I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?

I agree vicariously.

I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?

there are no hard or easy languages to learn. All languages are equally hard and easy to learn. The mind is not an obstacle, it is an opportunity so learn, and enjoy the language to really grasp the people who stand behindd it.

there are no hard or easy languages to learn. All languages are equally hard and easy to learn. The mind is not an obstacle, it is an opportunity so learn, and enjoy the language to really grasp the people who stand behindd it.

You don't know what you are saying. English just isn't logical. Look at these words: bough; rough. Logic would tell you that they should sound the same, but no, they don't. I don't know any other languages like that.

i wouldnt listen to him freethinkers...he's gone mad!!

yeah my exchange student told me how hard he found english to learn

I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?
this can mean that it's a complex language.

You don't know what you are saying. English just isn't logical. Look at these words: bough; rough. Logic would tell you that they should sound the same, but no, they don't. I don't know any other languages like that.

I know what I am saying, because I am saying it. ;)

bough is with a b
rough is with an r

almost pronounced the same , but differently written.

Take example of Russian language ( I am Russian), there is a word tolko...means "only"...and word talka...means small grained stone used for cement. Well they are written differently, yet pronounced the same. (bad example) Anyways English is as hard as Russian, and so as French. C'est la vie

i wouldnt listen to him freethinkers...he's gone mad!!

yeah my exchange student told me how hard he found english to learn

How exactly have I gone mad?

Well, not sound the same, but they should rhyme. And don't pretend you didn't know what I meant.

Well, not sound the same, but they should rhyme. And don't pretend you didn't know what I meant.

I don't pretend, I try to be truthfull.

I am agree but are not finding england.

bough is with a b
rough is with an r

almost pronounced the same , but differently written.

bough is pronounced to rhyme with now.
rough is pronounced to rhyme with buff.

Quite different.

FreeThinkers,

I picked this up somewhere a while back - I thought you might appreciate it...

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice; yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn’t the plural of pan be pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a while set are teeth, why shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be hose, and the plural of cat is cats not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethen, but though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.
Some reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he could get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to that object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into the sewer line.
16) To help with the planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.
Screwy pronunciations can mess up your mind!
For example, If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree.
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 not is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
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 don’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recital at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? 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 and alarm goes off by going on.

The major problem with studying English is the illogical pronounciation. (also spelling) Otherwise it is a rather easy language to learn. Try some languages with conjugation and you will shit your pants! :)
(megverethetne'm = I could get him beaten up)

In some other languages once you learn how to write you can write down anything, because the pronounciation/spelling is pretty much the same as the written words.

Also try to learn to READ Chinese. I think it takes 6 or so years to learn it in a way that one can understand a newspaper. In most languages 1 year is enough to learn how to write/read.

bough is pronounced to rhyme with now.
rough is pronounced to rhyme with buff.

Quite different.

FreeThinkers,

I picked this up somewhere a while back - I thought you might appreciate it...

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice; yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn’t the plural of pan be pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a while set are teeth, why shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be hose, and the plural of cat is cats not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethen, but though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.
Some reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he could get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to that object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into the sewer line.
16) To help with the planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.
Screwy pronunciations can mess up your mind!
For example, If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree.
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 not is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
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 don’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recital at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? 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 and alarm goes off by going on.

Excellent post , one raven ......

One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine." Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map? And what about nouns that end in a consonant, such as lapiz? Is it el lapiz or la lapiz? I've never understood the reasoning for this, but it's a minor thing at best.

I'm told that in Japanese, the slightest change in how long you hold a syllable can make all the difference in being in a bar and ordering either a beer or a building. Both, I am told, are biru, but one (can't recall which) has the first syllable held slightly longer. (Fortunately for my friend, the bartender wasn't an idiot.)

Aren't the German words for 'please' and 'you're welcome' the same (bitte)?

I've been told by several foreign friends that English is one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn. I think only Mandarin Chinese beats it out.

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same

Ah, this I can answer; sarcasm. Like when you roll your eyes and say 'Brilliant deduction, Sherlock."

One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine." Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map?

I know there's a joke in there somewhere about not using a map if you are masculine.

Why is this not a poll :shrug:

Ha, lai pamēģina iemācīties latviešu valodu! Paskatīsimies, ko tad viņš teiks. :D

Shouldn't this be in linguistics?

One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine." Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map? And what about nouns that end in a consonant, such as lapiz? Is it el lapiz or la lapiz? I've never understood the reasoning for this, but it's a minor thing at best.

Aren't the German words for 'please' and 'you're welcome' the same (bitte)?

I can understand how if you speak English the whole gender thing can be difficult, I'll give you that. But for someone who speaks a language already like that it's not too hard to learn another one. The problem with English is that it's different.

The German words for please and thank you are the same, yes, but what's the problem with that? That just makes it even easier to learn.

english is easy to learn, i am learning korean at the moment, now thats a hard language.

all of my korean friends learn english and say its so easy they are surprised i am learning korean so fast. i think its a myth how hard english is to learn, english and french are simple especialy to write, we have 26 letters in the alphabet, and only 9 numbers to learn how to write,

try learning all of the japanese korean and chinese symbols for numbers and words haha, good luck.

oriental written language is fucking hard for western people to master. but all of the chinese korean and japanese people i know say how easy and simple the english language is, they actualy laugh at its ease and simplicity.


peace.

english is easy to learn
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... good shit.

compared to korean chinese and japanese apparently it is very easy,

those are the words of chinese korean and japanese people who are currently learning english,

i am teaching english to korean students at the moment in exchange for them teaching me korean.

do you know how many seperate symbols there are to learn in chinese japanese and the korean language?

not tens not hundreds but thousands of seperate symbols, maybe even millions, oppose to 26 in english, :) i am learning korean at this very moment and i agree with them, its alot harder to write. the verbal side i find about the same, but the written side is way harder,

howcome the koreans are learning english way faster than i am learning korean then? and i learn quite fast (so they say)


peace.

english is so hard that you seem to speak it very well with ease.

i will give a little example.


this is how you say hello in english,

hi

this is how you say hello in korean

an yung ha se yo



peace.

english is so hard that you seem to speak it very well with ease.

i will give a little example.


this is how you say hello in english,

hi

this is how you say hello in korean

an yung ha se yo



peace.

Dude, English is the easiest language evah.

Indisputable evidence: I have a more or less decent command of it.

Even more indisputable evidence: That hillbilly in the White House speaks it (when he concentrates real hard, anyway).

Basically, English is watered down German.

And seriously, Chinese. I read somewhere that even the fucking Chinese have a hard time learning it. Can't blame them. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the inhabitants of planet ··/E·%$$%$, at the other end of the universe, speak Chinese.

Of course, the Chinese probably think the same of Spanish, for instance, but still...

seriously oriental language is fucking hard to learn, the verbal side is not so bad, but the written side is freaking difficult,

they have like a different symbol for every freakin word in chinese even a 40 year old chinese guy doesent know half of the symbols, and each family has there own symbols, and there are rare symbols that only certain people know,

i know some chinese (a fare bit) i know very limited japanese, and i am currently "trying" to learn korean fluently, korean is like a mix between chinese and japanese symbols, actualy no its not, its more like japanese with alot of circles and squares, oh and zig zaggy type lines,

its hard thats all im saying i have just learned 1 set of numbers from 1-10 then i find out there is a complete different set of numbers from 1-10 what the hell man!,

and i have learned some phrases for basic communication then i find out that i cannot use those phrases when talking to an "elder" and that i have to use a different phrase,

peace.

Like I said, totally fucked up language.

Also: Nihao!

nihao ma.


:)


peace.

I've been told by several foreign friends that English is one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn. I think only Mandarin Chinese beats it out.

Seriously guys, English is not even in the top 10 as difficulty goes...

By the way, let's apply objectivity:

http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/hardest-language.php

"There is no single answer to this question; it depends on so many factors. However, the British Foreign Office has looked at the languages that diplomats and other embassy staff have to learn and has worked out which they find the most difficult to learn. The second hardest is Japanese, which probably comes as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most difficult to learn is Hungarian, which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). This does not mean that Hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everybody, but it causes British diplomatic staff, who are used to learning languages, the most difficulty. However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases, so it would probably cause more difficulty if British diplomats had to learn it.

Different cultures and individuals from those cultures will find different languages more difficult. In the case of Hungarian for British learners, it is not a question of the writing system, which is alphabetic, but the grammatical complexity,..."

i know im finding it hard to imagine english as "hard" i am not fluent in every language but i dabble in more than a few, and english seems to be the easyest apart from french wich to me seems basicaly the same in difficulty status. i would say eastern language is harder than western as a general rule, obviously exceptions are present.




i would say anybody who thinks english is so hard, try learning korean japanese or chinese. cantonese is actualy harder than mandarin oppose to what many people "think" simply because cantonese actualy has 9 tones oppose to mandarin having 4-5.


chinese language is based on tone, people from 1 side of china cant understand people from the other side or even from the next village alot of the time,

the one thing that connects all chinese speakers is the symbols wich are the same as a universal rule in general, but how you pronounce those symbols is different in each how can i put it, "village dialect".

and most likely people from all of the villages cant understand me :)


peace

Another list, grouping languages according to difficulty to learn:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

One reason why Basque, Hungarian and Finnish are hard to learn, because they don't belong to the indo-european language family. Basque stands alone, Hungarian and Finnish belong to the Finno-Ugric family...

Here is a thread discussing the same question:

http://www.discovervancouver.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=39755

OneRavenI know there's a joke in there somewhere about not using a map if you are masculine.

LOL! That made my morning!

English has so many more rules and exceptions to those rules than Mandarin. Mandarin uses extremely simple and intuitive syntax. They don't even conjugate their verbs! How many languages are there that don't even require you to conjugate verbs? In some ways it's like German. Many of the words are compounds. When you analyze words with more complex meanings, you can see how it makes sense when you break the word up into its constituent parts.

But, you're right about the kanji. I've heard that learning Mandarin kanji is extremely difficult and very few Chinese people learn to master it. However, I'm talking about being able to converse in Chinese and learning conversational word syntax. It's much simpler than English. By far.

korean is like a mix between chinese and japanese symbols, actualy no its not, its more like japanese with alot of circles and squares, oh and zig zaggy type lines,


written korean is like the made up language in futurama..

Seriously guys, English is not even in the top 10 as difficulty goes...

By the way, let's apply objectivity:

http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/hardest-language.php

"There is no single answer to this question; it depends on so many factors. However, the British Foreign Office has looked at the languages that diplomats and other embassy staff have to learn and has worked out which they find the most difficult to learn. The second hardest is Japanese, which probably comes as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most difficult to learn is Hungarian, which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). This does not mean that Hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everybody, but it causes British diplomatic staff, who are used to learning languages, the most difficulty. However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases, so it would probably cause more difficulty if British diplomats had to learn it.

Different cultures and individuals from those cultures will find different languages more difficult. In the case of Hungarian for British learners, it is not a question of the writing system, which is alphabetic, but the grammatical complexity,..."

That is written from the perspective of people that already speak english. The point is that if you aren't a native speaker of english it is very difficult relative to other languages.

People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn!Some of us do.You don't know what you are saying. English just isn't logical. Look at these words: bough; rough. Logic would tell you that they should sound the same, but no, they don't. I don't know any other languages like that.Well then you obviously haven't studied French, which is unutterably worse. French "spelling" is a complete joke that should have been reformed 200 years ago. The trick to reading French is to leave half of the letters silent and to pronounce the remaining half wrong. :)

But you're complaining about the writing system. That's hardly the totality of a language.One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine."That's not a rule. It's just a general guide.Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map?It's not an exception. All Greek words ending in A are apparently masculine. Latin retained the gender and so does Spanish. Programa, artista, diagrama... the list is endless and they're all masculine. English has the same problem: you'll make a big mistake with a lot of words if you don't know the language of origin. Focus, alumna, and vertex are Latin, and the plurals are foci, alumnae and vertices. Hypothesis is Greek and the plural is hypotheses.And what about nouns that end in a consonant, such as lapiz? Is it el lapiz or la lapiz? I've never understood the reasoning for this, but it's a minor thing at best.There is no "reasoning"! These things evolved over centuries, some of them over millennia. Why is die Sonne feminine in German and el sol masculine in Spanish, since they are merely phonetic evolutions of the same Indo-European word?

If you want illogic in English:Sweden: Swedish Norway: Norwegian Switzerland: Swiss Germany: German Spain: Spanish Iraq: Iraqi Greece: Greek Poland: Polish Denmark: Danish France: French Portugal: Portuguese Argentina: Argentine Thailand: Thai England: English Lebanon: Lebanese Peru: Peruvian and last but not least, Holland: DutchI'm told that in Japanese, the slightest change in how long you hold a syllable can make all the difference in being in a bar and ordering either a beer or a building. Both, I am told, are biru, but one (can't recall which) has the first syllable held slightly longer. (Fortunately for my friend, the bartender wasn't an idiot.)But your friend is. :) "Beer" is spelled phonetically in the kana syllabary as bi-i-ru. In schoolbook romanization it would either be "biiru" or "biru" with a macron over the I (which I don't have in my character set) to indicate a long vowel. No Japanese would ever confuse the two, and a student of the language would pick up the distinction rather quickly. It's about the same as the difference as between a long í and a short i in Czech. Once your ears get calibrated there is absolutely no confusion. Speakers of Spanish have the same problem with "pick" and "peak" in English; there is only one series of vowels in Spanish so their ears are not calibrated to recognize that difference as phonemic.Aren't the German words for 'please' and 'you're welcome' the same (bitte)?Oh heck, greetings and other social words are almost totally meaningless and evolve and change rather rapidly. You can't put much stock into those that any language happens to have at the moment. Bitten is the German cognate of "bid" and means "to ask [for something]." So bitte literally means "I ask [for whatever makes sense in this context, you figure it out]." The first time you're asking me for some object or favor, the second time I'm asking you to feel free to request anything you need because it's an honor to provide it. Look at the etymology of the English word "please;" it doesn't make any more sense. A fragment of "If it please you." How about "goodbye," a contraction of "God be with ye," something that the irreligious can hardly utter with sincerity.I've been told by several foreign friends that English is one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn. I think only Mandarin Chinese beats it out.I disagree. I think Chinese is remarkably easy. There is no singular/plural, no present/past/future, no masculine/feminine. If it's important to make it clear that two dogs ate three fish you just say "two dog yesterday eat three fish," otherwise it's "dog eat fish." There's no utterly worthless paradigm of around twenty prepositions left over from the Stone Age that's supposed to describe every conceivable relationship between two nouns... at, of, in, by... yeah right. You express relationships with your choice of thousands of nouns and verbs and you do it with whatever nuance and precision you need. Not, "The dog is in the house," rather, "dog occupy house interior," except those words don't take up as many syllables in Chinese.

The hardest part of spoken Chinese is the fact that tone is phonemic. You don't get to express how you feel by changing the tone of your words. You have to actually be an articulate master of your native language and just say it!Shouldn't this be in linguistics?Yes, I'll make the appropriate inquiries on the Moderators forum.seriously oriental language is fucking hard to learn, the verbal side is not so bad, but the written side is freaking difficult,vthey have like a different symbol for every freakin word in chineseYes, but the up side of that is that you can be partially literate by knowing a small set of words. That was probably a tremendous advantage in the era before universal education. I'm sure in the days when 99% of Europeans couldn't write their own name, most Chinese probably knew a few dozen han zi for the words they used most often in their work.even a 40 year old chinese guy doesent know half of the symbolsThese days any Chinese with a high school education knows something like 2000 han zi which gives him the ability to read a number of compounds equivalent to the vocabulary of a university-educated anglophoneand each family has their own symbolsSomeone is either pulling your leg or referring to some awfully ancient traditions. There is a standard set of about 5000 han zi used in everyday typography. I've got the dictionary, it's called the Fenn 5000.and there are rare symbols that only certain people knowSure, scholars in arcane specialties. Don't you wonder what reason there could be for knowing a word that nobody else knows, given that the whole purpose of language is communication? :) Somebody is really putting you on. If you want to read the original writings of the ancient philosophers you have to learn some words that are not used any more... but so what? If you want to read the original writings of Plato you have to learn Ancient Greek. That doesn't stop most of us from being sufficiently familiar with them in modern translations.i know some chinese (a fare bit) i know very limited japanese, and i am currently "trying" to learn korean fluently, korean is like a mix between chinese and japanese symbols, actualy no its not, its more like japanese with alot of circles and squares, oh and zig zaggy type lines,You haven't learned much about these writing systems. Chinese is han zi (more familiar in its Japanese pronunciation, kanji). Each elementary morpheme has its own character. (I'm hesitant to call them "words" because Chinese is just not put together like an Indo-European language.)

Japanese uses kanji for the thousands of words it borrowed from Chinese, and just to make it harder (must be some zen value in that) it has a parallel series of pronunciations for each one, for the more-or-less equivalent native Japanese word. You have to tell from context which way to read it of course, more zen. And then for all the words that didn't come from Chinese and have no Chinese equivalents, they use hiragana, those symbols that look like stylized kanji because that's what they are, each of which representing one spoken syllable. A KA SA TA NA HA MA YA RA WA, I KI SHI CHI NI HI MI null RI null, U KU SU TSU NU... well you get the picture, a lot more zen in there with the phonetic vagaries of the language superimposed over the symbols. And little diacritical marks to distinguish TA from DA and HA from PA or BA. And the second vowel in a long vowel is written real tiny, and the second consonant in a double consonant is a real tiny TSU... more zen. Wait I'm not done. Then there is katakana, a complete second set of the same syllables in a much squarer style that is used for transcribing foreign words. That is if you consider rokido as a "transcription" of "Lockheed."

Korean has a totally phonetic alphabet. Three or four letters are arranged artistically into a square shape to form the symbol for a syllable, yes folks there's a bit of zen there too. Also they use kanji as well, but not as prolifically as the Japanese, mostly for proper names.

You can spot printed Japanese in a second because so many of the syllabary symbols look brush-written. You can spot Korean in half a second because it's the only one with circles.its hard thats all im saying i have just learned 1 set of numbers from 1-10 then i find out there is a complete different set of numbers from 1-10 what the hell man!,One, two, three, four... then first, second, third, fourth. We have two series of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Chinese think that's pretty odd, since in Chinese it's yi, er, san, si... for cardinals and di yi, di er, di san, di si for ordinals.and i have learned some phrases for basic communication then i find out that i cannot use those phrases when talking to an "elder" and that i have to use a different phrase,Many Indo-European languages have two forms for "you," one familiar and one former, and goddess help you if you use the wrong one. After staying in my Spanish friend's house for a week I accidentally called his mother tú and I got the cold shoulder for the rest of my stay. (In Mexico people are much less formal, even waiters call their customers tú.)the one thing that connects all chinese speakers is the symbols wich are the same as a universal rule in general, but how you pronounce those symbols is different in each how can i put it, "village dialect".There are regional dialects in Chinese as in most languages, but the definition of "dialect" is "mutually intelligible, perhaps with a little effort." For example, the speech of Sichuan is a dialect of Mandarin. The tones are different and there are some phonetic shifts, but after a few days a person from Cheng Du and a person from Bei Jing suddenly find their ears recalibrated and they start to understand each other. Cantonese, on the other hand, is a different language. There is no intercomprehensibility between Cantonese and Mandarin. Yes they use the same words in the same sequence, at least about 98%, but the phonetics have changed so much over the centuries that the similarity is lost. There's no "mapping" of Cantonese phonetics into Mandarin. Shang Hai, Fu Qian, and many other regions have distinct languages, rather than dialects. But they all use the same words in the same order, an interesting phenomenon due to the unifying influence of a non-phonetic writing system.English has so many more rules and exceptions to those rules than Mandarin. Mandarin uses extremely simple and intuitive syntax.Mandarin has a huge number of micro-rules. Like the "measure words" that go with numbers. One person is yi wei ren, one dog is yi tiao gou, one book is yi ben shu and one large flat thing like a table is yi jang juo zi. There are micro-rules for the way individual words fit together, each rule may only cover a few dozen words. Still, I agree that is easier than one macro-rule with lots of little exceptions.They don't even conjugate their verbs! How many languages are there that don't even require you to conjugate verbs? In some ways it's like German. Many of the words are compounds. When you analyze words with more complex meanings, you can see how it makes sense when you break the word up into its constituent parts.Chinese is what is called an analytic language and that is actually the engine for word formation in the language. There are only 1600 distinct syllables in Mandarin, meaning that every morpheme has quite a few homonyms, so most "words" must be compounds of multiple morphemes to be understandable. Most of the compounds make sense, but not all. For example dong xi, "east-west" means "thing."

But, you're right about the kanji. I've heard that learning Mandarin kanji is extremely difficult and very few Chinese people learn to master it.Universal education is one of the very few things that communism does right, and since the communists took over China literacy has become as universal as in America. Virtually every Chinese under the age of 40, except in the remote provinces, can read and write the couple of thousand kanji that comprise what we would call a high school vocabulary.However, I'm talking about being able to converse in Chinese and learning conversational word syntax. It's much simpler than English. By far.I agree with you. I think it's also easier to learn since it generally takes fewer syllables to express a thought in Chinese than in English. As a result the language is spoken somewhat more slowly than English, and far more slowly than, say Italian. That's a real boon to a student, who has to parse every sentence in real time.

English has so many more rules and exceptions to those rules than Mandarin. Mandarin uses extremely simple and intuitive syntax. They don't even conjugate their verbs! How many languages are there that don't even require you to conjugate verbs? In some ways it's like German. Many of the words are compounds. When you analyze words with more complex meanings, you can see how it makes sense when you break the word up into its constituent parts.

But, you're right about the kanji. I've heard that learning Mandarin kanji is extremely difficult and very few Chinese people learn to master it. However, I'm talking about being able to converse in Chinese and learning conversational word syntax. It's much simpler than English. By far.

i agree, the verbal conversation side to chinese is simple. but when it comes to actualy knowing the language its very hard, if you dont know how to write the symbols then you wont even be able to communicate with somebody who lives a few hundred miles down the road.


and without beloved pinyin systems i garentee western people would struggle alot more,


i am in the middle of creating my own pinyin system for korean, i have posted a small sample of it in my "learning korean thread"

i was shocked that korean had no pinyin and i was finding it hard without such a system so i created one myself,

salang hey pinyin,


peace.

wow fraggle you know lots, you can be my new shifu,

seriously that was one hell of a long post when i scrolled past it i thought "wow i have to read all of that" then when i was quater of a way through i realised how much decent infomation it contained,

i even read it through twice because i learned alot and didnt want to forget what i read, seriously thanks for that post man =,


and yes i do have a whole lot to learn about the written sides to the languages. as i said before i find it very hard and i struggle quite alot, i have to learn most of what i know through my martial arts training, but i have a general interest in learning the languages for there own sake.


i am still very bad i can hold a half convo in all 3 languages, but when it comes to writting i get lost fast.


maybe one day soon i will get better hopefully.

peace.

oh yeah and where the hell did the thai language originate from, it looks nothing like chinese japanese or korean.

it looks more like arabic than anything else lol.

peace.

Oh yeah and where the hell did the Thai language originate from?It's in a family more or less by itself, with a few languages spoken by small communities nearby. It is tonal (i.e., tone is phonemic, not something you use as a separate bandwidth for expressing emotion) and analytic (i.e., you shove morphemes or word-units together to build the word you need) like Chinese. Some linguists put it in a superfamily with other nearby families like Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian... but then many linguists are starting to suspect that all non-African languages belong to a single super-duperfamily, descended from an ancestor brought from Africa 70,000 years ago at the start of the Homo sapiens diaspora.It looks nothing like chinese japanese or korean.You keep trying to infer a relationship between two languages because they use the same or similar writing systems, and that is totally bogus. Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian uses the Roman alphabet, but they are essentially the same language and far more closely related to each other than to Russian and Italian, respectively. Ditto for Urdu, which uses the Arabic alphabet, yet is basically an intercomprehensible dialect of Hindi. Vietnamese was until recently written in the symbols of Chinese, to which it is not related at all (except going back to Africa), and is now written in the symbols of Latin, to which it is also not related at all. Writing is a very new technology and it spread slowly. People learned to write from the people with whom they did business or from whom they adopted a culture, not necessarily from people who spoke related languages. All of Western Europe adopted the Latin alphabet, but only French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and a few less familiar tongues like Occitan are actually closely related to Latin.

The Thai alphabet is an offshoot of the Khmer alphabet, which ultimately evolved from the venerable Sanskrit alphabet of Ancient India. India was the dominant culture among the peoples immediately east of it.It looks more like Arabic than anything else.A coincidence and not a very close one. Take a look at any website from India and you'll see a far more obvious similarity.

If you want illogic in English:Sweden: Swedish Norway: Norwegian Switzerland: Swiss Germany: German Spain: Spanish Iraq: Iraqi Greece: Greek Poland: Polish Denmark: Danish France: French Portugal: Portuguese Argentina: Argentine Thailand: Thai England: English Lebanon: Lebanese Peru: Peruvian and last but not least, Holland: Dutch.

Yeah that is stupid. I speak Irish Gaelic and it's always: An Frainc (France)= Fraincis, An Gearmain (Germany)= Gearmainis, An Spainn (Spain)= Spainnis, An Iodail (Italy)= Iodailis, etc, An Ollainn (Holland)= Ollainnis. The only difference is that England is Sasain and English is Bearla. I don't really get that, but most are the same.

I learn German too, and it's Englisch, Irisch, Spanisch, Italienisch, Hollandisch, etc. There's one exception to that too though - Franzosisch for French. But at least it's close enough, English is completely irregular.

I am agree but are not finding england.

What?

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.

I could be light-hearted about it and laugh with you guys, but since I'm a language nerd, I'm compelled to give the back-story to these cases, and then laugh. :cool:

Because "ox" used to be what is called a weak noun, back during the Old English period when we still "extensively" declined nouns.

One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

"Goose" was a strong noun in Old English, meaning its vowel changed in its declension. "Moose" was borrowed from a language called Eastern Abnaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Abnaki_language). I've never heard of it either.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice; yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

Maus, Mäuse: mouse, mice.
Laus, Läuse: louse, lice.
But Haus, Häuser: house, hice(r)?

If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn’t the plural of pan be pen?

"Man" was a strong noun in Old English. Compare German Mann/Männer with English "man"/"men". "Pan" is different.

If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

"Foot" is another of those strong nouns. German Fuß/Füße. "Boot" probably wasn't.

If one is a tooth and a while set are teeth, why shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth?

"Booth" is different. It's of Scandinavian origin, and it seems we tend to take the bear form of a word and change it according to our paradigms as if it were just another of our words.

Also, Zahn/Zähne: "tooth"/"teeth".

Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in the plural would never be hose, and the plural of cat is cats not cose.

The declension of pronouns are so messed up that they're probably arbitrary.

We speak of a brother and also of brethen, but though we say mother, we never say methren.

"Brother" is another strong noun which got simplified, but recently enough that we remember the old plural. Compare Bruder/Brüdern.

Interestingly, in German, they have Mutter/Mütter, as if it would've been "mother"/"mether" in English.

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

Fun with arbitrary pronouns! :D

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?

"Finger", "grocer", and "hammer" are based in different Old English paradigms (and those of other languages too) than "writer", I suppose.

Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?

You tell a lie, but the truth.

If teachers taught, why don’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Different paradigms again.

One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine." Except for the word for 'map', mapa.

And la mano.

we have 26 letters in the alphabet, and only 9 numbers to learn how to write,

Ten. "0" counts as a number too.

Basically, English is watered down German.

Watered down by lots and lots and lots of foreign words. And lacking all the synthetic aspects.

However, the British Foreign Office has looked at the languages that diplomats and other embassy staff have to learn and has worked out which they find the most difficult to learn. The second hardest is Japanese, which probably comes as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most difficult to learn is Hungarian, which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc).

Oh yes, the Finno-Ugric languages. The ones with the ungodly number of cases.

However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases,

FUCKING! :eek:

Shouldn't this be in linguistics?
it is, now anyway.

Queen's English seemed a bit hard to learn for some one who grew up with a patois as his mother tounge. I mean, its all so CORRECT and proper, rules of grammar to learn not feel, even though lots of the words are the same. Makes you think youre a real simple-minded buttu!
:o

Athelwulf:

Good post explaining the germanic origins of many of English's wierder plurals, etc.

Has anyone heard of the Mormon attempt to rectify the wierdness of the spellings in English. They concocted an entirely new alphabet, called the Desert Alphabet [ http://www.deseretalphabet.com/ ]

It standardized all phonetics in English into a uniform system, so there were no spelling inconsistencies. It consisted of 38 characters, modified from Greek and other alphabets, such that it wrote out the English language phonetically.

Anyway, it never caught on, though several books were published using that alphabet, which are impossible for an English reader to read unless he/she learns that new alphabet. However, the words are pronounced exactly as English words are supposed to be pronounced.

Also, has anyone noticed how written instructions, for example on multi-language assembly instructions for furniture, toys, etc., or elsewhere, almost always has the shortest phraseology in the English language. It seems to take fewer words to communicate the same idea in English, compared to any of the other Indo-European languages, which is likely one of the reasons for its global success (aside from the British navy spreading it in earlier ages).

One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine." Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map? And what about nouns that end in a consonant, such as lapiz? Is it el lapiz or la lapiz? I've never understood the reasoning for this, but it's a minor thing at best.Oxy, I have been ruminating on your question ever since you posted it. I am prepared to offer you this set of guidelines for guessing the correct gender. They have lots of exceptions, but you'll probably be right 90% of the time.If the word is of Greek origin, it's probably masculine. El sistema, el analisis, el plan, el drama. Oh yeah, el mapa. :) I don't know what a word ending in a has to do to become feminine in Greek, perhaps bring a note from its mother. If it ends in d, it's probably feminine. Many of them are derived from Latin words ending in feminine suffixes like -tatis. La libertad, la velocidad, la pared. If it ends in n, it's probably masculine. Many of them end in a masculine augmentative suffix like -on. El cañón, el varón, el régimen. If it ends in j, it's masculine. That's a freebie, only one word ends in j, el reloj. :) If it ends in l, it's probably masculine. El nogal, el pastel, el fusil, el control. If it ends in r, it's probably masculine. El motor, el porvenir. If it ends in s, it's probably Greek and masculine. If it ends in z, it's tricky. Try replacing the Z with an X and see if an obvious Latin feminine noun is hitting you in the face. La voz < vox, la paz < pax, any word ending in -triz < -trix, like cantriz, obviously a female cantor. Otherwise words ending in z tend to be masculine. El lápiz. But this guideline is more unreliable than the rest. La nariz.Buena suerte. I speak Irish Gaelic.Oh boy have I got many years' worth of questions that I've been saving for you! For starters, how do you pronounce R? Do you trill it like the Spaniards, Italians, Russians, and Japanese? Or do you gargle it like the Scandinavians, most Germans, and Parisian French? Or do you make that peculiar indescribable sound in the back of your mouth like we do in America and some parts of England?

Do you have lots of endings for inflections like Russian and Spanish, a few like French and German, almost none like English and Swedish, or none at all?

Do you have definite and/or indefinite articles?

Do you have three genders, two, or zero?

How do you name the days of the week? After Roman gods, German gods, numbers, or some other way? Do you have "Sun" day and "Moon" day like most European languages?

Oh boy oh boy, a real live speaker of Gaelic! A representative of the Celtic language subfamily!Maus, Mäuse: mouse, mice. Laus, Läuse: louse, lice. But Haus, Häuser: house, hice(r)?English has preserved a great many strong verbs, but we seem to have lost a lot of the strong nouns. Now that I've said that I'm struggling to come up with half a dozen examples of strong German nouns become weak English nouns, but my German has been languishing for decades. Let's see, I think "hands" and "hounds" fall into that category.Also, Zahn/Zähne: "tooth"/"teeth".Perhaps not obvious to those unfamiliar with Verner's law, Teutonic T > Modern German Z. Compare Latin dent-. German lost the T, English lost the N. It should be Zand in German, tonth in English.You tell a lie, but the truth.Articles drive people crazy who speak languages that lack them. We breathe air and drink water but fly through the air and swim in the water. We can talk about truth, a truth, or the truth. Chinese people wonder why we say "this rice," when it should be plural because there are so many of the little buggers on the plate, yet we ask for "some rice," not "a rice." (Or "a rouse." :)) I think articles only serve one purpose in English: to identify foreign speakers.Also, has anyone noticed how written instructions, for example on multi-language assembly instructions for furniture, toys, etc., or elsewhere, almost always has the shortest phraseology in the English language. It seems to take fewer words to communicate the same idea in English, compared to any of the other Indo-European languages, which is likely one of the reasons for its global success (aside from the British navy spreading it in earlier ages).Moreover, it takes fewer syllables to say something in English than in most languages. Monosyllabic nouns and verbs are common in English. As a result, English can be spoken more slowly than, say, Italian, to pick an extreme example. I think this makes it easier to speak clearly in disadvantageous conditions, and it also makes it easier for a student to parse sentences in real time.

I suspect French comes pretty close because it also has a lot of monosyllables and has been stripped of most of its inflections--in speech if not in its insane writing system. However, in my own attempts to analyze this language trait, I consistently find Chinese to be even more compact, running an average of seven syllables to ten in English. And indeed as a student I find it rather easy to follow conversational Chinese; the words I know stand out and are not lost in a torrent. Chinese has no inflections and almost no "noise words" such as articles to boost the syllable count needlessly.

I wonder just how people came up with the idea of gender specific grammar?? Must have been God at Babel... One of the biggest stupidity of the languages...
I specially hated german for it and I simply refused to learn the der, die das part.... :)

I studied Russian for 7-8 years (I cannot say I was really into it) but still cannot speak fluently. Then I started English it was whole lot easier. In the beginning I would translate English into Russian to undertsand what a sentence means and translate from Russian to English to make up a sentence (because my mother tongue is Mongolian and it is easier to mechanically translate between English and Russian than to involve Mongolian), but since I studied English 2-3 years it is the other way around. To begin with English does not have gender or cases, it does not use many prefixes or postpfixes to modify words. True you need to learn a lot of vocabulary and prepositions are difficult.

english is the easiest language to learn.

I wonder just how people came up with the idea of gender specific grammar??

how did people come up with the idea of "he" and "she". my language doesn't have those words because it's pointless. you can just write man or woman if you need to specify gender.

Temur:

Nice comparison.

I studied Latin as my first foreign language, and ugh, it was tough for a native English speaker. I had had no clue about declensions and genders and endings on adjectives having to be the same as for the endings on the nouns they modified. Then memorizing whether a noun was masculine, feminine, or neuter, or of the second class of masc. fem. or neut., was a real chore.

It was good training, however, because later I studied Italian, German, and Russian, and then it made 'sense', or at least I was quick to grasp the grammar.

Russian with 7 declensions was similar to Latin with 5 and two 'archaic'; German was similar to Latin, but with only 4, having lost one.

In English they've all gone away, except in a few of the prononuns. Makes it a whole lot easier.

the problem is that most languges are pure with out to many words from other languges in them english has a ton of words from other languges it is nolonger a pure germanic langage that is why its so difficult

The problem is that most languges are pure without too many words from other languges in them. English has a ton of words from other languges. It is no longer a pure Germanic langage. That is why it's so difficult.That's an interesting perspective and one that I've never encountered before. Are you speaking from the experience of a foreigner who had to learn English as a second language?

Clearly it makes our spelling a mess, since the tenuous relationship between spelling and phonetics is different depending on the source language. And okay, we have a more than a few plurals to learn that are "irregular" because they follow the "regular" rules of the source language, such as radii, data, formulae, cherubim and indices. A Russian friend suggested that since the plural of opus is opera, the plural of walrus must be walrera. :)

But other than those things, which are a bigger problem in the written language, I'm curious as to how words of foreign origin complicate the study of our language?

It's a big problem in Japanese, with its huge body of Chinese loan-words. But again, it's really more of a problem in reading. You have to guess from context whether to pronounce a kanji in its kun (Chinese) reading or on (native Japanese) reading, and there may be more than one of the latter.

there are no hard or easy languages to learn.

Of course some are harder. Some have larger (vastly) larger vocabularies than others. Some have extremely complicated (and/or strict) grammatical rules while others are simpler and more flexible.

Further a language can be much harder if the written language is not easy to translate into sounds.

Even native speakers can have more trouble WITH THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. Danish children learn their own language more slowly than Swedish children learn theirs. This is in large part due to pronounciation. You can see this when two adults meet, a Swede and a Dane. The Swede can speak swedish and the Dane will usally be able to follow. The Dane however is generally asked to speak English(!) because the Danes swallow so many sounds.

So I disagree with you completely.

Further there is the issue of how the language one is learning relates to one's mother tongue. To go from French to Spanish is vastly easier than from French to Mandarin.

my language doesn't have those words because it's pointless.

Mine neither. What really stupid is that esperanto kept the gender specific grammar, although that is supposed to be a loggical language...

Also, it is just much easier to simplify an already existing language instead of making up a brand new one.

The hardest part of spoken Chinese is the fact that tone is phonemic. You don't get to express how you feel by changing the tone of your words. You have to actually be an articulate master of your native language and just say it!

I am wondering about one thing: What happens with the songs?

From what I've been told by Chinese people who are not exactly scholars but know their own language and understand the concept of tones being or not being phonemic...

In traditional Chinese songs, the pitch of the note had to be consistent with the tone of the word being sung. It gives you a little artistic leeway. As long as a word with tone 1 is on a much higher note than one with tone 3 so you can detect the difference, you don't have to land on exactly the same note every time. I don't know what they do with the rising and falling tones (1 is constant pitch high and 3 is constant pitch low--in most positions), and I don't know what they did in more ancient dialects that had more tones. Mandarin has been simplifed to four: high, rising, low, and falling; but Sichuan which is merely a more-or-less intercomprehensible dialect of Mandarin still has six and some which have diverged into separate languages like Fuqian have twelve. I've never heard enough of this traditional singing to analyze it; I rather enjoy instrumental Chinese folk music but the singing kind of makes my ears hurt.

However, since electronic technology brought foreign music to China in great abundance, they have been translating pop lyrics into Chinese with no regard for the spoken tone. When I asked a friend about what seemed to me an obvious problem, she wrinkled her forehead for a few minutes and ran a couple of songs through her head. Then she said, "I guess these lyrics are so simple and are written in such an elementary vocabulary, that after you hear a song a couple of times you can understand it even without the proper tones. I think it's the same way we can understand foreigners learning to speak simple Chinese, even though you often get the tones wrong."

I understand what she meant. I've seen plenty of Chinese chick flicks in which the actors break into song at the oddest moments. I found that I could understand a lot of the lyrics even though even I could tell the tones were wrong. If a guy sings "Meiguei, Meiguei, wo ai ni" to his girlfriend, you don't need the tones to know he means "Rose, Rose, I love you."

That's an interesting perspective and one that I've never encountered before. Are you speaking from the experience of a foreigner who had to learn English as a second language?

Clearly it makes our spelling a mess, since the tenuous relationship between spelling and phonetics is different depending on the source language. And okay, we have a more than a few plurals to learn that are "irregular" because they follow the "regular" rules of the source language, such as radii, data, formulae, cherubim and indices. A Russian friend suggested that since the plural of opus is opera, the plural of walrus must be walrera. :)

But other than those things, which are a bigger problem in the written language, I'm curious as to how words of foreign origin complicate the study of our language?

It's a big problem in Japanese, with its huge body of Chinese loan-words. But again, it's really more of a problem in reading. You have to guess from context whether to pronounce a kanji in its kun (Chinese) reading or on (native Japanese) reading, and there may be more than one of the latter.
i don't speak any languges but both my mom's parents had english as a second language and talking with them is where i gained my prespective

english is easy to learn.

So when are you going to start spelling properly, and capitalising correctly?

english is the easiest language to learn.



Please fill in the blank with a "yes" or "no"


_________ , I don't have a brain.:D

there are no hard or easy languages to learn. All languages are equally hard and easy to learn.
There's the dragon I know. Everyone and everything is equal. LOL

Anyway, English is tough because we incorporate a lot of foriegn words into English. We often keep the pronunciation and the spelling pretty close to what it was in the original language, which means the word makes no sense at all under normal English spelling rules.

For instance, Rendezvous. It's pronounced rɒn-də-vu. When I was a kid, I thought it was "rend-a-vus". I also knew the word rɒn-də-vu when I heard it, but didn't realize they were the same word.

English is the easiest language to learn.Please fill in the blank with a "yes" or "no" _________ , I don't have a brain.:DMost of my Chinese friends think that English is the easiest of all the major languages. In structure, it's the closest to Chinese. It's highly synthetic and word order is nearly identical. Inflections have almost vanished and in a pinch one can speak quite understandably without tense, number, etc. Also without articles and other noise words. As discussed in another post, we are heavy on one-syllable words. As a result our syllable count per sentence is almost as low as theirs and we speak rather slowly like they do (compared to, say, an Italian!) so our sentences are easy for a student or foreigner to parse in real time. Our phonetics are a big obstacle of course, ending a word with a non-nasal consonant is almost painful for them. (Mandarin speakers, not Cantonese.)For instance, Rendezvous. [My browser doesn't reproduce IPA symbols.] It's pronounced ***. When I was a kid, I thought it was "rend-a-vus". I also knew the word *** when I heard it, but didn't realize they were the same word.We certainly have subtle differences in pronunciation across the anglophone world and I'm not sure they're all regional. It may have something to do with the style of education that was popular when we were in school. Everyone I know says rahn-day-voo, a more correct French pronunciation. A lot of them also say ahn-ve-lope, although for some reason I say envelope.

But no one pronounces lingerie in proper French, they all say lahn-zhe-ray instead of lan-zhe-ree. I'll never understand where that came from. I wonder if they say it the same strange way in England?

And chaise longue ("long chair"), everybody in America is dyslexic and thinks it's chaise lounge.

I'm English. "lan-zhe-ree" EVERYTIME. or "WOW, yes wear that!" :)

My first language is Spanish, and in latin countries it is advised to teach the dogs to do stuff in English, because it is easier for them to learn.

For example:
Sit = siéntate
Stay = quedate quieto
Lay = acuéstate
Roll = da vueltas
Go = anda
Jump = brinca
Down = abajo

Can you see the pattern? it goes on and on.

So yes, we teach the dogs in English, even if our first language is Spanish.

From my perspective (and I only know 2 languages), English cannot be the most difficult.

That puts us English ex colony types in our place. You feel proud of yourself, Mr Spanish??

english is a very large language (huge repository of words, and many different words that explain the same thing) that has evolved out of many other languages. Not all of it makes sense, ghoti.

That puts us English ex colony types in our place. You feel proud of yourself, Mr Spanish??

Hehe, I´m sorry my friend, my intention is not to offend anyone, I´m just pointing the fact that English cannot be the most difficult, it is just a hyperbole.

Well that settles it then. English is easier to learn for dogs. Budgies and African Greys too, from what I've read. Is there a psittacine anywhere with a big vocabulary in Italian or Arabic?

And how about those gorillas and chimpanzees who are learning American Sign Language? :)

Mad Anthony: SORRY DUDE! I was trying to edit my own post. Apparently I edited one of yours instead. This is all my own text. I can't find any way to retrieve your text. I hope you can put it back together.

My apologies. I keep forgetting I'm the moderator. I have an "Edit" button on every post in this forum and it's right where the "Quote" button is supposed to be.

Never hand a powerful tool to an idiot. :(

FRAGGLE ROCKER TEXT:

I'll say two or three words and the translation will be a paragraph. I believe this is why Spanish speakers talk so fast. They need to!It's the syllable count that really kills speakers of languages like Spanish and Italian. They have few monosyllabic words while our language abounds with them. This makes them talk faster. The combination of the speed and the difficulty in figuring out which syllable goes with which word makes them challenging for foreigners and students to parse sentences in real time and understand spoken language. As I've said earlier in this thread, this is a key feature of English that makes it easier to learn: we talk slower and many of our words have only one syllable. The only language I'm familiar with that has a lower syllable count than English is Chinese, and it is indeed really easy to pick the words you know out of a spoken sentence and puzzle out half of its meaning. You just can't do that with Russian or Japanese.Hell, as far as I can tell, Spanish even lacks a word for "squint".They say entornar, which means "to close halfway" or "leave ajar," which in turn is a word we don't have in English. "It's getting pretty noisy outside, would you squint the window please." :) They also have a word for cross-eyed: bizco.

I find it difficult to criticize Spanish for vocabulary limitations. Their vocabulary is rich, just in different dimensions than ours.I think it is our large vocabulary in English that allows us to get our point across in very few words. Unfortunately, this large vocabulary draws words from many other languages which causes spellng and pronunciation to be a bit chaotic and hard to learn.Indeed. Chinese's equally large vocabulary is 99.9 percent native. Of course that doesn't help with the "spelling." :)

I pulled my own text out of Mad Anthony's where it appeared due to an editing blunder on my part. I hope Anthony can reconstruct his own post since I appear to have no tools to do that.

Sorry Sorry Sorry. :(

It's the syllable count that really kills speakers of languages like Spanish and Italian. They have few monosyllabic words while our language abounds with them. This makes them talk faster. The combination of the speed and the difficulty in figuring out which syllable goes with which word makes them challenging for foreigners and students to parse sentences in real time and understand spoken language. As I've said earlier in this thread, this is a key feature of English that makes it easier to learn: we talk slower and many of our words have only one syllable. The only language I'm familiar with that has a lower syllable count than English is Chinese, and it is indeed really easy to pick the words you know out of a spoken sentence and puzzle out half of its meaning. You just can't do that with Russian or Japanese.

For "squint" they say entornar, which means "to close halfway" or "leave ajar," which in turn is a word we don't have in English. "It's getting pretty noisy outside, would you squint the window please." :) They also have a word for cross-eyed: bizco.

I find it difficult to criticize Spanish for vocabulary limitations. Their vocabulary is rich, just in different dimensions than ours. Chinese's equally large vocabulary is 99.9 percent native. Of course that doesn't help with the "spelling." :)

For "squint" they say entornar, which means "to close halfway" or "leave ajar," which in turn is a word we don't have in English. "It's getting pretty noisy outside, would you squint the window please." :) They also have a word for cross-eyed: bizco.

I'll try that word (entornar) on my next spanish speaking patient. Would it be:
Lea la linea mas chiquita y no entorna. For crossed eyes, I've been saying something like "cruxado". I hope that's a word. For about a year, I told Spanish speaking patients to mira a la charta
, until someone finally told me there was no such word. Now I use tabla.

Fortunately, most Spanish speaking patients are quite forgiving of my poor Spanish and are just happy I make the effort. I actually even did an interview for a local Spanish language station on the importance of eyecare.

PS No big deal on the editing faux pas.

Would it be: Lea la línea mas chiquita y no entorna.The examples I saw suggest that you have to give the verb an object, entornar los ojos. Don't forget that when you're giving a negative command, technically you're lapsing back into the true subjunctive mode, rather than the imperative mode, which is a "broken" conjugation without a complete paradigm. In the third person there's no difference: No entorne Ud. los ojos. But when addressing a child (or in compulsively informal Aztlán just about anyone) in the second person you'd say, No entornes los ojos.For crossed eyes, I've been saying something like "cruxado". I hope that's a word.You mean cruzado. Obviously you've studied Latin. If you pronounce it that way, your patients surely understand ojos cruzados after thinking about it for a second.For about a year, I told Spanish speaking patients to mira a la charta, until someone finally told me there was no such word. Now I use tabla.It's hard to guess at professional jargon, but I would suggest el cuadro. El cuadro clínico is a medical chart and a el cuadro sinóptico is a diagram.

And it's Mira el cuadro, not Mira al cuadro. You only stick a before a direct object if it's a person, and then you also have to stick a dative-case pronoun onto the verb: Mírale al gran tonto en la Casa Blanca.

Check out http://wordreference.com/, my favorite online dictionary for Spanish, French and Italian. The trick I always teach is to take all the words you find and look them up in the Spanish-English dictionary. That will give you the often not-so-subtle differences in meaning and help you pick the right one.Fortunately, most Spanish speaking patients are quite forgiving of my poor Spanish and are just happy I make the effort.Yes, they're nothing at all like the French--or us anglophones. :) Chinese people tend to do that as well.

I have a friend who lived in Japan, speaks Japanese fluently, even scholarly Japanese, and has done professional translations. He has to be careful to sneak up on Japanese people from behind when he starts a conversation. If they see a gaijin face they automatically assume he's speaking a gaijin language and they don't even hear it as Japanese. They bow and respond, "I'm terribly sorry, sir, but I don't speak English."

What about Chinese?

What about Chinese?I have found Chinese people to be very pleasant to Westerners who tackle their language. Often they will stop what they're doing and go to the trouble of carrying on a simple conversation, for the sake of helping.

Recent immigrants or visiting scholars tend to be very gracious, because they're startled and pleased to realize that any of us are even trying. Chinese-Americans can be more helpful, because they've had more time to examine the differences between the two languages. In particular they understand the issue of tone, which is very difficult for us yet something many Chinese don't think about consciously and have trouble talking about.

Obviously English is not the “most difficult language ever” as this forum puts it. And the best people to ask this question are not the native speakers, since they learned it when there were toddlers. The best people you would have to ask this question are non-native speakers who are learning it or learned it.

I am a Spanish speaker dude, who learned this great language a few years ago. I came to the US without knowing a word of English, and after I assimilated myself into the American-culture I decided the best way to improved myself was going to college. Those were very difficult times for me since I had to take 3 levels of remedial English before I was able to continue my high level education, and after doing so, it took me another two more regular English class to meet the requirements to achieve my goal (which, by the way I am very glad to know this is a requirement to get your bachelor’s degree.)

Now that you guy’s know a little bit of my background, I can definitely concluded that English is not one of the hardest languages to learn for me. Why? Very simple, English at difference from Spanish, verbs don’t have inflection, except for the third person singular on the present tense, where we have to add an “s”!, the past-tense except for a few singularities has the same termination! (“ed” or “d”), oh, and what about the future tense? well just add “will” before the verb, the same for “would” “should” “might”. I still remember the time when I was in eighth grade in Chile, and I had to learn every verbal form known in the Spanish language from a small book called “Castellano, Real Academia de Lenguas Espanola”, there were more than a hundred ways to conjugate a damn verb in Spanish. The verb “To Be” is divided in two verbs in Spanish “ser” and “estar” i.e. “I am Joseph” = “Yo soy Jose” however, “I am here” = “Yo estoy aqui” and as I said before, you have to consider the hundreds of conjugations of these two Spanish verbs have also.

English does not have to deal with it

And this is for verbs, what about articles? “The” = “los” “las” “el” “la”
Or what about possessives “my” = “mios” “mias” “mio” “mia” just for the fist person singular, I didn’t want to mention the second and third persons singular, or the first second and third person plural either

English does not have to deal with it

I love English because is easy direct to the point, short and precise.

However……

English, due to its nature is very inflexible in the word other. The only way to know what I am talking about it is by using a strict word order, and this is where the confusion resides on whether English is a hard language or not. Grammar rules must be enforce, i.e. “I buy books” “yo compro libros”, in Spanish I can easily said “compro libros” since the inflection of the verb “compro” tells me immediately that refers to the first person singular, but, “buy books” can not tell me who is buying the books

However, the most complicated part of the English language is its pronunciation; imagine short words being spitted in a fast passed connected with each other. Well know words were Chinese to me when I heard them from a native speaker. It took me years to master the sounds of those words, and be able to understand them.

Now, I am a successful computer scientist working for a well renowned company in the US, and during my spare time I serve proudly in the United States Navy, from where I learned even more about this great English language as a radio operator in the Seabees, serving in Kuwait and Iraq
“If you want to talk about love, learn French, if you want to talk poetry, learn Spanish, if you want to talk war, learn German, but if you want to communicate with the world, learn English”

English has preserved a great many strong verbs, but we seem to have lost a lot of the strong nouns. Now that I've said that I'm struggling to come up with half a dozen examples of strong German nouns become weak English nouns, but my German has been languishing for decades. Let's see, I think "hands" and "hounds" fall into that category.

Hände and Hunde. I'm not sure if Hunde is considered strong. But there are the words Bücher, Nägel ("nails"), Äpfel, and possibly Bäume (which means "trees" but I think it's cognate with "beams").

Would nouns like "ox" be considered weak or strong? Etymologically it's weak, but seeing as almost every other English noun uses the old strong paradigm, and seeing as you and possibly others consider nouns like "hands" to be weak, it seems like a toss-up.

Some linguists put it in a superfamily with other nearby families like Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian... but then many linguists are starting to suspect that all non-African languages belong to a single super-duperfamily, descended from an ancestor brought from Africa 70,000 years ago at the start of the Homo sapiens diaspora.

I imagine that would be impossibly hard to reconstruct. :p

And how about the African languages? Do you suppose linguists will try to reconstruct an ultra-hyper-mega-family that the non-African super-duper-family and the African languages fit under?

nar come on, im sure vitamise is harder or chinise

nar come on, im sure vitamise is harder or chinise

What?

I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?

I learned english in three months, compared to German which took four.

Try russian greek or arabic, it's by far harder than any germanic language.

The structure of the english language is extremely simple, much like spanish.

What?
Vietnamese or Chinese.

It took me two more regular English classes to meet the requirements to achieve my goal (which, by the way, I am very glad to know is a requirement to get a bachelor’s degree.)I wish they were that strict with native speakers. I am appalled by the poor communication skills of the average U.S. university graduate. Forty years ago we could depend on someone who had a B.A. or B.S., not necessarily to write well enough for publication, but well enough for internal circulation. Now companies hire me to edit the writing of their college graduates so the other employees can understand it at all.
I love English because it's easy, directly to the point, short and precise.Isn't it hard to learn our idioms? A friend of mine was translating a speech into Spanish and where he said he was going to let the guest speaker "take over," he used toma sobre. I thought he was trying to drink an envelope!

One of the things that speakers of non-Indo-European languages complain about in English, Spanish, Russian and all the rest, is our seemingly haphazard use of prepositions. Most of them really don't mean anything any more, but goddess help the foreigner who uses the wrong one in the wrong place. Did you have to struggle to understand when to say someone is "at school" versus "in school," or that they got there "on time" versus "in time"? I cannot explain these nuances to foreign students because they make no sense and there's no pattern. We may not have bewildering macro-rules about conjugating whole families of verbs, but we have hundreds of micro-rules that only apply to one specific word.

Why do birds fly in "the air" and Paris Hilton has "an air" of tackiness about her, but we breathe just plain "air"? When people ask about stuff like this I all I can say is that we have these rules just to help us identify the non-native speakers. :)English, due to its nature, is very inflexible in its word other.Oh if you find that annoying, wait until you try to learn Chinese! Compared to Chinese, English word order is a matter of personal choice.However, the most complicated part of the English language is its pronunciation; imagine short words being spit at a fast pace, connected with each other.My observation is that we have more trouble in that regard with your language. There are so many more syllables in an equivalent sentence, that Spanish is spoken much faster than English. Measure the number of syllables per minute, English and French aren't in the same league with Spanish and Italian. It's very difficult for us to figure out where one word ends and the next one starts, in real time. Chinese has an even lower syllable count than English, since it lacks inflections, articles, prepositions and other meaningless "noise words," and as a result it's not so difficult for a student to pick out the words he knows in a spoken sentence. I think your first hypothesis is correct, that the problem with English is that we have such a huge array of phonemes compared to most other languages--particularly vowels. Tuck tock took tech take tack tick teak talk toke tyke. Several pairs or even triads of those words will sound the same to a student whose native language has only cardinal vowels. It takes a while to recognize the difference--in real time.“If you want to talk about love, learn French, if you want to talk poetry, learn Spanish, if you want to talk war, learn German, but if you want to communicate with the world, learn English.We have several versions of that one. Food in French, cars in Italian, business in English, philosophy in Russian. We make fun of Frenchmen because they talk about food the way we talk about women: "Be sure and save your egg whites, in case you decide later to make a little meringue on the side."Would nouns like "ox" be considered weak or strong... it seems like a toss-up.Strong verbs have be both umlauted and use -en instead of -ed for the past participle. I think a strong noun has to have an umlaut and no ending. "Oxen" is disqualified on both counts.I imagine that [ancestor of the superfamily of all non-African languages] would be impossibly hard to reconstruct.All they've gotten so far by disassembling phonetic shifts using massively parallel computing is something like fifty words of which forty occur in all languages. It's too much to hope for a grammar, but who knows? :)And how about the African languages? Do you suppose linguists will try to reconstruct an ultra-hyper-mega-family that the non-African super-duper-family and the African languages fit under?The key here is an evolutionary bottleneck in the non-African languages. Only one group of humans walked out of Africa and we're making the reasonable presumption that they spoke one language. So we only have to trace ours back 70,000 years. No one knows when the technology of language was first invented so it's possible that African languages have had half a million years to diverge. On the other hand it's also possible that language was invented by more than one tribe independently and there are multiple families. On the third hand, the theory I find most attractive is that humans were not able to successfully migrate into the strange world beyond Africa without being able to do sophisticated planning and organizing. Language was the key technology that made that possible, and therefore was probably invented or at least perfected shortly before the start of the H. sapiens global diaspora. In that case there probably would be only one world language family. And we only have to track it back maybe five or ten thousand years, the time span we used to consider the limit of our ability to do it at all. :)nar come on, im sure vitamise is harder or chiniseWhat?I'm sure he means "Vietnamese," rather than something to do with vitamins.

Of course I disagree. I know nothing about Vietnamese but I suspect that when the ballots are counted Chinese will be voted much easier to learn than English. Especially when they finally do something about that writing system.

I learned english in three months, compared to German which took four.

Wow, das ist sehr unglaublich.

Try russian greek or arabic, it's by far harder than any germanic language.

I bet.

[...] Now companies hire me to edit the writing of their college graduates so the other employees can understand it at all.

That's scary.

Tuck tock took tech take tack tick teak talk toke tyke.

And Turk. Then there's the mess you get into when you look at the different accents of English. If you just look at Southern American English... meyan, wut drugs ah thaye awn? :p

Do you pronounce "tock" and "talk" differently?

All they've gotten so far by disassembling phonetic shifts using massively parallel computing is something like fifty words of which forty occur in all languages. It's too much to hope for a grammar, but who knows? :)

Now you got me thinking about the possibility of very basic trends in the grammar of human languages. I think I'll post a thread soon if I don't forget about it.

Wow, das ist sehr unglaublich. [Die deutsche Sprache in drei Monaten zu lernen.]It took me three or four months just to learn Esperanto, and I was fourteen, an age when my mind was still a sponge.That's scary. [Having to edit the writing of university graduates so it's barely legible.]It's hard to convince American children that they need good communication skills in order to get a decent job, when their role model for six and a half years has been a President who isn't even fluent in spoken English.Then there's the mess you get into when you look at the different accents of English. If you just look at Southern American English... meyan, wut drugs ah thaye awn?Oddly, that seems to be the one dialect that all anglophones throughout the world can both decode and mimic. British actors have a notoriously hard time learning to portray American characters convincingly, but their crutch is to lapse into hillbilly talk. E.g., the current hit TV show, "The Riches," with English stars Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver playing Southerners with utterly perfect dialog. Two of the big stars in "country and western" music (i.e. "Rednecks and cowboys") are Shania Twain, a Canadian, and Keith Urban, an Australian.And Turk.I didn't even count that as another vowel because we think of it as a diphthong. Almost all American dialects are rhotic, meaning we pronounce the R in those syllables. In IPA the U in "Turk" is schwa-R. In Oxford English it's just schwa.Do you pronounce "tock" and "talk" differently?Yes, we have a massive vowel shift that differentiates American phonetics from Oxford English. I can't do IPA symbols with this browser so bear with me. The vowel in "tock" is the symbol a, so it sounds like British "tark." "Talk" is the backwards c, so it sounds like British "tock." We don't have the sound of the symbol o in accented syllables, so "call," "often," "brought," etc. are the backward c. We also use that vowel in words like "floor," but remember we're rhotic so it's backward C followed by R. In addition, we use the sound of the IPA a-e digraph for short A in "cat," where the British use a vowel we don't have; I'm not sure of the IPA symbol but it's midway between our sound and a full a. Maybe it's that symbol that looks like a lower case d with the top of the staff cut off. There are many differences between British and American pronunciation that involve entire series of sounds, such as our vir-choo-al, vi-zhoo-al and resi-joo-al versus their vir-tyoo-al, vi-zyoo-al and resi-dyoo-al. Our doo-ty, noo-ance and tooning versus their dyoo-ty, nyoo-ance and tyooning. They pronounce the T in "writer" and the D in "rider". We convert them both to the sound of the Spanish or Russian flapped R and distinguish the two words by changing the dipthong in "writer" from a-i to (IPA upside down v)-i.Now you got me thinking about the possibility of very basic trends in the grammar of human languages. I think I'll post a thread soon if I don't forget about it.That sounds interesting. I'll try to remind you. :)

Fraggle, can you use this website to help you with IPA symbols?

http://ipa.typeit.org/

Fraggle, can you use this website to help you with IPA symbols?Thanks, but that's not my problem. My Macintosh has an incredible character set, everything from Armenian to Hiragana. I can insert them into my typing window and they show up just fine in the preview. But when I hit "Submit," all of them vanish except a very limited set of "Extended Latin" that only serves a few major western European languages. There are a number of Stone Age websites that are not entirely Mac-compatible and SciForums must be one of them.

I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?
I'm brazilian and I know 5 languages and studied a few others, including chinese, greek and hebrew. English was by very far the easiest one. I don't know what you are on about. I cannot think of a single language easier the english....

I didn't even count that as another vowel because we think of it as a diphthong. Almost all American dialects are rhotic, meaning we pronounce the R in those syllables. In IPA the U in "Turk" is schwa-R. In Oxford English it's just schwa.

That's interesting. I produce (or at least perceive) the pronunciation of "Turk" as /tɝk/, with a rhotacized, monophthongal vowel. (Wikipedia: R-colored vowel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel).)

Yes, we have a massive vowel shift that differentiates American phonetics from Oxford English.

When you say "we", do you mean people in California, or from wherever you happen to be from if not California? If you're talking about American English in general, then the sounds you're describing really are news to me.

I pronounce "tock" and "talk" both as /tɑk/, with an open back unrounded vowel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_back_unrounded_vowel). I thought this was common in the US. I'm aware of a meme at the site 4chan.org where users play on the identical pronunciation (as I hear it, and apparently they too) of "cock" and "caulk".

I'm starting to feel very self-conscious of my dialect of English. I always thought it was almost exactly the same as the General American "standard". :(

I study three languages at school, and I'm starting a fourth, and English is the most difficult language of all! People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn! Any comments?

Personally, my money is on Irish.

Personally, my money is on Irish.

The various Gaelic languages scare me. I looked at Irish Gaelic on Wikipedia once, thinking I could learn how to read it. But honestly, I think my eyes would bleed if I forced them to read too much. And don't make me think about the phonetics.

On second thought, I think Welsh might be simpler. I even learned to read it once, but it hasn't stuck with me.

That's interesting. I produce (or at least perceive) the pronunciation of "Turk" as /t?k/, with a rhotacized, monophthongal vowel. [Sorry, you see my problem with the character set and this Mac-incompatible website.]That's standard American. We're just affected by the spelling so people who are conscious of language would tend to regard that as two sounds. The vowel-plus-R in "tar", "soar", "hair", "near" and "poor" is more clearly so. The schwa-plus-R spelled variously as "her", "sir", "fur", etc. is not.When you say "we", do you mean people in California, or from wherever you happen to be from if not California? If you're talking about American English in general, then the sounds you're describing really are news to me.I was born in Illinois, spent my later childhood in Arizona, lived most of my life in California, and have been working in Washington DC for several years. Except for many black Americans, and the Old Southerners near Washington, everyone in all those places speaks the same way. There is a trace of Southern American (really "Southeastern" but when the name was coined the U.S. stopped at the Mississippi River) in the Wild West, but it's vanishing as the Sun Belt fills with refugees from all over, just as it's being leveled out in the urban areas of the South by the same refugees and by the standard dialect of TV and radio.

Only a professional linguist, not an amateur like me, can hear the subtle difference in pronunciation (not vocabulary) between an American from Kansas and one from Pennsylvania. Only in the Northeast, our oldest settlements, have people had a chance to establish strong regional dialects, and they weaken as you travel from the extreme northeastern corner of Maine, down through the less isolated areas of New England, and finally into urban New York and New Jersey. Boston, New England's biggest city, has its own sound, recognizable because it's about the only major non-rhotic American dialect. ("Pahk the cah.") But if you walk down a Boston street today, 80% of the people you meet don't talk that way any more. "New Jizey" is famous for its dialect, yet the two most prominent Jerseyites who spring to my mind are Jon Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, both of whom talk just like me.I pronounce "tock" and "talk" both as /t?k/, with an open back unrounded vowel. I thought this was common in the US. I'm aware of a meme at the site 4chan.org where users play on the identical pronunciation (as I hear it, and apparently they too) of "cock" and "caulk".That is Oxford English. "Cock" has a cardinal A over here and "caulk" has the IPA backward "c", closer to an O. Those words are not homonyms in North America.I'm starting to feel very self-conscious of my dialect of English. I always thought it was almost exactly the same as the General American "standard".If those vowels are representative of the pronunciation you learned, you probably sound more like an Englishman to us. How do you say "daughter"? The British vowel is one we don't have here, a long O without the diphthongization. We use the same vowel as "talk." Do you flap your intervocalic T and D like a Spanish R so they're identical? That's a dead giveaway; the Brits pronounce them as written, and many of their dialects flap their R.

Amusingly, many Americans have trouble learning Spanish because they claim they just can't make their tongues flap the R. I tell them to say "cotto salami." Then I point out that they just said the Spanish word caro

That's standard American. We're just affected by the spelling so people who are conscious of language would tend to regard that as two sounds. The vowel-plus-R in "tar", "soar", "hair", "near" and "poor" is more clearly so. The schwa-plus-R spelled variously as "her", "sir", "fur", etc. is not.

Right. I have the sounds /ɑɹ/, /oɹ/ (or possibly /ɔɹ/, but it's hard to tell), /ɛɹ/, and /ɪɹ/ in my dialect. But the vowel in what you call "schwa-plus-R" words are just /ɝ/.

By the way, even if you can't post IPA, can you at least see it? I don't wanna keep using something you can't read.

There is a trace of Southern American (really "Southeastern" but when the name was coined the U.S. stopped at the Mississippi River) in the Wild West, but it's vanishing as the Sun Belt fills with refugees from all over, just as it's being leveled out in the urban areas of the South by the same refugees and by the standard dialect of TV and radio.

I didn't know that. What features are those, specifically? And are they found in rural Oregon, to your knowledge?

That is Oxford English. "Cock" has a cardinal A over here and "caulk" has the IPA backward "c", closer to an O. Those words are not homonyms in North America.

I always thought they were except for the Midwest (which distinguishes them with a slightly different set of vowels). At least, I don't remember very many people making such a distinction.

If those vowels are representative of the pronunciation you learned, you probably sound more like an Englishman to us.

I don't really see how I sound British. I thought I exhibited nearly all of the features of the General American accent. :confused:

Maybe someday really soon I will post an audioclip. I just have to come up with something to say. But I'll be sure to illustrate how I produce the sounds you're describing, as well as my apparently different pronunciation of tr combinations in words like "train".

How do you say "daughter"?

/ˈdɑɾɝ/

I exhibit the cot-caught and father-bother mergers. These words have the vowel /ɑ/ to me. Father bother tock talk cock daughter rotter rock rocker long thong cot naught not caught wrong pop body bawdy lock loch knock rot wrought sought bought rhombus raw hot haughty naughty knot.

Do you flap your intervocalic T and D like a Spanish R so they're identical?

Yes.

Right. I have the sounds... in my dialect.I suppose to be precise we should be saying "idiolect" here, the speech of a single person.But the vowel in what you call "schwa-plus-R" words are just...Well I can understand that. I can feel my mouth changing shape for OR and all the others, but not for ER. But what it changes shape to is precisely the ER, which the IPA seems to count as a vowel. So I guess that IPA symbol in the first series is basically a semivowel form of schwa-plus-R, and that makes me feel justified in referring to them as diphthongs. :)By the way, even if you can't post IPA, can you at least see it? I don't wanna keep using something you can't read.Yes, no problem. IPA, katakana, Arabic, math, everything. Read-only access.I didn't know that. What features are those [American South dialect], specifically?Wow, I thought everyone who has experience with English had by now run into the "Southern drawl." Our "Country & Western" music stars (i.e., "Redneck & Cowboy") like Garth Brooks do concerts in Europe and Japan, and they make pedal steel guitars in the Czech Republic. When British actors play American characters they often speak Dixie dialect because it's the only one many of them can do right. Its best-known feature is "y'all"--short for "you all"--instead of "you," often even in the singular. I sometimes sing Country & Western music, and two vowel shifts make me sound believable to Northerners. The long I as in "why" is not a diphthong, it's halfway between cardinal A and the short A in "hand"--our pronunciation. Actually it's fairly close to the Oxford pronunciation of "hand" but much longer duration. (I think foreigners like our Southerners because they talk very slowly. :)) The cardinal A in the diphthong in "how" undergoes the same transformation but retains its diphthong, resulting in what may be a unique sound. Then the short A in many words like "cash" and "can't" (but not all of them) becomes a diphthongized long A, so "can't" almost rhymes with "paint."

Actually many of the diphthongs are shifted. The vowel in the long E in "be" becomes more of a short OO as in "hook," so "beet" sounds something like the Russian verb "to be." The vowel in the long O in "home" becomes more of the AW in "daughter," our pronunciation not yours, the IPA backward c. The unaccented long E ending in words like "funny" is stripped of its diphthong and becomes just a short I, the IPA small capital I. It's mostly vowels, "think" and "thing" become "thank" and "thang." While "thank" of course acquires the diphthong of "paint."And are they found in rural Oregon, to your knowledge?People have migrated from the former Confederacy to all parts of the country so you can hear their accent almost anywhere, even in big cities. But it's strictly a Southern dialect. The "border states" of course were Southern in culture even though they remained in the Union, so that's the speech of Missouri, Kentucky, and southern Maryland. And as the people from adjacent Texas and Arkansas migrated to what the Indians assumed we meant by "Indian Territory" when they discovered we had lied, what became Oklahoma is the home of premiere Southern drawler Garth Brooks.

So aside from the culturally Southern states and some in the extreme northeast, and the people from those states who settled elsewhere without losing their accents, we all speak Standard American. Especially in Oregon, which from my travels I would say is not home to a lot of Southerners.I always thought they were [the vowels discussed earlier] except for the Midwest (which distinguishes them with a slightly different set of vowels). At least, I don't remember very many people making such a distinction.It may not be easy to hear, especially if your native language doesn't have the cornucopia of vowels that English does. Your ears aren't "tuned" to distinguish them. But Yankees and Rebels can tell each other apart halfway through a sentence.I don't really see how I sound British. I thought I exhibited nearly all of the features of the General American accent.You do have many of the most important ones, like the flapped intervocalic T and D. We'd probably think you were Australian because we still don't have a really good fix on their accent and it's a little "softer" than that of the U.K. Most Americans won't comment on accents. We think they're charming as long as they don't impede understanding and the rest of the language is proper....my apparently different pronunciation of tr combinations in words like "train".You're the second person (or maybe it was you the first time) who talks about a variant pronunciation of initial TR in English, more like Mandarin CH. I haven't heard that, but perhaps I just didn't notice. But you'd think I would, since I know the Chinese phoneme.I exhibit the cot-caught and father-bother mergers.That's a mixture of British and American. We say "cot," "father" and "bother" the same, but "caught" differently. The British say "cot," and "bother" the same, but "father" is different and "caught" is yet another vowel.These words have the vowel /?/ to me. Father bother tock talk cock daughter rotter rock rocker long thong cot naught not caught wrong pop body bawdy lock loch knock rot wrought sought bought rhombus raw hot haughty naughty knot.Let's see... We say talk, bawdy, raw, and all the words with UGH and NG with the IPA backward c. The rest have cardinal A. Americans consider "loch" a foreign word and pronounce it with a random vowel and a KH, assuming Gaelic has German consonants. The spelling of the equivalent English word is "lough" over here and it has a cardinal A.

I should modify my IPA representation of "daughter" in my idiolect. I mixed up a character. That pronunciation again, and more precisely transcribed, is:

/ˈdɑɾɚ/

Wow, I thought everyone who has experience with English had by now run into the "Southern drawl."

I have, and I know it very well. You said some features were in the Wild West, and I wanted to know which features of Southern American English were in the Wild West. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

So aside from the culturally Southern states and some in the extreme northeast, and the people from those states who settled elsewhere without losing their accents, we all speak Standard American. Especially in Oregon, which from my travel