost no concept of formal/informal, and barely had any verb conjugation or grammar.
I used to agree with you, then I came to Europe where everyone can speak at least two languages. So they must be doing something right in schools here
My coworker moved to Sweden for three years, and his kids had a much less favorable experience.
I can speak English quite well.
Between the ages of 7 and 14 i was taught five languages, at best i could say hello me name is u\manuallybreathing in a grand total of one
you’d amazed what you can teach yourself woth motivated self study as an adult though, don’t fall for that ‘your brain solidifies after 25’, I’ve learnt a lot since i started again after the age of 30
only after meeting someone who’d done the same though, i really doubted myself
That “brain matures at 25” bs is a myth that was caused by a study in brain development losing funding when its subjects (that it follwed from birth) were 25.
Concluding brain development stops there is like assuming the road ends at any point where you have stopped following it.
Ohh, mais non! Je parle le fracais trés bien. Je peut achetee une Pizza avec pas de probleme.
(I’m so sorry, please excuse me my french friends, I had shit teachers on a shit school with shit classmates)
If your main language is English you probably can’t. There’s just little need since everything is so English-centric that almost everyone else has to learn it as a necessity.
Larger countries like France and Germany can often get on without it as there’s enough population to be worth dubbing and translating things to it, but go somewhere smaller like the Nordic countries, and you’re basically stuffed without it.
Most people who take a language in school don’t keep at it. We’re just doing it because it’s required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I’ve ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be “different”.
In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they’d all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they’d have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.
I am from Portugal - which is a very peripheral region in Europe, bordering only Spain - but do speak several European languages, and one of my most interesting experiences in that sense you describe was in a train in Austria on my way to a ski resort, an intercity train (so, not even a long-distance “international” train) which was coming from a city in Germany on its way to a city in Switzerland just making its way up the Austrian-Alps valleys, and were I happened to sit across from two guys, one Austrian and one French, and we stroke up a conversation.
So it turns out the French guy was a surf promoter, who actually would often go to Ericeira in Portugal (were at a certain time in the year there are some of the largest tube waves in the World, so once it was “discovered” it became a bit of a Surf Meca) only he didnt spoke Portuguese, but he did spoke Spanish.
So what followed for a bit over an hour was a conversation floating from language to language, as we tended to go at it in French and Spanish but would switch to German to include the Austrian guy and if German wasn’t enough (my German is only passable) we would switch to English since the Austrian guy also spoke it, and then at one point we found out we could both speak some Italian so we both switched to it for a bit, just because we could.
For me, who am from a very peripheral country in Europe, this was the single greatest “multicultural Europe” experience I ever had.
That said, I lived in other European countries than just my homeland and in my experience this kind of thing seems to be likely in places which are in the middle of Europe near a couple of borders and not at all in countries which only border one or two other countries.
It has to be learned immersively. Also, in Canada, we take french in school, which works in France, but in Quebec they speak a slang they don’t even understand, tabernac.
Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.
Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.
Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.
Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.
Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.
If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.
If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
Well, sorta.
In my experience with British colleagues when living in The Netherlands (were you can definitelly get away with speaking only English), whilst some of them never really became fluent in Dutch, others would become fluent in it.
You see, even with English being a lingua franca, many if not most of the locals (how many depends on the country and even area of the country - for example you’re better of speaking broken German with the locals in Berlin than English) are actually more comfortable if you speak their language, which make your life easier. Also the authorities will often only communicated in the local language (in The Netherlands the central authorities would actually send you documents in English, but for example the local city hall did everything in Dutch).
That said, if you’re an English speaker you can definitelly get away with not learning another language even when living elsewhere in Europe plus I’ve observed that in the early stages of learning the local language often when a native English speaker tried to speak in the local language the locals would switch to English, which for me (a native Portuguse speaker) was less likely, probably because the locals could tell from a person’s accent if they came from an English-speaking country hence they for sure knew English whilst with me even if they recognized my accent they couldn’t be sure that I spoke English.
All this to say that whilst I think it is indeed much harder for native English-speakers to learn a second language to fluency levels even when living abroad, it’s not quite as bad as “likely never”, though they have to put some effort into it whilst non-English speakers are far more likely to naturally end up learning a bit of English in addition to their own language (but for any other language, they too have to “put some effort into it”).
That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.
As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.
If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.
(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)
If you are an immigrant in a country with a low-tier language, e.g. a Rumanian living in Albania, the four languages will be English, Russian, Albanian, Romanian.
Yeah, ok, that makes sense.
I suppose the only part that my post adds is that in my experience for native English-speakers the tendency to learn the language of the country they live in is less than for non-native English speakers who are also not locals, because - thanks to English being the global lingua franca, almost everybody finds it easy to switch to English when confronted with a person who doesn’t speak their local language well but does speak English well, which makes it a lot harder in the early stage to learn the language of the locals (you need to be really assertive about wanting to try to speak the local language).
Certainly that was my experience in most of Europe.
Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.
I took German in school, then moved to Germany and gained (rudimentary) fluency, then moved back to the US and lost it after a couple decades of disuse.
“Mexican Americans…take Spanish in school…and get a B”
They wouldn’t let me take foreign language classes because my English grades weren’t good enough. It wasn’t that I was even bad. I just didn’t do homework.
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.
That’s so weird, I don’t think or dream in a language.
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 speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.
In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
That makes a lot of sense and is pretty much why I speak three languages.
In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.
Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.
So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).
That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
But did you use AI for this post? … otherwise your English is pretty sound (to me as a non-native speaker) :D
English is my primary language. I said my accent is getting worse, which is only a spoken thing
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
