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Why English is hard to learn | ||
Tags: Difficulty | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sulis Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6452 days ago 60 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 17 of 84 10 April 2007 at 8:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, people certainly do use these words. I'm very surprised you needed to look them up in a dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6690 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 18 of 84 10 April 2007 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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````Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted.. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but finge rs don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally in sane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. PS. - Why doesn't "Buick" rhyme with "quick"? "```` Certainly interesting features but... Any of this makes sense. Why dOWN isn't about owning? Why wITh isn't about IT? Why rACE isn't about ACE? And for the rest it's called conjugating. Why not make everything identical? It'd probably be easy to understand! One language=one sound! It makes perfect sense, or does it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 84 10 April 2007 at 9:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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When planning a language or working on a "conlang", people can impose their ideas about logic, regularity and so on. However, no language that I know of can be perfectly regular unless it's created and standardized from the beginning by one person or a minority of academics.
Not even notoriously purist languages can do very much since the best that language academies can do is to decelerate the pace of change (or in some cases accelerate it toward some chimera called "proper language"). The languages that academies oversee have been in flux for centuries before a bunch of language geeks (sorry, there's no other way around it) for whatever reason decided that they didn't like what they heard and read coming from the mouths and hands of other speakers of the same language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 20 of 84 10 April 2007 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
One of my professors once told me that many words (e.g. tale) still reflect the spelling of older forms of English and were indeed pronounced as their spellings suggest (e.g. 'ta-leh' rather than 'tay-ill'). Over time, the pronunciation of 'tale' merged with 'tail' but the spelling didn't change to reflect the change in pronunciation. Presumably, keeping different spellings in this case would help make it clear in writing whether we are talking about the hind end of an animal or someone's story, even though there's no longer a difference in speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zelaia Tetraglot Newbie El Salvador Joined 6810 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Spanish*, FrenchC1, English, Portuguese Studies: Kurdish | Message 21 of 84 10 April 2007 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French has a lot of homonymes, they can be found even in everyday French (not so often). Here you have an example (which is not everyday French)
Si six scies scient six cyprès, six-cent-six scies scient six-cent-six cyprès. Un sot monte sur un cheval, en tenant de main droite un seau d'eau, et de la main gauche, le sceau du roi. Durant sa course, le cheval fait un saut qu'il rate.... Du coup, les trois "so" tombent...( le sot, le seau, et le sceau ). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 22 of 84 10 April 2007 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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And of course the classic:
Gall, amant de la Reine, alla, tour magnanime, Galamment de l'arène à la tour Magne à Nîmes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ColdBlue Groupie Angola Joined 6574 days ago 40 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 23 of 84 10 April 2007 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sow is a common word? Do you live on a farm? None of those words I picked out are common! I just asked a bunch of my good friends and it was the same deal with them... and were all about to graduate college :-( 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 24 of 84 10 April 2007 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I doubt it. All of those words are common. Are you really a native speaker? Do you listen to the news? Read the paper? What's your major? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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