You're the first person I've ever seen talk about English's "weird/difficult/confusing grammar" who's actually talking about the grammar and not just the spelling.
@CrystalMuffyn The comment says “ not JUST the spelling” as in, not exclusively spelling. You can’t talk about how weird English is without including the spelling lol. But we’re glad he included some of the other weirdness as well.
English also has very inconsistent syllable stress rules (if you could even call them "rules"), but if you put the stress in the wrong place you'll sound VERY foreign. You can hear this clearly in a stereotypical "French" accent.
Stress is actually phonemic in English with words liek "incite" and "insight" being differentiated in speech exclusively by which syllable gets stressed. Of course this also doesn't cover cases where stress changes the actual vowel itself (usually into a schwa).
@@angeldude101 Stress is even used for derivation in English! There's "initial stress-derived nouns", where you have a noun-verb pair that's only distinguished by the stress moving to the initial syllable for the noun: You suspéct a súspect, reprínt a réprint, invíte somebody with an ínvite... That one catches non-native speakers out a lot because you can't see it in writing and it's also just weird.
I’m native in Russian and Ukrainian, and when I started learning English I was a little kid. But at that time for me the words “people” and “purple” were very similar. I made so many ridiculous sentences bc of this. For example: I really like “purple” in my school they are very nice. Or like: “people” is my favourite colour😂
At least you have an excuse, I still can't speak English properly and it's my only language. I can do Algebra, geometry, history and basic physics with little effort and still get between 87 and 92% correct. Even with my best effort one year in high school I failed English class with 69%. But because I tried and I completed 79 out of my 80 homework assignments for the year my teacher was kind enough to pass me with a 70%. So although it might not be saying much I bet you're English is better than a lot of Americans. Have a nice day.
I'm also native Russian speaker, and when I was a kid I've called Empire State Building "Employee State Building". I didn't understand why my teacher was laughing her ass off, but in retrospect, yes, I think that was funny
Polish has a slightly higher than normal amount of consonant clusters for a Slavic language, but I feel some of Polish having too many of them is due to large amounts of digraphs involving "z" like "sz", "cz", and of course "szcz" (something we, your south-easternly neighbors, convey with the single letter щ). This is far from "worst", of course. Georgian is most obvious - "marjvniv", "martkshinv", "stsori", and many others. I also heard a bit about Salishian languages, but the Nuxalk word "clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts", meaning "he had had a bunchberry plant", is brought up often for its masses of obstruent consonants. English is by far not the most cluster-convoluted language - and some of them, like initial "pt" or "ts", get routinely simplified ("pterodactyl" having a silent "p" is part of a joke, even though "pt" is among most routine clusters for Slavic language speakers). But, there are indeed also languages that have even less clusters - Japanese and Polynesian languages included, but also many Semitic and Mon-Khmer languages, and Finnish.
Twelve years of speaking English has made me realize one thing. Nobody cares how you convey information as long as you do it in a somewhat recognizable manner.
very true, as a native speaker who interacts with nonnative speakers on the daily, i do not care how you say it, as long as i have an idea of what you’re getting at; your english is perfect to me lol. one interesting thing tho! is as you learn other languages and interact more with people who are nonnative speakers your OWN speaking pattern changes. like my sentence structure in english, since moving to germany and speaking german, is fked a lot of the time😅and, as the people around you use articles with less frequency, it becomes easier to also slip into that a a sort of habit haha. like the other day i caught myself saying “you are now going? or?”
yeah we're pretty good at piecing together "broken" english and heavy accents given how many foreigners are learning or proficient in our language thats the one good part of it being both extremely extremely difficult (and common); it means we're used to non-standard ways of speaking. like, if someone spoke japanese with a heavy accent, it would be very very hard for japanese to understand because its not commonly spoken by foreigners, and its generally considered easy to pronounce, but english is the opposite for the opposite reasons
I am a 17 year old Indonesian and I can confirm that the way I acquired and learned english is by holding the philosophy of "f**K it we ball" and just stopped caring at the "rules" ( I believed that there are still errors in my comments here)
I can't believe you got all the way through the phonetics section without mentioning English "r"! That's one of the * actual * rarest sounds across world languages, and takes the longest to acquire for native English speakers too (iirc). Loved the video, though :-)
One thing I will say for English speakers is that we’re generally very tolerant of accents. Not even/only in a conscious way, but in that part of what it means to speak English is to be able to navigate General American English, RP, AAVE, regional US and British+Irish accents, and then the accents of all the L2 speakers out there.
@@0xyd You're both right and wrong there 😅 you're right that you can totally get away with substituting standard English 'r' with Scottish 'r' (I guess depending on the situation? You'd obviously be most successful in Scotland haha) and as a linguist I wholeheartedly agree with speaking in whatever way is most natural for you. However, for a lot of English learners, they want to sound like speakers from England or America, and in those dialects, the "r" sound is quite tricky. We only really pronounce it one way that I know of, though some of us (hello England natives) drop it in certain contexts, like the end of a word. So it's challenging to learn!
Yeah, that sound is exceedingly rare in terms of how many languages it appears in, but 2 of said languages happen to be the 2 most widely spoken in the world. Living in France, I used to hear it as some kind of /w/ which also seems to be a stereotypical feature of how children speak in the English-speaking world.
it does that because, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, Vikings, Normans, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Great Vowel shift, type setters form Belgium and the Holland. That is why, in a word history.
I agree. As a Korean who has learned English as a second language, I will die on a hill claiming that article adjectives are stupid; excessive conjugation is stupid too. I also remember practicing "th-" pronounciation as a kid everyday to sound more native. Even after speaking it for 20 years, I still inappropriately use "in/on/at" prepositions sometimes :( To be fair, US's Foreign Service Institute categorizes eastern laguages (i.e., Category IV: Korean/Japanese/Chinese/Arabic) as one of the toughest languages to learn for English speakers, and vice versa. Good video. It validated all of my frustrations from learning this crazy language lol.
Don't feel bad about not being grammatically perfect and don't worry about not knowing how to pronounce a word correctly. having traveled all over the English speaking world I've come to realize the best rule of thumb to go by when speaking English is If you say whatever you're thinking with confidence, people will understand what you mean and won't really realize your "mistakes" 👍
Dude i'm literate in portuguese, english, and spanish (even doe i don't quite remember spanish quite well). Fucking hell i hate kanji, fuck that bro, fuck that. I tried learning japanese but i can't wrap my head around kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are okay and makes sense in my head but what the hell man why everything has to be written in a different way (talking about kanji)? Just use goddam hiragana but noooooooooo, different kanji with same pronounciation means different things, by rule you just can't infer meaning from context cause you need the kanji. I have to learn a new word and learn how to write it's fucking ideogram. Whyyyyyyyyy? 😭😭😭😭😭 Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg and my arm... even my fingers... the body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting. It's like they're all still there. (Ofcourse i'm being overly dramatic for comical reasons and i might just said things that are wrong, bear that in mind. I love category V languages but fuck ideograms, i guess i'm just too dumb for that.)
@@NirousPlayers as a Chinese advanced student (almost C2) and having studied up to intermediate Japanese at University, a trick I use to remember Kanji/Hanzi is to think of them as pictures. I know it might look "useless", but remembering the meaning of the radicals (most of times, not always) can really help you remember words because they repeat themselves too often. For example, 穿 (chuán) in Chinese means "to wear", if you split its radicals or "parts" you've got: 穴 (xué, which means cave or hole), and 牙 (yá, tooth/teeth), so I picture a little mouse boring into a piece of clothes with its little teeth. So when I want to remember and write 穿 I don't think only about it's physical shape, but with the image of a mouse sticking its head out of a hole in a tiny piece of clothes. Indeed, 穴 (xué) is also used in other common words like "穷" (qióng, strong). for which I picture a strong caveman in a cave. Also, something that happens in Chinese but not so often in Japanese (only with Onyoumi readings), is that some Hanzi/Kanji radicals/"parts" can tell you the approximate pronunciation. As an example, continuing with 穴(xué, hole or cave), the word 空 (kong, air or space) is formed with radicals 穴 and 工 (gong, work or skill), so I just add a radical to a Hanzi I already know. These are my tricks for remembering Kanji and Hanzi, I hope they were useful!
The easiest way to learn English from my experience is just accepting that spelling is random and learning it primarily through feel and exposure. Sure that's only viable if you already have a base for it and is majorly helped if you have a similar language, but the one great strength English has is the massive amount of content in it, and you should make use of it. I was really bad at it as a kid but once I started watching everything in English with subtitles, that where I started to progress, because eventually I didn't need them anymore, and now my parents complain my English is better than my Portuguese lol
Wait so did you watch everything in English with English subtitles or Portuguese subtitles? Just wondering since it’d be interesting to know how I can apply it to learning a language in general 🤔
It's not _completely_ random, but there are enough cases where sounds change based on what's around it (even syllables away) and where spelling is preserved from non-English languages despite using (partly) native pronunciation that it may as well be.
@@kuyaleinad4195 not OP but definitely use subtitles in the language you're trying to learn. Using subtitles in a language you don't know helps you map the spoken language to the written one, and it can make it easier to process difficult chunks of the language so you don't get lost. Subtitles in English makes it easier for your brain to skip all that nonsense and watch the movie, which is not helpful in the long run.
English is hard for foreigners to speak fluently on native level, but it's very easy to start, which makes it good enough as a lingua franca. Even with bad English we can communicate across the world, even if some of us drop "the" and the others mixup "v" and "w". Many other languages are harder to start. Small grammar mistakes in Russian, Spanish, Arabic or Chinese can make sentences incomprehensible to both learners and natives.
That’s how I feel too! To speak proper perfect textbook English is a feat most native speakers don’t even accomplish, but to speak “good enough” English is something anyone can do.
hard to master, but very easy to learn. As this video said, some ESL speakers will have a really hard time figuring out when to say "the" properly, (russians seem to just sprinkle it all over the place randomly) but it really doesn't matter at all. You can drop all "the" from the english language and it's perfectly comprehensible. And as you said, meanwhile, if you drop such a ubiquitous thing from other European languages, you may not be understood at all. It's a bit annoying when people say "english is hard", it just shows they have little foreign language experience.
I think this is what makes English make sense for the global language. Anyone who acts like they can’t understand a foreigner speaking broken english is lying.
@@moonasha i am a native russian speaker and i heard other russian speakers express the same sentiment about our own language - that we can still understand what someone means even if they get all the grammatical endings/cases/genders wrong... I dont know how true that is, just saying that as a native speaker one might have a bit of a bias there
@@jen_sa I believe it, after all English at one point had a case system and genders, and now it doesn't...я уверен если писать как этот вы ещё понять что я иметь в вид. по-мой много вещи в этот язык излишние. That should be broken enough, lol
Okay, so. Your pronunciation, of EVERYTHING, is outstanding!! How dare you just read all those words in so many different ways/accents ACCURATELY?? I admire that so much honestly
@@rogerwilco2 We are just not used to people doing that, because nobody gives an excrement. Not too long ago, UA-cam gave me a (german) ad in which that the English word "intimate" was one of just two words in the BRAND NAME ITSELF and they pronounced it "in-tea-mate" in the refridgerating ad that they spent thousands of Euroes on. That was when I learned that smaller content creators mispronouncing gömböc or kierteishäntäkarhu is really not that big of a deal.
@@rogerwilco2 Hey now, hold on, practice with the internet does not make pronunciation universally easy. If you've never encountered a sound that you need to pick away at for days or weeks to get right, you're an extreme exception. Most people will have certain sounds they just can't nail down in a reasonable amount of time, and I don't think a fair response to that would be, "well, spend an unreasonable amount of time."
I learned English as a kid and French is my first language. It’s weird because I always thought of english as being easier to learn than French, since it has no grammatical gender and no complicated verb system. I think the way they teach English at school makes it seam easier because there are less rules to learn, but at the same time that is exactly why it’s hard: you’re just supposed to grok everything and not rely on a rule.
Hear, hear! I have mentioned this in my comment. I have studied French and English as foreign languages. Rules are great. You learn a rule, internalize it and you can apply it to a thousand different times and words. English is not this way. There are a few grammar rules but most of the time, you have to memorize everything and this takes a lot of effort. In addition, this is why English learning plateau is harder than the French one. After you learn the few rules of the English language, you are an intermediate student and you need lots of learning to get to the advanced level.
Non t’as raison - l’anglais est évidement beaucoup plus facile que le français. Pour un français, la chose la plus difficile serait sans doute la prononciation.
Using French as an example of having an easier tense system is weird. French has an objectively harder tense system and the conjugations are much harder to remember.
@@shadowyzephyr Yes, but once you get the hang of it, it's easier. I mean apart from some irregular verbs (which English has many), verbs of the same group are conjugated the same way.
Back when I was in highschool, we learned a little bit of French since it is mandatory in canada, and the French accent is just something that I couldn't learn. Speaking French with a North American accent just doesn't sound right, and while the learning the conjugations and rules were hard for me, I can see how it makes more sense than in English. Like if you learned the rules it would be more applicable to the entire language as a whole, but as an English speaker, it was hard for me to learn it. That and the female and male noun stuff, but it seems English is the odd language for not doing that, my mothers tongue, Arabic, has gendered words like that. But I really don't remember much of it. I think languages are like muscles, you don't use it , you lose it. My French was never great but it is much worse now than it was back then since I've never had to use it in my life.
as an english speaker learning chinese i think the hardest part for me has been letting go of articles. it’s so instinctual for me to want to add them bc i don’t think the sentence will make sense otherwise but chinese doesn’t have them and you’ve perfectly described that frustration but in reverse! thank you!
As someone who speaks both English and Chinese fluently, this video did explain a lot of the peculiarities I did hear from my Chinese family members learning English. Also explains why I often hear people with Russian accents dropping articles.
As a Chinese speaker learning English. The video is really true to me. But one thing left is plural. We don't care that much about plural, especially when it reacts with the tense of verbs and auxiliary verbs. My brain can't just be able to run those grammar rules simultaneously when speaking.
At first when I started learning Japanese every sentence without plurals and articles felt wrong lol, especially without a plural form XD I'm more used to it now though :3
@@gameragodzilla you know, for me russian accents always sounded natural speaking english. Like, when you uniformly drop the articles, it sounds like you just speak a different kind of english.
Mandarin Chinese was actually my second language, and I *immediately* appreciated how easy it was to learn the grammar. The writing, reading, and sound discernment was all very hard of course, but the lack of tenses and article words was a blessing to someone who avoided learning Spanish due to that exact confusion! Measure words, however, are still beloathed lol. 个 is still my go-to, and I just hope I’m understood 😭😂
I laughed a lot when watching the video and wandering in random comments, and when reading your comment, as an native Chinese I smiled and later started thinking about the question. Then I realize, indeed, measure words are difficult - I took a while thinking about it (and hope it may help), yet even got myself confused. I'm so used to the system just like got used to heartbeats and blood flow, but how to explain it to other people? Well, I still got a key that works for me hours later and hope this may work for you too. When using measure words, Chinese people think about the item measuring and its related feelings, then categorize it to confirm which word to use. For example, "a bunny doll" may be "一个兔子玩偶" or “一只兔子玩偶”, the different is which category you put it in. The speaker may be slightly more focused on "兔子(bunny)" part and use the "small animal catagory" measuring word "只", or vice versa, slightly focusing on "玩偶(doll)" part and using 个, which is "general put-everything-in catagory" and also explains your question... It's all right to confusing about using it, just like I may have a pile of tense errors in this comment, nobody would laugh at you in China for it as most Chinese don't quite care about it either. The question "when to use 个" is hard, yet it would be easier to answer "when not to use 个", as most times Chinese use the most specified measure word. For example, in ”一台冰箱“ a fridge, "一台彩电" a TV, the measure word 台 indicates the item is heavy but still movable and probally electronic item, "一口锅" a pot, ”一口井“ a well, word 口 indicates it's big (usually more than half meter in diameter), round and hallow item. But when it comes to ”电饭锅“ a electric rice cooker, it's not quite big to fit "口", and it may fit ”台“ as it's electric and movable, so you may found that most Chinese say "一台电饭锅" or "一个电饭锅", and far less "一口电饭锅", which may means a huge one for diners and restaurants. And "个" most using with when comes to generally references like "一个原子" an atom, ”一个侦探“ a detective, something abstract like "一个说法" a saying, or rarely coming with demeaning someone like "一个笨侦探" a foolish detective (as contract, "一位好侦探" a good detective where ”位“ indicates praising and ”一名侦探“ a detective specified both ”一“ one and ”侦探“detective). Hope all these helps - and I also hope I did explained myself as I didn't write long in English for maybe 2 or 3 years and just found all "category" typed as "catagory" before clicking reply button *sigh*. Also I'd recommend ”汉典“ www.zdic.net/ , a huge and free online dictionary for Chinese users and learners.
"个" is a fine go-to. Measure word can make a difference in the meaning though: 一个面包 means one bread aka a loaf of bread, whereas 一片面包 means a slice of bread. Similarly 一个蛋糕 vs. 一块蛋糕 (a cake vs. a piece of cake). yì tiáo lù means a way, yì zhí lù means a deer. yí guàn jiàng means a jar of sauce, yí 点 jiàng means a bit of sauce, yí 位 jiàng means a general/commander.
This reminds me how Spanish is similar to English and been taught English since I was small, so even as a non native speaker, I didn't realize how hard English is.
@@helloiamenergyman verdade, todas essas conjugações inúteis do português são pelo menos usadas mais comumente no inglês. Sério, quem usa "tu vás" em português? Such bullshit
You're right. If you take enough steps back, all languages are similar. But if you're looking for something *really* similar to English, you're searching for Norwegian and Dutch. And if you want something similar to Spanish, take a gander at Latin or French.
As a native hawaiian, I think its really cool you brought up ʻōlelo hawaiʻi as an example! Totally was unexpected, but nice to see Polynesian languages being mentioned in these language videos =D
Had a debate last night with a guy. He said Hawaiian’s aren’t a form of Asian and I said yes they are because they are Polynesian. Hawaiians are considered a form of Asian right?
As someone who grew up in America, but in an area full of immigrants from all over the world, I haven’t experienced the struggle but I’d like to think it’s made me more cognizant of it. I’m not fluent in any language but English. I was a supervisor at a very large distribution center that employed a significant number of non native English speakers. A large portion of the employees were West Africans who could speak French (including my wonderful boss, Ousmane Ba). People spoke varying degrees of English, but many spoke very little English and were just learning. I found out for some people it was easier to try to communicate in my TERRIBLE French than in English. Which in a tiny fraction of a way helped me understand how they felt trying to communicate in English. I had taken three years of high school French, so not a language I’d tried to communicate in outside of a classroom environment. Many of the people I worked with immigrated to America with almost no English experience and zero classroom education in the language. I absolutely cannot imagine trying to learn a language that way.
I have switched to French, Spanish, German, Italian, even Greek on occasion, when people struggle and I know/figure out which language they might be more familiar with. And one case of Dutch when interacting with some people who spoke Afrikaans.
I was born speaking English and I still get a lot of stuff wrong, or use things kinda vaguely when i don't really understand why certain things are used when. heh
As a native Mandarin speaker, one of the hardest parts of English phonology for me is the reduction of some sounds and learning to _not_ pronounce every single letter in a word. Many vowels are reduced to schwa seemingly arbitrarily, and final Ts tend to be reduced to glottal stops (for example, “what” becomes /wəʔ/). Not to mention the syllabic consonants like how “button” is pronounced as /bʌʔn̩/. It becomes more difficult putting these parts together to pronounce a sentence, which in rapid speech sounds completely different than how the individual words are spelled. (“What are you doing” /wəˈɹ̠jəduɪŋ/)
@@malcolm_in_the_middle Unless you are in the American south and or the Appalachian Mountains then just speak like Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
I am a native English speaker, and although I do convert random vowels into Schwa all the fucking time, DO NOT REDUCE YOUR Ts TO GLOTTAL STOPS! I know a lot of native English speakers do it, but they are A L S O D O I N G I T W R O N G A N D S O U N D H O R R I B L E! I hate when people do "wəʔ" it just sounds terrible, please don't pick up that habit from people. If you don't, you can get the dubious honor of speaking better English than them.
5:24 that is in fact quite relatively recent a linguistic change. In old literatures you will most likely find such constructions as “I believe it not” rather than “I do not believe”
indeed, previous to this, the "don't" negative was an emphatic one, just like the "do" affirmative is emphatic ("I DO play"). for some reason, negative emphatics have a tendency to become the standard negative in a language - it happened in French too, for instance, with "pas" initially being an emphatic adverb and then transitioning into being the main negative particle ("je dis pas", with "ne" often ignored in speech) It happens so commonly that there's even a name for it, the Jespersen Cycle!
People have already mentioned stress accent but let me reiterate how difficult it is for people coming from languages with no stress accent. It's like how english speakers dread learning mandarin tones but in reverse. And messing it up on a noun/verb pair (like present vs to present) can make it a lot harder to understand what people are saying
It doesn't help that spelling gives absolutely no clue as to where the stress is in a word, unlike other languages like say, Spanish which does take it into account for every single word.
@@Ramk0core Uh, no, plenty of words in Spanish have syllable stress but not all of them have the tilde where the stress is. The only ones that do have the tilde are the esdrujulas and the llanas and agudas that don't end in the correct. Llanas that don't end in n, s , or a vowel are written with an accent mark where the syllable stress is. And agudas tat don't end an consonant tat isn't n or s also have to be indicated were te stress s. It's only the exception to the rule that gets a tilde. Meaning you still need to have a grasp of the spoken language to tell where the sylable stress is or just memorize them from seeing them soi often.
@@ivetterodriguez1994 It's not marked for every word, but the writing system does tell you where to put the stress if you know the rules. Why don't we just mark stress for every word? I guess they wanted to save up on ink during medieval times and then it just stuck.
For any non-native speakers who worry about their pronunciation: English being a lingua franca means native speakers like me hear a LOT of different accents (there are plenty of accents in English itself) so your pronunciation and grammar really does not have to be perfect for someone to understand you. I feel like the biggest thing is getting consonants right, vowels are super flexible (American english especially blurs vowels into that “uh” vowel sound all the time). If you want to say “I want to buy a car”, I will probably understand if it sounds like “Ay Went Tu Bey a Care” If you say it like “I Vend Du Bey a Ger” I will probably not understand. Maybe that’s just me, but in my experience the hardest accents to understand are ones that pronounce vowels weirdly and also cant bridge them together with English consonants. It can make an entire sentence sound like gibberish
It sucks when dealing with older people over the phones though. I used to work in call centers and people were like I wanna speak with an American when in fact I am one. 😭
As a Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka Chinese speaker, who is learning English and German, I believe much difficulty is due to the different language systems. Any Chinese guy would find Japanese much easier than English. However, I find German easy to learn once I have mastered English because they share the same system.
Yep, the main difference with German/English is German doesn't use "do" the way English does, e.g. "do you want" is "willst du" or something, not "tun du willst". Also German puts verbs mostly on the end of a sentence, AFAIK. Plus it's even more fussy with articles (der/die/das/den/dem/des = the/of the).
@@JohnOstrowick verb goes second, and if there are two verbs, for example a helper verb like have, and another verb like seen, ie have you seen, then the verb second one is put at the end. Hast du den Hund gesehen? For ex
@@JohnOstrowick In the main sentence, put the conjugated verb to the second position and, if existent, the unchanging verb at the end. In neighbouring sentences, put the conjugated verb at the end and, if existing, the unchanging verb right in front of it. Be aware that neighbouring sentences might substitute for a position, ergo placing the verb in the main sentence directly behind the comma. E. g.: "Dass Hunde gerne Wurst essen, haben wir alle gewusst" (We all knew that dogs like eating sausages)
I'm an American, but I've talked too and listened to foreigners speak on the internet. They often say our biggest export is our culture (which includes the English language), like they say when you're watching a movie it's either from your home country, or American.
@@fasteddy9312 Exactly! I've been to more than a dozen countries and the amount of American influence is quite surprising. The last country I visited was the Philippines, and I was staying at this modern district called BGC. You can find almost all the American food chains you can think of, like Denny's, Fridays, Chili's, Krispy Kreme, Shake Shack, Buffalo Wild Wings, etc, in the Metro area. People listen to American music, watch American films, American brands is ubiquitous. Even when I studied in France back in college(2015), the movies that I've watched with my host family were American films with French subtitles. All my host brother listened to were music from American artists. And many slangs we use here in the US, a lot of the younger generation know or use. Culture is our biggest export lol
@@alistairt7544 well yeah, the Philippines was colonised by the us for quite a while (even if not officially, it was effectively colonised), hence the amount of american influence. Hell, even our government uses english more in writing and enforcing laws more than our national language. i could go on an extensive rant about how it further separates the educated and privileged from most people which contributes to the increasing gap in income and opportunity in the country, but I've rambled long enough.
You should’ve mentioned how English also has more vowel sounds than most other languages. Most languages have between like 8-14 but English has over 20.
We're taught AEIOU and sometimes Y. A: apple, agent, all E: ebony, evil I: igloo, ice, in O: otter, orange, ooze U: under, uvula Y: just copy e? I seem to be missing a lot.
My mom's second language is english (first is bengali) and I've always told her that her english sounds fantastic even with the accent and even if she wants someone to check her writing, it's readable, but this video is helping me understand why she's self conscious.
As a Georgian who has learned C2-level English, I've completely forgotten how hard the language is. I take a lot of these things for granted now, but I can never forget how much I struggled with the non-sensical pronunciation of words like "shore" and "sure"
like "For Shore" vs "for sure" even worse in the American South where you can go "far shore to the right of the Catawampus house for a tab and get were you want to be.".
The pronunciation is the worst for me. It is so confusing when you have a language where you have very few silent lettres in a word (3 ways to lengthen a vowel: die, dehn, boot and 2 ways to shorten a consonant: heck, tritt and 3 sounds comprised of several lettres: schnee, ich, ei). Every other sound is directly linked to a lettre. No they're, there, their. No view and few. No thourough, taught, thought, through, though (I mean there is a reason why people write this one as tho: it is half as long and sounds exactly the same). The worst offender tho is any word that has a silent e at the end, because it impacts the vowel before the last consonant. Why not write write as wrait or wreit or wriet to avoid confusion with writ (a short i sound instead of the long one of write). When I hear a german word I dont have to ask myself how it is written (except for some edge cases, mostly with long i sounds or consonant clusters, like Schifffahrt, but even those follow certain rules. Also certain is a perfect example for how to avoid the silent e ending, like in octane. Except for the origin of the word there is no reason to expect one spelling over the other...). When I hear English it can happen, that when I try to look up the word I get a completely unrelated result, because I used the wrong spelling, even tho phonetically I was correct.
I think the -ough words are the toughest (see what I did there). Hard to say as a native speaker, but there’s a lot of variation as to how it is pronounced
@Giorgio Fegatini I often forget that there are people who actually try to learn the Georgian language. I do not understand why someone would do that, but I still respect the hell out of someone who makes even a small bit of progress in what I imagine to be a VERY painful process.
@@steggyweggy True, learning to pronounce the -ough words is rough, and I've certainly had a tough time with it. No matter how thoroughly I tried, it was never enough. I've come to accept that some words can only be learned through trial and error. Although there may be a useful rule somewhere, it probably would have too many exceptions for anyone to care. Unless we have some kind of breakthrough in language learning, we'll have to stick with the rigorous process of watching English movies and talking to English-speaking people. Although it's not efficient, it definitely is fun.
That's interesting and nice to keep in mind, but even as a Hungarian speaker (a language that's very different from English), I find English much easier than most other European languages. For example, English only has an extremely simple version of verb conjugation (adding an "s" to the verb in singular third person, present tense), this is so much easier than German, Spanish or French or pretty much anything else I know of. English also doesn't have a grammatical gender, and has easier word order rules than French for example. "I give you the book." or "I give you this" have the same order when "this" takes the place of "the book", but in French, in if you substitute the object with a pronoun, its place in the sentence gets switched, and the same is true with the dative. Similarly, the placement of adjectives. In English (and Hungarian for that matter), they are always before the noun they refer too. "The good dog", "the white dog", "the naughty dog", but in all the Romance languages, sometimes it's before and sometimes it's after, depending on the adjective, one more thing that you have to memorize and consciously keep in mind when you speak.
@@xunqianbaidu6917 Yeah, I get that the point of the video was mostly to tell native English speakers that the stuff they find basic and intuitive may not be so for everyone. Which is nice but I think it's also interesting that despite all this, I still think English is one of, if not the easiest to learn as a foreign language.
Fellow hungarian here. I studied german in high school and I found the gender system very hard, especially because the grammar is very heavily based on it (den or dem). Whats the gender of a noun? I know there are some rules, but it seems like there is no system and its a guessing game. Contrast that with spanish, only 2 genders, easily differentiated with some exceptions, and it doesnt really play a role in the grammar.
also, in english, you don't have to change the number of the other things that refer to the noun (except for verbs). you don't say "thes beautifuls girls", you say "the beautiful girls".
The way I’ve often heard it put is that English is easy to learn the basics, but an absolute pain to master - a lot of the most fundamental elements are simpler in English than in most other languages (which makes it straightforward to get a basic level of competency as second language), but things like pronunciation, spelling, tenses, and the sheer volume of vocabulary make it nightmare to come close to sounding like a native.
@Immortal Science of Hauntology - the proof that it is as hard as any language is the fact that most people don’t learn to speak it perfectly. Even with its apparently incredibly simplistic conjugations, people still can’t manage to remember to add an S for third person, or when to use present perfect, or to negate verbs with “don’t”.
I've been learning Japanese for the past three years about, and just merely learning a new language has opened my eyes in seeing how difficult English is. By no means is Japanese easy at my stage, but trying to think in either language helps me see some of the pitfalls English learners could fall into when learning my native language.
Speaking as someone who picked up Japanese and currently sits at late beginner/early intermediate level, it really put into perspective for me just insane the English language is and how lucky I am to have it as my native language. I fully agree with the comment on how English is "not a language, but rather three languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be a language."
i'm always fascinated with the kinds of English mistakes that people with different native languages make, and how they're caused by the ways in which those languages differ from English. I'm also aware that a lot of the time when something "sounds wrong" to native ears and can easily be corrected, that doesn't necessarily mean we understand the grammar behind it. The existence of these complicated and unintuitive rules which we nonetheless have a perfect subconscious grasp of is pretty crazy to think about.
Yeah, like how English has a very specific adjective order that must be followed. Every native speaker knows how to follow the order by heart and knows when someone messes the order up, but nobody can list the order off the top of their head.
Weirdly, as a Swede who speaks only English and a tiny bit of Spanish I can't understand spoken Dutch at all, but I can actually sort of read it. About as "easily" as reading Danish at least, which I've never learned either but that's a very closely related language to Swedish. (Meaning I can usually get the rough meaning of half to three quarters of a text.) As a sidenote, Afrikaans is even easier to read, on the level of Norwegian. Couldn't understand a word of it spoken, but reading is pretty easy.
Unrelated, when I heard Dutch spoke at first I thought it was Queen's English with a thick German accent or German with and thick American accent, be fore i realized I didn't understand a word.
I struggle a lot with the two present tenses in English. But I've realised that the "ing" tense is a liiittle bit similar to how we use a position verb with another verb in Swedish ("jag sitter och läser", "jag står och bakar" etc), and that realisation made it easier for me to understand how there can be two present tenses to begin with. I still struggle with picking the correct present tense in English though. I hope I got them all right in this comment at least.
Generally, -ing is when the action is currently being done, and the present simple tense is a general or habitual action. For example "I drink coffee" = I may drink coffee every day, every week, I've done it many times and I'll do it again. But "I'm drinking coffee" is when you're holding a cup of coffee as you speak. Also stative verbs use the simple present and very rarely the -ing form. "I love this house" for example, but "I'm loving this house" would sound strange.
@@Pining_for_the_fjords "I'm loving this house" doesn't sound weird at all. It's the same habitual/present thing, it's just a little harder to grasp because love is a much more abstract verb than "drink". "I'm loving this house" would be said in the context of a house tour, or even in the first few days/weeks/months of living in a house.
As a native English speaker the part of this video that made me go “wait wtf that is weird” was when you showed the phrase “I am doing yoga next saturday”. I’ve never thought about how odd that future tense is.
We use it to talk about future plans. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow. I'm meeting with the principal on Wednesday. And don't get me started about why we use a present tense to talk about something that has clearly happened in the past. (I've told you a thousand times!)
German does that too, in speaking, people seldom use the actual future tense. They just use the present and a word to indicate that it is, in fact, happening in the future.
@@w.reidripley1968 Yes. I agree. At 4:56 there is on the screen an example of past perfect (I had fucked off) and past perfect continuous (I had been fucking off). I paraphrase, of course, but what's your point? Or are you, Mr. Ripley, trying to catch me out on my phrasing of "something that had clearly happened in the past"? Are you aware that the past perfect in English is very often used to reference an event that happened before such a time that you are already talking about in the simple past? e.g., I had been fucking around all afternoon on the computer when I finally saw some boobies. Or ... When the police found the tatty remnant of John Wayne Bobbit's severed dick, it had lain in the snow for several hours. WTF is your point, Mr. Indeterminately-Talented Ripley? NB: If you are not a native English speaker, you should probably shut up here. If you are, you should probably know that I went to school to learn how to teach English to non-native speakers of English. That is, I know what the fuck I'm talking about, and I'm pretty sure you don't, and you should probably shut up now. 'M'kay?
My mind is blown how if you simply analyze the diffrences between 2 languages and how those diffrences makes it hard to speak for the foreigner, it completely explains the accents. The Russian and Chinese examples were gold
Yeah. As a native Russian speaker, I often find myself struggling a bit with those freaking articles. Like, how on earth should I know where to put my "the" or "a" next? I mean, yeah, sure, if we are talking not about some random butcher from street, but a specific one, widely known around the world, we will call him THE butcher. However, why did I just said "around the world"? Why is "the" there? I'm pretty sure it should be there, but why, exactly? Back in school my teacher told me that if you're writing or talking about something first time in the text/conversation you should use "a" next to it, like, "I had spotted a chicken at the back of the barn", but sometimes I see people just completely ignore that and it's really confusing, why this is the case. I consistently get C-1/C-2 ("Advanced") during tests but I still don't have a clue where it is correct to put articles and where it is not. Just kinda swinging it. Apparently, it just works. Well, most of the time, at least
@@VasiliyOgniov think of "world" as a planet. This becomes much easier then. When you talk about THE world you mean Earth world. When you say "a world" it might be some random planet or even just a concept. I never heard about using "a" when you introduce something to the dialogue. When you say "a chicken" it might be any chicken. But "the chicken" is that one specific chicken you saw somewhere or talked before or had in memory etc. You can think of it as a name when you use "the" and an object type when you use "a"
@@holesmak Oh. It does make sense, yeah. Okay, but isn't it kinda obvious that I'm talking about Earth in this context? We are yet to colonize any other planet, so when I'm saying "around the world", there is only one world to refer. However that logic ("this specific world") definitely checks up. So, "a" should be used when someone is referring to something non-specific opposed to something concrete? Is it a strict rule without exception or just a general one? Anyways, thank you for clarification
@@VasiliyOgniov you add context by adding an article. You might be talking about some fictional story or scientific discoveries and they are not limited to Earth. Also world may have different meaning. From "third world countries" to world as a solar system or even universe. So its better to clarify a bit using article. I don't know the rules myself its just something I figured out and got taught by my native English friend's. But generally yeah. I'm not aware of any exceptions but I'm sure there is
40 years studying English and counting...because you never stop learning. The first 20 years are the worst ones: most people in my country throw the towel after 10 years or so... It is very easy to grasp the basics of the English language and to get to the intermediate level. It is fast compared to other languages. Going from intermediate to advanced (meaning: I can watch a movie without subtitles, I can have a normal conversation with native speakers without sounding like Tarzan even if my vocabulary is limited) is the 40-year march of the Israelites through the desert. English has a plateau the size of Alaska and you feel like an Inuit. You only see snow and more snow and you think you don't progress because you only see a white landscape for years and years . Most people in my country never get through the plateau. I am one of the lucky ones that pulled it off. Once you get through the plateau, things are normal. Not easy, but normal. The worst things are spelling, phrasal verbs, grammar being more about memorizing every case than about rules and (number one) stress-timed rhythm. So people say "Hows gone" when they mean "How is it going?" (real example). You have to figure out what word is coming next. So if you don't understand a word, you can miss the entire sentence. This doesn't happen in other language: for example, in French, which I have studied as a foreign language too.
I couldnt disagree more. English has been by far the easiest language ive studied. The phrasal verbs are a piece of cake, the grammar system is the easiest ive seen (words dont even have genders and verb conjugation is insanely simple- and the absence of cases makes it incredibly easy to learn). You just have to learn the stress on the words, the same way you have to do it in e.g. Russian.
I like that analogy and it seems true to me. Foreigners I know get to a certain level after a few years, and that's usually where they stay for a very long time. But it's adequate. They're using English. They know more languages than I do.
As a french speaker, for me the hardest thing about english is lexical stress, French is one of the few languages without it (or at least it's so non-existent that NOBODY knows about it in France) and to this day I couldn't even tell you where is the stress in any english word
French lexical stress is just the last syllable of whatever goes. I'm a Russian speaker, Russian lexical stress is a mess you have to learn by heart so officially there's a rule that says "if the word is originally French, put the stress on the last syllable minus parts that were added in Russian". Ballet, boulevard, bouquet, actress, réalisateur (film/play director), parter, baguette (bread, also painting frame), baton (bread), comme il fault (exists as one world without blanc spaces), puree, bullion, côtelette (mean a different dish here though - minced meat balls), salad, pomme'd ore = tomato, menu (could write a long list of foods here), etc.
Tbf, I don't know many languages that do use lexical stress the same way English does, and it's sort of a nightmare for native English speakers too. Growing up, you see a word for the first time in writing, you just make a guess on where you think the stressed syllable is, internalise that and assume that's the pronunciation, then feel like an idiot when you say the word out loud later and everyone looks at you like you've lost your mind ones that spring to memory for me are celebrity and canal, I thought the stress went on the i in celebrity, and the first a in canal Also really annoying how the stress shifts in different variations on the same word (terrific/terrified)
@@crptpyrthis is because for the supermajority of any language’s existence, the supermajority of people were illiterate. That is to say, the problem with English stress is not with the speech, it’s with the script.
I've been living in Sweden for the past year and learning the language the entire time. The first time I realized that Swedish only had one verb tense that covered ALL possible instances of the present made me want to drop to my knees and weep with joy ^_^
The weird thing about English phonology is that it has big consonant clusters that are kinda hard to pronounce, but doesn't have many simple ones that are common in other European languages like /kn/ or /pt/ or /dl/.
@@robynkolozsvari English does have dl in the middle of words, like needless. But if you're talking about dl at the beginning of a word, I only know of Polish, which itself only has it in two words I know, dla (for) and dlaczego (why).
As someone who had some experience teaching English in Hong Kong, I agree that students struggle a lot with tenses. That combined with an obsession to have a single 'right' answer, led to different schools developing different 'the single right way of englishing', and made the students think that English is less flexible than it really is. For example, to help them understand when to use perfect tenses, we tell them that if we see the word 'since' + 'time', then they use perfect tenses, or we teach them if conditionals, which is very confusing for them when they just find people not conforming to the sentence structures of the 4 if-conditionals, because people don't just write thinking 'ah i will put a 1st if-conditional here'. Another thing i think is worth mentioning is the prepositions, it's something that even native English speakers will have some difficulties in, and really, if you think about all the different ways prepositions are used, you will realise that even when considering 'in' 'on' and 'at', it's still complicated and most of them will quite often either forget to use them at all, or be completely wrong.
Is there a correct way to use certain prepositions? Kind of an absolutist statement. Is it more inherently correct to say "I will work on Sunday" vs "I will work Sunday?" I think it would cause a big argument if one were to say one was more correct than the other. Unlike many languages, English has so many idioms and dialects, it can sound like you are imposing one standard on another if you start making corrections that just aren't correct in another dialect, which is why native English speakers have to be very careful when making corrections for minor things.
@@marmac83 Certainly there isn't one singular right way to use all prepositions, but 'I will work Sunday' does sound very unnatural to me, then again I am not a native English speaker. I'm only talking about what I noticed from people learning English in Hong Kong as their second language, as well as my own experience. Though I will say, that even with prepositions there is an obsession with 'the correct', in that my teacher used to teach us the proper way to use prepositions, like how 'on' and 'upon' are not interchangeable when used in the context of 'upon my arrival/on my arrival', and we can only use 'upon' I do have to say though, when people here learn English, there is much less a concern of what is correct and not correct in another dialect, we are just concerned with not losing too many marks to grammar mistakes and speaking fluently. And that usually also points to there being a single 'correct English' standard, if there is even one to begin with
This is very true. English is actually a crazily super flexible language. I am a Chinese Canadian, and I would much prefer to use the English translator to translate other languages. For example, the Japanese put their verbs at the end of the sentence. "I study Japanese at home tonight" would become "Tonight at home, the Japanese language is the one i study". However, Chinese always put their pronoun at the beginning of the sentence, so looking back at the sentence, it becomes something bizzare like "The Japanese language studies me". (only in soviet Russia?). Usually I would use the English translator when I play Japanese video games, but occasionally I would switch to Chinese because the Japanese and Chinese all have like 30 ways of calling "I" as a person. Anyways, i just wish everyone in the world all understands each others languages.
Many languages have that. Czech has it even worse. Spanish has para/por. And you know what? You dont even have cases in english. And for plurals you just have “s”. And you dont even modify words by the gender and quantity of the subject 😂 english is insanely easy, you just havent taught other languages.
As a non-native speaker of English. I'm surprised that he didn't talk about the actual hardest part of English pronunciation. The vowels. Most languages have on average 5-6 vowel sounds, while English has a whopping 20 distinct vowel sounds (if we're including diphthongs). Not to mention, the vowel letters (a e i o u) have more than one pronunciation.
It would be not hard if it got actual rules, the guarani has the rules of spanish except that the consonants actually sound how they should be (in spanish the J sounds like H) and is easy to learn the 12 vowels with that
I learned English as a foreign language primarily by immersion on A TON of native content, lots of tv shows, and I'm lucky to have the right to "not pay that much attention to these parts of the language (like pronunciation) because i learned it naturally through immersion. Imagine being a monolingual beta (if you know, you know)
lol same thing for me, i just listened to a lot of english content. It's a really good way not only to learn pronunciation, your brain also handles the usual word placements, how people use prepositions and articles, tenses, etc, so you will just have a feeling that it's right to say something that way and not the other, sometimes without even knowing a rule.
@@diobrando666 yeah, i basically didn't take English classes at school, except the ones that were mandatory, and there i learned to pronounce the verb "to be" as TOBY. Yeah, not so great. Edit: autocorrect is BS
as a native speaker english tenses have always been really interesting to me . its wild how i can just automatically understand something so complex that non native speakers take awhile to learn
@@epsi Then you hit Fish, fish and Fishes. Fish a bass, fish 2 or more bass, Fishes a whole kettle of different kinds of fish. By the way what is a "Bive"? It is old English it is plural what is one of them called?
"it's wild how I can just automatically understand something so complex that non-native speakers take a while to learn" No, it's not wild. It's known as a native language.
I'm so glad I learned English through experience like games and videos and not through school which not only sucks but explains things weirdly. I learned it not by learning rules but just by remembering how words are spelled and when to use them
My friend suggested that English should remain the world lingua franca because, since English is so hard to learn, people will preserve their native language and only use English when they _have_ to. "It's so bad, it's good!" That, or we can collectively agree to reform and standardize English to have consistent grammar, pronunciation, spelling etc.
Reforming it wouldn't make it any easier to learn, and it may very well complicate things for native speakers. But the idea it's so bad as a lingua franca that it encourages language preservation is hilarious!
@@gavinwilson5324 I don't agree... If we take difficult words and simplify their spelling (for instance, though becoming tho in informal writing) you'll spend less time having to learn both the pronunciation and the spelling, since knowing one induces the other. If native speakers get laxer with replacing dental fricative with /f/ and /z/ (or any other pair), then you don't have to learn to do/differentiate those, either. If "which" and "who" (and "whom", I guess) become synonyms, then you don't have to learn the grammar behind those. It's not easy, but it's not impossible!
@CJH36 Samueru btw, I know you guys can speak good English but sorry the accent really comes through and I can easily spot the pronounciation blunders a Norwegian makes while speaking.
Or we can maybe make a new artificial language with easy grammar easy pronunciation an easy writing system and a logical structure and then make it the international language.
English is definitely a tough language to learn but feel that its complexity is worth it because compared to other foreign languages you can be so damn specific with how you convey ideas, and this is all down to having extremely odd tenses/ sentence structures.
As a native speaker, English is incredibly malleable and can take form of anything you wish. Leading to beautiful poetry, books, and sentences that include words that can perfectly describe the situation.
When I was going to university I realized how difficult it was for people who used English as a second language to be specific. When I tried to learn other languages I realized many languages may have more simple words with highly specific contexts. The consequence of this kind of language seems to be an extraordinary inflexibility. The strict rules almost imposed restrictions on creativity. The more creative the subject or abstract the more the complexity of the English language came out and the harder it was for people I talked to to grasp certain concepts. When I tried to speak other languages I realized there was an odd efficiency to the English language. English is like drawing ven diagrams of meaning to derive hyper specific contexts even when there are no individual words that exist within the language to describe that. Other languages have to compensate with a much larger lexicon. A lot more words that are very prescriptive rather then intuitive. I have difficulty learning prescriptive language as a result. You have to speak in many more simple sentences rather then a combination of abstract concepts to derive specific ones. Someone who is very good with the english language can be the most concise over the largest number of concepts with the fewest sentences. By contrast being poor with English causes the exact opposite issue in which the concepts get messy far too quickly and things get lost in translation even between native speakers.
Yes! I love this about English, my native language lacks some of these features and I always feel weird not being able to do things like the "I do go" emphasis, sometimes I find myself literally unable to fully express myself in my own native language because of this. And that was an example in and out of itself, can't emphasize "my OWN language" like that in my own language 😂
thats basically what i was thinking like i have noticed a lot of other lauguages its like you cant really say certain things you can english because those words litreally do not exist or if they do its kind of limited.
To be fair, all languages are difficult. And yes, there are challenging parts about English as well. But, I have to say, I grew up in Sweden and I’ve learnt both German and English, and what I’ve learned from it is that English is actually, for basic proficiency, much simpler than the alternatives. You can easily convey your message in English, and you can often make basic sentences very quickly when learning the language. Compare it to something like German, where there are the dative, accusative, genetive and nominative cases, the nightmare of der das and die, and so on. English is extremely well suited for international business.
Honestly, I am glad that English became the lingua franca. It is not the easiest, but at least its grammar is simpler than most European language like German, french, Russian.
I learned Turkish, Russian, English at young age (plus my native language), learning German at the moment, and English feels like the easiest language in this list 😅 It has weird rules (“suggestions”), but for work and similar use cases it seems the easiest to use.
For German, you could speak without ANY declination and with SVO word order, and still be understood by native speakers. Like most languages, the hard part is learning the language fluently with perfect grammar, which i still sometimes struggle with in English after 10 years, especially pronouncing voiced consonants and using the correct past and future tenses.
@@EminMastizada English's relative easiness is also a product of its pervasiveness. There are simply far more instances where you'll be exposed to it passively and far more resources that are readily available (TV/Movies/Books etc)
thanks for the video! the thing about slavic language speakers having trouble with articles is very true; i'm polish and i've noticed that even relatively high level ESL speakers have trouble with those. tenses as well, honestly even i have to remind myself when to use present perfect vs present simple sometimes and i'm halfway through my master's in english lol. speaking from my experience as a polish ESL learner, i think people can sometimes forget how complex english can be because it's relatively easy to grasp the basics to be able to communicate, but then you get tripped up on something like the adjective order, lol.
I think articles are not so bad, they make sense most of the time. But present perfect sucks, definitely. As for adjective order, isn't it universal (at least in indoeuropean languages)? I've never memorized the rules for it, I think I learned from a Tom Scott's video that different types of adjectives are intuitively placed in the same relative positions.
(respectful) Counterpoint: English actually isn't that hard in the grand scheme of things, it's just harder than the average English may consider. English is much more grammatically simple than a lot of languages: no grammatical gender, simple verb conjugations, fewer tenses than some other languages, (arguably) no tones, very limited inflectional morphology, strict word order, SOV word order (fairly common, globally), not ergative/case-marking etc. I have John McWhorter as my professor rn and something he is always talking about is that English has lost a lot of its most difficult features centuries ago. Due to historical circumstances, English has had to have been learned by a lot of adults, and adults suck at picking up complicated grammar, so we have lost a lot difficult aspects that Old English had. Also the fact the English is not a language isolate, and actually comes from a massive language family, many people around the world natively speak a language that it related to English in some capacity, which will allow them to learn English much faster than otherwise. English is complicated, but most languages on Earth are generally much worse in some way. Yes, some of our systems are annoyingly inconsistent, but all languages on Earth have some inconsistencies, many of which are much worse. English is a dominant language on Earth for a reason (other than colonialism ofc). I'm not in a very intelligent state right now so I might have missed the whole point of your video -- I apologise if that was the case. I love your content!
a big problem with english for language learners that was touched on shortly at the very end is orthography. i mean, in almost every word in my last sentence, there’s gonna be no rules for stress, consonants and vowels do not sound the way they are taught, silent letters, different pronunciation when stringing words together vs. when they’re isolated, few rules for what pronunciation to choose for vowels and consonants, etc. english spelling is really a mess. it makes it a beautiful language for sure. also don’t forget the absolutely arbitrary and ridiculous amount of irregular plurals and irregular past tense/perfect aspect conjugations. i ate? he leapt? she felt? i rung? i shot? i brought, i could, i paid, it shone, it broke, it shook, it made, it flew, it thought, it shut, i won…
@@henrystoes6508 As a German learner, the simple past in German also has a lot of irregulars (that then spill into present tense and past perfect irregular conjugations as well) so I imagine it might be a frequent attribute of Germanic languages.
I agree with your comment. Learning English is hard no doubt, but it’s a relatively simple language grammatically. The hardest part is pronunciation but even then, many native English speakers are used to figuring out what a non-native is trying to say. Plus the vast amount of really good and popular media that is originally in English makes exposure to it a lot more frequent
The hardest part of the English language is that in order to pronounce words properly you have to learn each word separately. It's like each word spelling is it's own unique symbol for a pronunciation, with similarities to other symbols rather than rules.
@StellarKnight not really... in most languages I've seen, you can read and pronounce properly almost any word you see even without context the first time you see it.
@@Fetrovsky vietnamese and chinese fr, there are rules for how words should be written and they're pronounced exactly that way, you write the words how you pronounce them
Yes. I think it is the main reason that so many native English speakers throw their hands in the air and proclaim "I don't know how to pronounce this word", when confronted with a new word. I have been puzzled by that for a long time, as I know most words are pronounced as they are written. It's kind of the point of writing things, at least when using an alphabet. Except for English.
@@MrHkl8324 Chinese and Japanese (when written in Kanji) aren't phonetic at all, instead, the written symbols allude to the word's meaning. English is a language that tries to be phonetic, but fails at doing so. You can't tell how to pronounce a word just by knowing how to spell, nor viceversa. Instead, you have to memorize each word twice (once for spelling, once for pronunciation). Learning pronunciation is specially hard for non-native learners because of this, since they have no way to even grasp that there is a difference between the pronunciation of many different words.
I love how you, while presenting your argument, explained where the stereotypical accents come from - that’s a short but great deconstruction of the whole accents topic 💪
i'm brazilian and i studied when i was younger in a school where they taught as foreign languages spanish and english. i liked at first spanish bc it's similar to portuguese and it made me feel special lol really, pretty much every brazilian has a basic knowledge of spanish since it's common for us to travel to neighboring countries and meet tourists from these. when the classes went beyond the verb "to be" (it tends to repeat for a long time) i started finding english actually easier especially due to the verb tenses. in both spanish and portuguese the verbs are always tensed not only according to time but also to person and number and the irregular ones will be tensed irregularly in all tenses, so for example the verb "fazer" ("to do") in the infinite present tense is flexed in portuguese as + singular 1st person: "faço" + singular 2nd person: "fazes" + singular 3rd person: "fazem" + plural 1st person: "fazemos" + plural 2nd person: "fazeis" + plural 3rd person: "fazemos" language gender is also mostly absent in english. i only know these things bc it's my native language, but i get how hard it is for non natives. on the other hand i hate how inconsistent the pronunciation is in english. it is completely obvious in portuguese and even more in spanish but like the "ou" in "bout", "dough", and "thought" ??? there's no intuitive rule. i only know bc of practice
We're sorry about the spelling and pronunciation thing, but it's an unfixable problem by this point. For example, "Let me take off my boot because I'm about to have a bout of gout" In American English, "about" and "a bout" are only able to be told apart by rhythm. "About" and "a bout" both rhyme with "gout". In Canadian English, "about" almost rhymes with "boot", but "bout" still rhymes with "gout". In British English, good luck because the first question is asking "Which British English?" If we changed the spelling to fit the pronunciation, the sentence which can be understood by all becomes mutually incomprehensible.
aprendi mais aq nos 12 anos de escola slk. eu também estudava espanhol na escola e sai sem entender nada. achei muito mais difícil e as inclinações verbais muito mais irregulares do que no inglês. a única parte fácil pra mim foi a similaridade nos sons com o nosso português, de resto, ladeira abaixo
As an American English speaker I've certainly noticed a lot of these points while trying to learn other languages. This was a very good and fun video. I enjoyed it a lot. Usually when I think of people dealing with others struggling with English I think of people just talking louder. As if shouting or yelling would correct any confusion.
This brought smiles. As an elderly German student, who is a native English speaker, and in a class with native Mandarin and Spanish speakers, I can identify. I am often called on to explain details of English grammar. I am one of those fortunate souls who went to a grammar school and a high school where formal grammar was taught. In my first attempt at learning German in the days beyond recall I identified a word as a gerundive, though technically English doesn't have one. My German teacher then asked me what country I was originally from, as so few Americans learn the grammar of their native language.
The thing I find interesting though, is that English is one of the few languages where people can say absolute gibberish, and the common English speaking population can almost always understand what they mean.
@@Anonymous-df8it Being held back a grade, like being old enough to be in 4th grade but held back in the third grade. Been there done that. I was not diagnosed as having Dyslexia until I was a sophomore in collage.
Lovely video! 🤩 One of the things I love about English, which is hard for non-natives, is when to properly use the "to" infinitive, the "bare" infinitive, and the gerund to introduce embedded clauses: "I was planning on doing/*do the cleaning myself;" "I want to see Brasil defeat/?defeating Germany in the World Cup;" "I went *(to) take care of it." Another one is the subtle differences that arise from placing adjectives/participles after the noun, something in which English is very similar to Ancient Greek (attributive vs. predicative use): "I found the lit candle" vs. "I found the candle lit."
thank you for putting this into words so well because i've been learning korean lately and whenver i try to explain to friends or family that doing so has made it even more apparent that english sucks complete ass, they ask for an example and my mind goes blank. i will be referencing this in a lot of conversations over the next week, thank you :D
My first and only native language is Portuguese. My only exposure to English outside of the internet was when i spent only 2 weeks in Ireland. I recognize that as a speaker of a Latin based language, there'll be a lot of similarities between these two languages, but I have to mention, that to me English always seemed very easy. Yes there are things that can cause a notch on my mind but also sometimes I find myself struggling with a sentence cuz it's so simple, that it sounds off, I feel like it should be more complex. The things that you pointed out as not making sense are indeed nonsense, but they're so easy to remember that after a few times using them you're already used to it. I have only studied Germanic and Latin languages, and between them, I found English to be the easiest, there might be some less complex languages out there, but English is definitely a smooth language to learn.
You're right. This guy is just glossing over how most other popular languages have much higher initial barriers than English (e.g. tones, complex grammatical cases, crazy verb conjugations, gendered nouns, agglutination)
I would like to highlight that your written English is excellent for a non-native speaker who seems to have only picked it up from the internet. Better than many native speakers in fact.
I agree that English seems relatively easy to start learning (though mastering it is a whole different matter). What do you mean with similarities? I mean, Portuguese seems to have big differences; English is a germanic language. I'm native german and am surprised by some similarities; there are even a lot of words in english which are directly originated from german (kindergarden, zeitgeist, doppelgänger, schadenfreude etc.).
I’m an English as a Foreign Language teacher, and all my students happen to be Russian. I always emphasize that there are NO difficult or easy languages as a category, subjective difficulty and simplicity is determined by your linguistic, cultural and educational background. Compared with Russian, English really is easy IN CERTAIN ASPECTS, and compared with Chinese it is more difficult IN CERTAIN ASPECTS
I don't know, I think Russian has several features which make it absolutely brutal for non-slavic learners, mainly the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns and the grammatical aspect of verbs.
As a German learning english, one of the thing which confused me the most is when you say "I am *in* a car." but "I am *on* a train." Reading the logic behind this seems so arbitrary to me, since my imagination of the difference of being "in" or "on" something is whether you (or the object) are (is) surrounded by walls or not. So in my understanding if somebody says he is "on the plane" I imagine him being literally ontop of the plane, on the roof, the plane underneath him. While if somebody says she is "in the plane" I correctly imagine her being inside the cabin, surrounded by the side walls of the plane (and optionally the roof).
You can technically say "she speaks not," but people will probably think it sounds antiquated. Means not that it isn't fun though. (Then again I did have to restructure that sentence quite a bit to make it work.)
Lool exactly, it is completely understandable. Its kind of like reading Shakespeare but simpler. Most native English speakers, I reckon, can understand most of what's going on in a Shakespeare play, despite it being quite different from modern English, so these sort of English phrases like the one you brought, are easily understandable. I don't see an issue with people speaking that way at all.
As a foreigner (and a polyglot), l can say that English is one of the easiest languages, just because it is EVERYWHERE. Lots of stuff on the Internet is written in English, as well as in every bookshop or other resources you can find the English textbook, material etc. And the majority of the whole population is native, so it is not that hard. Much harder to study Japanese, because lots of useful things are in Japan, but not everyone can afford going to it.
@@eladpeleg745 Not necessarily. In japanese school children learn ≈1800 kanji. After going to uni, students know approximately +2000 kanji. Add up scientific terms and characters that person learns at work etc. and you have roughly 5000. However, it is sufficient to know ≈1800 for speaking japanese fluently (there is a list of kanji of each level, for instance beginner (N5) knows kanji 日(sun) 月(moon) and so on).
@@eladpeleg745 More primitive is implying a lack of sophistication and complexity, when in fact the opposite is true. Japanese as least in terms of space taken by individual characters is much more efficient than English in conveying information.
My favorite podcast Lingthusiasm has a interesting podcast on languages from empires, where they make the case that actually, English IS easier than most to learn by the same rule that makes Mandarin Chinese and Persian easier to learn. The more non-natives that have to learn and speak the language, and the longer the language has existed as the language of the empire, the more the difficult parts of the language will just drop out of use. This is why Mandarin Chinese has only 4-5 tones when most languages in the region average at 8 or more tones, or why Persian's tenses are easier than most languages in that region (if I remember the podcast's example right, might be wrong about why they said Persian was easier). BUT, for the same reason that it's about the age of the language as an empire's language and frequency of correct usage by speakers, that's also what gives us the most annoying thing of all. The more common something is, the longer it takes for it to lose what makes it difficult. This is why most of the irregular verbs in a language are the most commonly used words. So frustrating!
English tenses are by far the hardest thing for me. I'm from Germany and we pretty much spent most of our time in school learning the rules, but I just can't remember them. I got very bad grades in middle school because it was all about the rules. Almost everything I know about languages is intuition, even in German, so my grades got a lot better with experience.
I'm sure you do a pretty good job, though it also works in reverse from a native English speaker ... the German simple past tense (does it sufficiently replace all the forms we use in English (imperfect 'was doing', etc. plus a 'once off happening' (... I did, ... did do, etc.)) ... plus the concept of a past conditional passive in a sub-clause (three or four verb bits at the end of the sentence, I've always found mind-blowing!! :) )
Fun fact: oddly enough, English shares three of its most unusual phonemes with a totally random and completely unrelated language: Cree. The English r, short i, and th are all also present in the western dialects of the Cree-Innu-Naskapi dialect continuum. Also, we need to bring eð and þorn back because as it stands, there is literally no possible way of knowing whether a th is voiced or not. You just have to already know.
Yes, but as it was the same in old english. Those two symbols having different meanings in English dictionaries is a modern creation of the IPA alphabet. In old English both represented th in voiced and unvoiced forms and was sometimes just up to the writer to choose one. That’s why thorn remained popular in written Middle English and eth died out centuries before. Regardless of which you used, it’s assumed to be unvoiced by default but you usually voice it when between vowels, so when it’s voiced at the end of a word we add an e like bathe or lathe. The only real problem nowadays is th at the beginning of words. If the two old English th graphs were consistent we would’ve just kept them because that’d be cool and useful instead of using a digraph, but they weren’t and th is the best we’ve got.
@@jacobhayes4085 I guess if you read it that way, your response makes sense. What I meant was we should use them for modern English to distinguish between the th in 'this' and the th in 'thing' like they do in Icelandic.
@@kklein Actually Japanese not have present tense. They called past and non-past. Because the non-past can be present and future too. Which in fact makes the japanese tenses very easy (atleast for my Hungarian nativeness which use the same past non-past method, except for only one verb what have a future form too).
@@tovarishchfeixiao Technically, English also has Past and Non-past. The "future tense" is just the same as present conjugations, sometimes adding the "will" particle (which doesn't qualify it as a separate tense, "will" is just like other particles like "would" or "must", and there's no "would tense" or "must tense"). be going to, present continuous and even the present simple conjugation can be used in a future sense.
On the other hand, the tenses are much simplified compared to many other European and other languages that have six or so versions for each tense. For most American verbs, it's just "V / V(e)s" like "go / goes" for one tense. Lots of other languages have many more. Also, the articles don't change based on gender or number, and the adjectives don't change depending on gender or tense. There are no declensions. Some tenses just use an extra verb (like "will") rather than new conjugations for that tense. Spelling is inconsistent, but English doesn't have thousands of characters to remember. And more...
i would definitely analyze maximal English syllable structure as CCCVCCCC, not CCCCVCCCC. in the case of "strengths," the initial three consonants would be /s tʃ ɹ/ (or /s t ɹ/ for some) not /s t ʃ ɹ/ (and the final four depends on analyzing the coda as /ŋ k θ s/ rather than /ŋ θ s/ with homoorganic stop insertion but the four-consonant analysis feels more reasonable than for the onset)
"angsts" arguably ends in 5 consonants though this is uncommon... plenty of "texts" "sixths" and "twelfths" to go around to justify the CCCC coda I definitely dont think the... palatalized? (is that the right word) "t" sound that appears in "tr" is helpful to analyze as 2 different consonants
@@urinstein1864 i'd argue that unlike /tʃ/ which definitely appears as a true affricate (phonologically acting as a single consonant), /ts/ in English should be understood as a cluster. phonetically you could count this as an affricate, but phonologically it kinda has to be a cluster (no distinction in usage between eg laps, rats, tacks /læps/ /ɹæts/ /tæks/, plus the morpheme boundary in the specific case of "texts"); no /ts/ phoneme in English
I love that English has both "He's not" and "He isn't" side by side which have similar meanings but not identical meanings to most people. Plus, English tenses don't always match with other languages that do have tense because semantics means English tenses do a lot of heavy lifting: "I ate" and "I have eaten" both signify a past event, but only one has (default) effect into the present day... and it's not the "simple past". The future construction isn't always considered a real tense (because "shall" and "will" are modals expressing intention) and present tense verbs often signify future effect (e.g., "I see the doctor in five days" is a future expression and not a present one). English is... an odd duck.
It's a bastard language, cobbled together from old French, German, Latin, Celtic roots. I love the adaptability and the expressiveness that's possible with all the different ways you could choose to phrase the same information. It makes the poetry so rich and nuanced.
You also don't have to follow it's rules. You'll still be understood. You can make English do whatever you want it to. When I was 11 I cared deeply about spelling and rules and I would correct my teacher. But I've learned that 'poor' English is still English. It's richer and more complex and more alive than some people would like it to be.
I think those are more like general reminders that any language will be hard to learn if your own language is very different from it. For me, English actually stands out as a pretty easy language to learn compared to my own (as in, I've had a lot less trouble learning English than an American would probably have learning Portuguese)
Thank you for speaking out for us non English people! Even though I spoke English growing up, it's not the so-called "native" version, but a localised and simplified version (I'm Malaysian). The pronunciation is quite hard for me sometimes, I can never distinguish some sounds which English speakers seem to see as different, such as the "u" in "but" and the "a" in father, or the "a" in "cat" and the e in "met". It took me years to learn to pronounce the "th" properly, even then, something I just slip back into "t" or "d". To be fair, for the spelling part, my knowledge in Chinese helped me a bit, that is to not expect consistency in the English spelling, but to memorise every word as if I memorise Chinese characters. As for the future tense, I pretty much give up on the subtle differences and just speak whatever I feel is right, but that's of course not okay with exams.
A feature that is tricky to most learners of English are the phrasal verbs. From the spanish perspective (wich is my mother tongue), there is a single word for each action, and to learn that in English you can change the meaning of a phrase by adding a preposition constantly makes you wonder wether the action that you want to express needs a preposition or not. Also, I would add comparatives and superlatives as sth a little tricky for some people.
For me, the problem with the consonant clusters isn't even the sheer amount of consonants there can be in a row, but that some combinations of sounds are really hard to pronounce, it took me a while to be able to pronounce /ɝl/ (the "rl" in "girl" and "world"), and I still have trouble with words like "depths" (/p/, /θ/ and then /s/, seriously??? I just say /depfs/, still awkward but pronounceable)
To be fair, there are non-rothic English accents that doesn't pronounce the R in "girl" and "world". The R only appears if the next letter is a vowel. So /ɡɜːl/ and /wɜːld/.
For the former, you could just opt to drop the r completely. One of the two main accents of English does, giving /əː/ instead of /ɚ/ for /gəːl/ and /wəːld/. Even without dropping it completely, there are a lot of ways to pronounce /r/ that seem to be accepted, though [ɹ̠ʷ] is standard for the most part. For the latter, personally, I barely pronounce the "p" in "depths." Pretty much all I can hear of it is just the pop from the mouth opening. /θs/ from what I can tell seems to largely just be starting a /θ/ and then quickly pulling my tongue back to make the /s/. That said, swapping /θ/
Since English is already accepted as the international language, if we ever make it the official international common, it should probably be a simplified cut down version, but also have it be backwards compatible with English.
I am a russian-speaking finnish-learning person, English for me got quite easy after maybe 3 years of hard work on studying. The only actual problem there was was perfect tenses, as Russian doesn't have anything like it, but a simple explanation made it bearable
I'd argue about that, Vitas. Russian gets there -- by way of verb aspect: its _vid._ Different method, same meaning. Feels very strange at first to English speakers, but becomes easier with experience.
As a czech i can say that the biggest problem was the sentence structure itself, like when do i need to use the word “do” or “the” but after that its very easy
LMAO i love how you didn’t even mention the absurd orthography till the very end. here in China so many people have to rely on specialized PRINTED BOOKS to help them memorize words and their spellings, since the orthography can look innocuous (another ridiculously hard to memorize word btw), but it can be so haphazard at times. also the whole ‘just remember the roots and regular affixes’ thing doesn’t really work. i mean, i have incorrectly used the adjectival suffixes -ist, -ic and -istic so many times for a given root, that it’s pretty much random. i’m convinced that English orthography and morphology are just hostile to EFL speakers at this point 😅 anyway, another great video as always ❤
When I started learning Latin I realized how wordy English is. I feel like English is a bit unique from Indo-European languages in that it keeps a lot of the conjugations for tense, aspect, mood, etc. but instead of changing the verb it just adds more and more auxiliaries. It's kind of a trade off between memorizing a bunch of conjugations versus putting in more and more words until it's a soup of a sentence.
The way these figures in the video are drawn is very catchy in my opinion. All of them contain some sort of traditional outfit that is supposed to represent different nations, it's very cool
As a Dutch speaker, English is relatively easy compared to other languages. I usually don't even think about the pronunciation because I already know how to pronounce a word or phrase correctly. I think this has something to do with English being very prevalent in the Netherlands and English is closely related to Dutch. I find it easier to learn/speak English than German, even tho German is supposed to be closer to Dutch. A lot of people in the Netherlands indeed pronounce "th" (ð, θ) as "t, d or f", however, I think younger people find it easier to pronounce "th" correctly.
As a native English speaker, who is learning Dutch, I can definitely say Dutch has been super easy to learn for me so far. I’ve always heard now and again that Dutch is one of the easiest languages to learn for us, but I didn’t realise that until I started looking into it myself. There’s SO many similarities.
@@casluvs Yeah, I don't speak Dutch, but I lived in the Netherlands for a few months. It's strange, hearing often _feels_ like you're hearing English, before you pay attention and realise you can't understand the words....😅
Your indignant way of speaking of things is hilarious. Fantastic video! *** The absence of V in chinese suddenly explains the woman in my bluetooth speaker saying: Top loot shoes twice and reedy to pell. (So it sounded to me, a Brazilian)
I am Ukrainian and now trying to teach some English to my mom, who never studies English (she wasn't familiar even with simple words like "yes", "no", "happy birthday" etc) 1) hardest thing in English is its phonetics, you can't predict how to pronounce word unless you have seen and heard dozens of similarly written words. There are rules for pronounciation but there are so much of them and exceptions are still not rare that learning this rules becomes pointless. It all comes to brute force and remembering pronounciation for each word. You could say people will see patterns with time and its true but my mom for example need just a little bit of English to be able to communicate so she dont learn how to write, she dont have good vision already so when she learns words she dont always see them but only hear so such patterns won't appear and she has to remember pronounciation for each word. 2) Articles aren't useful, despite author saying they are. I simply cant imagine situation where someone would be confuse about context without article. Yes, particles have function but it indicates something that is obvious without article,therefore making article useless. P.s. I didnt use any articles in this comment and i doubt anybody missed the point because of it
The point, we got. 😊 The articles... we regretted not seeing. Take Dostoevsky's _Idiot._ The English needs an article, or else the title ends up not meaning some particular idiot, but calling you one. So the English title gets an article: _THE Idiot,_ by Dostoevsky.
I know this wasn't the point of the video, but English actually has quite simple grammar when compared to many European, and non-European, languages. It used to be much more complex, but it was simplified down to the point that a lot of linguists actually call the simplification(and the adoption of many French words) a creolization.
@@krzychukar676 Completely deserved if your language(s) ha (ve)s [not sure if you're already bilingual natively or not so...] tenses, tones [like Mandarin], genders, declensions [like Russian], conjugations [like Spanish], flowing syllable times over stress times, final devoicing, rolled R's, throat R's, post-positions, uncertain word order, or some other blemish. Also deserved if you failed to have empathy from an English speaker who just wants to not be that monolingual guy, and insisted on switching to English at the first mistake instead of a good exchange.
I still struggle hearing the difference between /s/ and /z/, and I hate the American name "zee" because it sounds like "cee", while the British "zed" is unique. Many situations it's clear, "Dragonball C" is Dragonball Z, and "press the C/CR button" is the Z/ZR button on a Nintendo controller. "Ctrl+C to copy" is Ctrl+C, "Ctrl+C to undo" is Ctrl+Z, but "press Alt+C to [command]" can be either Alt+C or Alt+Z.
Love the topic here since it's something I think about a lot, for whatever reason. You should really do a video on why English is this way too, since it's fascinating to learn the origins of quirks in this absolute homunculus of a language.
As an English speaker who likes to learn languages, I've never had much of a problem pronouncing new sounds, some took practice but after a little bit pronouncing sounds like "Х" and "Ы" in russian or the german "R" were as easy as saying any sounds
Being English, and a learner of a few foreign languages, I would say English having a big phonology is quite helpful. It certainly covers most of the areas of Romance and other Germanic languages and slavic. Notable exceptions, trilled/rolled 'r', the French 'r', the guttural 'ch' sound (found in Spanish j and g, German 'ch', similar to Scottish 'loch') and the sound similar to Welsh double L 'll'.
Yeah, your critique is on point. For me as a native Russian speaker it is always a pain in the ass when it comes to pronouncing unknown words, let alone articles and those freaking tenses. It's manageable, but to this day I don't get it completely and instead I learn it to know by heart or just use my intuition
@@JohnOstrowick oh I'm agree with you in that regard. To think about it, it's also quite tricky. It is a good point you make, but as a native speaker I usually don't even think about it. I can't imagine how hard it's like to learn Russian as a non native speaker, especially aspects like that
I'm currently doing a grammar class for English at uni (it's just a side course for stem students) and half the course is just tenses. Like present perfect, simple past, the progressive stuff etc etc. I think I'm doing quite alright with the past tenses, but oh boy do I hate the future. I have no idea what the rules are and half the time I still forget them because German basically doesn't do future tenses and idk... It's a mess
Well, English doesn't technically have a present tense, which is probably why it's confusing. Past tense is generally the -ed suffix, present has none, present perfect has -ing, but future... there is no suffix for it. Instead, you (usually) use the word "will" followed by the some other tense. The future of "walk" is "will" + present: "will walk". The "future perfect" is "will be" + present perfect: "will be walking" (similar to how present perfect is "am walking" or "is walking"). You can use past perfect ("will have walked"), that weird one that I think is called pluperfect ("will have been walking"), etc., but every "future" tense follows the rules of some other tense.
As Russian, the article thing is just so true. Articles are very confusing and inconsistent and I use them when I just "feel", that it's needed, but I cannot usually explain why exactly article is needed in this exact situation.
I consider English easy because of one single thing: verbs don't change based on the pronoun. For example, the verb eat: I eat You eat He/She/It eats We eat They eat It's the same word each time. It only changes at the third person, you gotta add an s, but it's really consistent so easy to remember. In French, the verb eat (manger) would be conjugated like this: Je mange Tu manges Il/Elle/On mange Nous mangeons Vous mangez Ils/Elles mangent In Spanish, the verb eat (comer) would be this: Yo como Tu comes El/Ella/Usted come Nosotros comemos Vosotros coméis Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes comen It changes with each person, and it's also the case in other tenses. My main language is french. In school I learned english and spanish, and I found english so fucking easy because of that.
What bothers me is how you know what I think.
I swear I thought I was going insane
Geniuses tend to think the same way, yk
@@Kimo_uwu
Kind, thank you.
?
He doesn't. He just made up "what you think."
You're the first person I've ever seen talk about English's "weird/difficult/confusing grammar" who's actually talking about the grammar and not just the spelling.
I'm an English teacher and I've been teaching about this.
Then there is the difference between the spoken and written English. Not counting spelling, which is a whole different beast.
@@Delgen1951 purely in regional variations. Generally, text reflects speech.
@CrystalMuffyn The comment says “ not JUST the spelling” as in, not exclusively spelling. You can’t talk about how weird English is without including the spelling lol. But we’re glad he included some of the other weirdness as well.
@CrystalMuffynnot JUST the spelling
English also has very inconsistent syllable stress rules (if you could even call them "rules"), but if you put the stress in the wrong place you'll sound VERY foreign. You can hear this clearly in a stereotypical "French" accent.
in the words of Tom Scott: if you stress the wrong syLLAble, you'll sound ridiCULous
Stress is actually phonemic in English with words liek "incite" and "insight" being differentiated in speech exclusively by which syllable gets stressed. Of course this also doesn't cover cases where stress changes the actual vowel itself (usually into a schwa).
@@angeldude101 Stress is even used for derivation in English! There's "initial stress-derived nouns", where you have a noun-verb pair that's only distinguished by the stress moving to the initial syllable for the noun:
You suspéct a súspect, reprínt a réprint, invíte somebody with an ínvite...
That one catches non-native speakers out a lot because you can't see it in writing and it's also just weird.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs "invite" is one of those weird words like "like" and "friend"
what happened to "invitation", "appreciation", and "make friends"
@@notwithouttext appreciate has a different vibe to like. The language is increasing the nuance of emotional expression.
I’m native in Russian and Ukrainian, and when I started learning English I was a little kid. But at that time for me the words “people” and “purple” were very similar. I made so many ridiculous sentences bc of this. For example: I really like “purple” in my school they are very nice. Or like: “people” is my favourite colour😂
Have you ever heard of the flying purple people eater? lmao
At least you have an excuse, I still can't speak English properly and it's my only language. I can do Algebra, geometry, history and basic physics with little effort and still get between 87 and 92% correct. Even with my best effort one year in high school I failed English class with 69%. But because I tried and I completed 79 out of my 80 homework assignments for the year my teacher was kind enough to pass me with a 70%. So although it might not be saying much I bet you're English is better than a lot of Americans. Have a nice day.
I'm also native Russian speaker, and when I was a kid I've called Empire State Building "Employee State Building". I didn't understand why my teacher was laughing her ass off, but in retrospect, yes, I think that was funny
You just solved racism with that second one
Ok, but imagining as you a little kid messing up "purple" and "people" sounds cute hehe.
As a Polish speaker, I always thought of English as having a very few consonants clusters:)
As a learner of Polish, I would agree. But it's words like chrząszcz, źdźbło, wstrząsnąć, krnąbrny and bezwzględny that make Polish fun. 😁
as a speaker of spanish that knows english and is studying russian, yalls consonants are wack
Polish has a slightly higher than normal amount of consonant clusters for a Slavic language, but I feel some of Polish having too many of them is due to large amounts of digraphs involving "z" like "sz", "cz", and of course "szcz" (something we, your south-easternly neighbors, convey with the single letter щ).
This is far from "worst", of course. Georgian is most obvious - "marjvniv", "martkshinv", "stsori", and many others. I also heard a bit about Salishian languages, but the Nuxalk word "clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts", meaning "he had had a bunchberry plant", is brought up often for its masses of obstruent consonants.
English is by far not the most cluster-convoluted language - and some of them, like initial "pt" or "ts", get routinely simplified ("pterodactyl" having a silent "p" is part of a joke, even though "pt" is among most routine clusters for Slavic language speakers). But, there are indeed also languages that have even less clusters - Japanese and Polynesian languages included, but also many Semitic and Mon-Khmer languages, and Finnish.
@@torcoAaAa Bro you ain't bouta tell me you're not a native English speaker with a sentence like that
@@TenositSergeich Georgian has worse consonant clusters, for example "gvprtskvni" and "gvprtkhlvni".
Twelve years of speaking English has made me realize one thing.
Nobody cares how you convey information as long as you do it in a somewhat recognizable manner.
of good correct comment up agree laugh due funny
why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick
very true, as a native speaker who interacts with nonnative speakers on the daily, i do not care how you say it, as long as i have an idea of what you’re getting at; your english is perfect to me lol.
one interesting thing tho! is as you learn other languages and interact more with people who are nonnative speakers your OWN speaking pattern changes. like my sentence structure in english, since moving to germany and speaking german, is fked a lot of the time😅and, as the people around you use articles with less frequency, it becomes easier to also slip into that a a sort of habit haha. like the other day i caught myself saying “you are now going? or?”
yeah we're pretty good at piecing together "broken" english and heavy accents given how many foreigners are learning or proficient in our language
thats the one good part of it being both extremely extremely difficult (and common); it means we're used to non-standard ways of speaking. like, if someone spoke japanese with a heavy accent, it would be very very hard for japanese to understand because its not commonly spoken by foreigners, and its generally considered easy to pronounce, but english is the opposite for the opposite reasons
I am a 17 year old Indonesian and I can confirm that the way I acquired and learned english is by holding the philosophy of "f**K it we ball" and just stopped caring at the "rules" ( I believed that there are still errors in my comments here)
I can't believe you got all the way through the phonetics section without mentioning English "r"! That's one of the * actual * rarest sounds across world languages, and takes the longest to acquire for native English speakers too (iirc). Loved the video, though :-)
One thing I will say for English speakers is that we’re generally very tolerant of accents. Not even/only in a conscious way, but in that part of what it means to speak English is to be able to navigate General American English, RP, AAVE, regional US and British+Irish accents, and then the accents of all the L2 speakers out there.
@@0xyd You're both right and wrong there 😅 you're right that you can totally get away with substituting standard English 'r' with Scottish 'r' (I guess depending on the situation? You'd obviously be most successful in Scotland haha) and as a linguist I wholeheartedly agree with speaking in whatever way is most natural for you. However, for a lot of English learners, they want to sound like speakers from England or America, and in those dialects, the "r" sound is quite tricky. We only really pronounce it one way that I know of, though some of us (hello England natives) drop it in certain contexts, like the end of a word. So it's challenging to learn!
Yeah, that sound is exceedingly rare in terms of how many languages it appears in, but 2 of said languages happen to be the 2 most widely spoken in the world. Living in France, I used to hear it as some kind of /w/ which also seems to be a stereotypical feature of how children speak in the English-speaking world.
As a native speaker who had to have speech therapy for years….English sounds are NOT easy 😭
@@FairyCRat Dat wascawy wabbit!
one of my favorite parts of linguistics classes in university was "lets look at how weird english is and try to figure out why it does that"
it does that because, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, Vikings, Normans, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Great Vowel shift, type setters form Belgium and the Holland. That is why, in a word history.
@@Delgen1951 English doesn’t have any borrowing from the celts or Romans tho
@@europeanenjoyer4904 *old French
@pippi2285 no borrowings from celtic languages or latin, lol, what a crazy thing to think
@@horsermchead2504 what Celtic borrowings are there.
I agree.
As a Korean who has learned English as a second language, I will die on a hill claiming that article adjectives are stupid; excessive conjugation is stupid too.
I also remember practicing "th-" pronounciation as a kid everyday to sound more native.
Even after speaking it for 20 years, I still inappropriately use "in/on/at" prepositions sometimes :(
To be fair, US's Foreign Service Institute categorizes eastern laguages (i.e., Category IV: Korean/Japanese/Chinese/Arabic) as one of the toughest languages to learn for English speakers, and vice versa.
Good video. It validated all of my frustrations from learning this crazy language lol.
As a former English teacher who taught a good many students in Korea (mostly adults), I feel obligated to tell you that your English is very good.
But every one take that as gospel , even the Chinese will claim Chinese is the more difficult language to learn.
Don't feel bad about not being grammatically perfect and don't worry about not knowing how to pronounce a word correctly. having traveled all over the English speaking world I've come to realize the best rule of thumb to go by when speaking English is If you say whatever you're thinking with confidence, people will understand what you mean and won't really realize your "mistakes" 👍
Dude i'm literate in portuguese, english, and spanish (even doe i don't quite remember spanish quite well).
Fucking hell i hate kanji, fuck that bro, fuck that. I tried learning japanese but i can't wrap my head around kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are okay and makes sense in my head but what the hell man why everything has to be written in a different way (talking about kanji)? Just use goddam hiragana but noooooooooo, different kanji with same pronounciation means different things, by rule you just can't infer meaning from context cause you need the kanji. I have to learn a new word and learn how to write it's fucking ideogram. Whyyyyyyyyy? 😭😭😭😭😭
Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg and my arm... even my fingers... the body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting. It's like they're all still there.
(Ofcourse i'm being overly dramatic for comical reasons and i might just said things that are wrong, bear that in mind.
I love category V languages but fuck ideograms, i guess i'm just too dumb for that.)
@@NirousPlayers as a Chinese advanced student (almost C2) and having studied up to intermediate Japanese at University, a trick I use to remember Kanji/Hanzi is to think of them as pictures. I know it might look "useless", but remembering the meaning of the radicals (most of times, not always) can really help you remember words because they repeat themselves too often. For example, 穿 (chuán) in Chinese means "to wear", if you split its radicals or "parts" you've got: 穴 (xué, which means cave or hole), and 牙 (yá, tooth/teeth), so I picture a little mouse boring into a piece of clothes with its little teeth. So when I want to remember and write 穿 I don't think only about it's physical shape, but with the image of a mouse sticking its head out of a hole in a tiny piece of clothes. Indeed, 穴 (xué) is also used in other common words like "穷" (qióng, strong). for which I picture a strong caveman in a cave. Also, something that happens in Chinese but not so often in Japanese (only with Onyoumi readings), is that some Hanzi/Kanji radicals/"parts" can tell you the approximate pronunciation. As an example, continuing with 穴(xué, hole or cave), the word 空 (kong, air or space) is formed with radicals 穴 and 工 (gong, work or skill), so I just add a radical to a Hanzi I already know. These are my tricks for remembering Kanji and Hanzi, I hope they were useful!
The easiest way to learn English from my experience is just accepting that spelling is random and learning it primarily through feel and exposure. Sure that's only viable if you already have a base for it and is majorly helped if you have a similar language, but the one great strength English has is the massive amount of content in it, and you should make use of it. I was really bad at it as a kid but once I started watching everything in English with subtitles, that where I started to progress, because eventually I didn't need them anymore, and now my parents complain my English is better than my Portuguese lol
Wait so did you watch everything in English with English subtitles or Portuguese subtitles?
Just wondering since it’d be interesting to know how I can apply it to learning a language in general 🤔
It's not _completely_ random, but there are enough cases where sounds change based on what's around it (even syllables away) and where spelling is preserved from non-English languages despite using (partly) native pronunciation that it may as well be.
@@kuyaleinad4195 not OP but definitely use subtitles in the language you're trying to learn.
Using subtitles in a language you don't know helps you map the spoken language to the written one, and it can make it easier to process difficult chunks of the language so you don't get lost.
Subtitles in English makes it easier for your brain to skip all that nonsense and watch the movie, which is not helpful in the long run.
Yeah, the same experience.
Thanks to a lot of useful content in English, it is easy to use it for "fun/work/study" and learn it by the way
Same here
English is hard for foreigners to speak fluently on native level, but it's very easy to start, which makes it good enough as a lingua franca. Even with bad English we can communicate across the world, even if some of us drop "the" and the others mixup "v" and "w".
Many other languages are harder to start. Small grammar mistakes in Russian, Spanish, Arabic or Chinese can make sentences incomprehensible to both learners and natives.
That’s how I feel too! To speak proper perfect textbook English is a feat most native speakers don’t even accomplish, but to speak “good enough” English is something anyone can do.
hard to master, but very easy to learn. As this video said, some ESL speakers will have a really hard time figuring out when to say "the" properly, (russians seem to just sprinkle it all over the place randomly) but it really doesn't matter at all. You can drop all "the" from the english language and it's perfectly comprehensible. And as you said, meanwhile, if you drop such a ubiquitous thing from other European languages, you may not be understood at all. It's a bit annoying when people say "english is hard", it just shows they have little foreign language experience.
I think this is what makes English make sense for the global language. Anyone who acts like they can’t understand a foreigner speaking broken english is lying.
@@moonasha i am a native russian speaker and i heard other russian speakers express the same sentiment about our own language - that we can still understand what someone means even if they get all the grammatical endings/cases/genders wrong... I dont know how true that is, just saying that as a native speaker one might have a bit of a bias there
@@jen_sa I believe it, after all English at one point had a case system and genders, and now it doesn't...я уверен если писать как этот вы ещё понять что я иметь в вид. по-мой много вещи в этот язык излишние. That should be broken enough, lol
Okay, so. Your pronunciation, of EVERYTHING, is outstanding!! How dare you just read all those words in so many different ways/accents ACCURATELY?? I admire that so much honestly
@@gregoryford2532 what is IPA? Oh, international phonetic alphabet
India pale ale 😂
The internet exists.
This has been easy to find and do correctly in a prepared setting like a recorded video for well over a decade now.
@@rogerwilco2 We are just not used to people doing that, because nobody gives an excrement. Not too long ago, UA-cam gave me a (german) ad in which that the English word "intimate" was one of just two words in the BRAND NAME ITSELF and they pronounced it "in-tea-mate" in the refridgerating ad that they spent thousands of Euroes on. That was when I learned that smaller content creators mispronouncing gömböc or kierteishäntäkarhu is really not that big of a deal.
@@rogerwilco2 Hey now, hold on, practice with the internet does not make pronunciation universally easy. If you've never encountered a sound that you need to pick away at for days or weeks to get right, you're an extreme exception. Most people will have certain sounds they just can't nail down in a reasonable amount of time, and I don't think a fair response to that would be, "well, spend an unreasonable amount of time."
I learned English as a kid and French is my first language. It’s weird because I always thought of english as being easier to learn than French, since it has no grammatical gender and no complicated verb system. I think the way they teach English at school makes it seam easier because there are less rules to learn, but at the same time that is exactly why it’s hard: you’re just supposed to grok everything and not rely on a rule.
Hear, hear! I have mentioned this in my comment. I have studied French and English as foreign languages. Rules are great. You learn a rule, internalize it and you can apply it to a thousand different times and words. English is not this way. There are a few grammar rules but most of the time, you have to memorize everything and this takes a lot of effort. In addition, this is why English learning plateau is harder than the French one. After you learn the few rules of the English language, you are an intermediate student and you need lots of learning to get to the advanced level.
Non t’as raison - l’anglais est évidement beaucoup plus facile que le français. Pour un français, la chose la plus difficile serait sans doute la prononciation.
Using French as an example of having an easier tense system is weird. French has an objectively harder tense system and the conjugations are much harder to remember.
@@shadowyzephyr Yes, but once you get the hang of it, it's easier. I mean apart from some irregular verbs (which English has many), verbs of the same group are conjugated the same way.
Back when I was in highschool, we learned a little bit of French since it is mandatory in canada, and the French accent is just something that I couldn't learn. Speaking French with a North American accent just doesn't sound right, and while the learning the conjugations and rules were hard for me, I can see how it makes more sense than in English.
Like if you learned the rules it would be more applicable to the entire language as a whole, but as an English speaker, it was hard for me to learn it. That and the female and male noun stuff, but it seems English is the odd language for not doing that, my mothers tongue, Arabic, has gendered words like that. But I really don't remember much of it. I think languages are like muscles, you don't use it , you lose it. My French was never great but it is much worse now than it was back then since I've never had to use it in my life.
as an english speaker learning chinese i think the hardest part for me has been letting go of articles. it’s so instinctual for me to want to add them bc i don’t think the sentence will make sense otherwise but chinese doesn’t have them and you’ve perfectly described that frustration but in reverse! thank you!
As someone who speaks both English and Chinese fluently, this video did explain a lot of the peculiarities I did hear from my Chinese family members learning English. Also explains why I often hear people with Russian accents dropping articles.
As a Chinese speaker learning English. The video is really true to me. But one thing left is plural. We don't care that much about plural, especially when it reacts with the tense of verbs and auxiliary verbs. My brain can't just be able to run those grammar rules simultaneously when speaking.
At first when I started learning Japanese every sentence without plurals and articles felt wrong lol, especially without a plural form XD I'm more used to it now though :3
Chinese doesn't have articles but it has measure words which perform a very similar function most of the time.
@@gameragodzilla you know, for me russian accents always sounded natural speaking english. Like, when you uniformly drop the articles, it sounds like you just speak a different kind of english.
Mandarin Chinese was actually my second language, and I *immediately* appreciated how easy it was to learn the grammar. The writing, reading, and sound discernment was all very hard of course, but the lack of tenses and article words was a blessing to someone who avoided learning Spanish due to that exact confusion!
Measure words, however, are still beloathed lol. 个 is still my go-to, and I just hope I’m understood 😭😂
Well learning Spanish as a Mandarin speaker is rather painful
I laughed a lot when watching the video and wandering in random comments, and when reading your comment, as an native Chinese I smiled and later started thinking about the question. Then I realize, indeed, measure words are difficult - I took a while thinking about it (and hope it may help), yet even got myself confused. I'm so used to the system just like got used to heartbeats and blood flow, but how to explain it to other people?
Well, I still got a key that works for me hours later and hope this may work for you too.
When using measure words, Chinese people think about the item measuring and its related feelings, then categorize it to confirm which word to use. For example, "a bunny doll" may be "一个兔子玩偶" or “一只兔子玩偶”, the different is which category you put it in. The speaker may be slightly more focused on "兔子(bunny)" part and use the "small animal catagory" measuring word "只", or vice versa, slightly focusing on "玩偶(doll)" part and using 个, which is "general put-everything-in catagory" and also explains your question... It's all right to confusing about using it, just like I may have a pile of tense errors in this comment, nobody would laugh at you in China for it as most Chinese don't quite care about it either.
The question "when to use 个" is hard, yet it would be easier to answer "when not to use 个", as most times Chinese use the most specified measure word. For example, in ”一台冰箱“ a fridge, "一台彩电" a TV, the measure word 台 indicates the item is heavy but still movable and probally electronic item, "一口锅" a pot, ”一口井“ a well, word 口 indicates it's big (usually more than half meter in diameter), round and hallow item. But when it comes to ”电饭锅“ a electric rice cooker, it's not quite big to fit "口", and it may fit ”台“ as it's electric and movable, so you may found that most Chinese say "一台电饭锅" or "一个电饭锅", and far less "一口电饭锅", which may means a huge one for diners and restaurants. And "个" most using with when comes to generally references like "一个原子" an atom, ”一个侦探“ a detective, something abstract like "一个说法" a saying, or rarely coming with demeaning someone like "一个笨侦探" a foolish detective (as contract, "一位好侦探" a good detective where ”位“ indicates praising and ”一名侦探“ a detective specified both ”一“ one and ”侦探“detective).
Hope all these helps - and I also hope I did explained myself as I didn't write long in English for maybe 2 or 3 years and just found all "category" typed as "catagory" before clicking reply button *sigh*. Also I'd recommend ”汉典“ www.zdic.net/ , a huge and free online dictionary for Chinese users and learners.
A true mood lol. I don't care if I sound more like a kid, it's just easier lol.
@@kabakokawashiro2964 From what i interpret, what you said sounds kinda like grammatical gender, just more useful
"个" is a fine go-to. Measure word can make a difference in the meaning though:
一个面包 means one bread aka a loaf of bread, whereas
一片面包 means a slice of bread.
Similarly 一个蛋糕 vs. 一块蛋糕 (a cake vs. a piece of cake).
yì tiáo lù means a way,
yì zhí lù means a deer.
yí guàn jiàng means a jar of sauce,
yí 点 jiàng means a bit of sauce,
yí 位 jiàng means a general/commander.
This reminds me how Spanish is similar to English and been taught English since I was small, so even as a non native speaker, I didn't realize how hard English is.
Portuguese is also quite similar, saying from experience
@@helloiamenergyman verdade, todas essas conjugações inúteis do português são pelo menos usadas mais comumente no inglês. Sério, quem usa "tu vás" em português? Such bullshit
same for portuguese
@@EggyB tambem tem verbo no futuro, tipo "Ele cantará amanha" ninguem usa verbo no futuro, é sempre "ele vai cantar amanha"
You're right. If you take enough steps back, all languages are similar. But if you're looking for something *really* similar to English, you're searching for Norwegian and Dutch. And if you want something similar to Spanish, take a gander at Latin or French.
As a native hawaiian, I think its really cool you brought up ʻōlelo hawaiʻi as an example! Totally was unexpected, but nice to see Polynesian languages being mentioned in these language videos =D
even if it was a small example
Had a debate last night with a guy. He said Hawaiian’s aren’t a form of Asian and I said yes they are because they are Polynesian. Hawaiians are considered a form of Asian right?
@@Checkmate777 Pacific Islander would be the term
@@eloquent_redneck3719 isn’t that Asian though? Or of Asian decent
@@Checkmate777 Pacific islander would be the term, but race is an arbitrary grouping anyway, so every category has wiggle room and overlap.
As someone who grew up in America, but in an area full of immigrants from all over the world, I haven’t experienced the struggle but I’d like to think it’s made me more cognizant of it. I’m not fluent in any language but English. I was a supervisor at a very large distribution center that employed a significant number of non native English speakers. A large portion of the employees were West Africans who could speak French (including my wonderful boss, Ousmane Ba). People spoke varying degrees of English, but many spoke very little English and were just learning. I found out for some people it was easier to try to communicate in my TERRIBLE French than in English. Which in a tiny fraction of a way helped me understand how they felt trying to communicate in English. I had taken three years of high school French, so not a language I’d tried to communicate in outside of a classroom environment. Many of the people I worked with immigrated to America with almost no English experience and zero classroom education in the language. I absolutely cannot imagine trying to learn a language that way.
I have switched to French, Spanish, German, Italian, even Greek on occasion, when people struggle and I know/figure out which language they might be more familiar with.
And one case of Dutch when interacting with some people who spoke Afrikaans.
You can definitely say you're fluent in English when all of this stuff seems just about right to you.
I know, I honestly became more appreciative of English after this video
Tbh I don't really know the rules. All I do just listen. If it sounds right then it's probably correct.
@@sahasavadmangkhaseum5455 You don't need to know the rules to be fluent, you must understand them.
It just seems so rudimentary and obvious lol
I was born speaking English and I still get a lot of stuff wrong, or use things kinda vaguely when i don't really understand why certain things are used when. heh
As a native Mandarin speaker, one of the hardest parts of English phonology for me is the reduction of some sounds and learning to _not_ pronounce every single letter in a word. Many vowels are reduced to schwa seemingly arbitrarily, and final Ts tend to be reduced to glottal stops (for example, “what” becomes /wəʔ/). Not to mention the syllabic consonants like how “button” is pronounced as /bʌʔn̩/. It becomes more difficult putting these parts together to pronounce a sentence, which in rapid speech sounds completely different than how the individual words are spelled. (“What are you doing” /wəˈɹ̠jəduɪŋ/)
Just assume all vowels are schwa, and you won't go far wrong.
@@malcolm_in_the_middle Unless you are in the American south and or the Appalachian Mountains then just speak like Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
@@Delgen1951not everyone knows what that sounds like.
I am a native English speaker, and although I do convert random vowels into Schwa all the fucking time, DO NOT REDUCE YOUR Ts TO GLOTTAL STOPS!
I know a lot of native English speakers do it, but they are A L S O D O I N G I T W R O N G A N D S O U N D H O R R I B L E!
I hate when people do "wəʔ" it just sounds terrible, please don't pick up that habit from people. If you don't, you can get the dubious honor of speaking better English than them.
Whreudion
5:24 that is in fact quite relatively recent a linguistic change. In old literatures you will most likely find such constructions as “I believe it not” rather than “I do not believe”
indeed, previous to this, the "don't" negative was an emphatic one, just like the "do" affirmative is emphatic ("I DO play"). for some reason, negative emphatics have a tendency to become the standard negative in a language - it happened in French too, for instance, with "pas" initially being an emphatic adverb and then transitioning into being the main negative particle ("je dis pas", with "ne" often ignored in speech) It happens so commonly that there's even a name for it, the Jespersen Cycle!
People have already mentioned stress accent but let me reiterate how difficult it is for people coming from languages with no stress accent. It's like how english speakers dread learning mandarin tones but in reverse. And messing it up on a noun/verb pair (like present vs to present) can make it a lot harder to understand what people are saying
It doesn't help that spelling gives absolutely no clue as to where the stress is in a word, unlike other languages like say, Spanish which does take it into account for every single word.
@@Ramk0core Uh, no, plenty of words in Spanish have syllable stress but not all of them have the tilde where the stress is. The only ones that do have the tilde are the esdrujulas and the llanas and agudas that don't end in the correct. Llanas that don't end in n, s , or a vowel are written with an accent mark where the syllable stress is. And agudas tat don't end an consonant tat isn't n or s also have to be indicated were te stress s.
It's only the exception to the rule that gets a tilde. Meaning you still need to have a grasp of the spoken language to tell where the sylable stress is or just memorize them from seeing them soi often.
@@ivetterodriguez1994 Tilde for stress? The tilde is what they use on the n letter. I think you mean acute accent like as á é í ó ú.
And it even worse for those whose native have a fixed stress. Like as always on the 1st syllable, for example.
@@ivetterodriguez1994 It's not marked for every word, but the writing system does tell you where to put the stress if you know the rules.
Why don't we just mark stress for every word? I guess they wanted to save up on ink during medieval times and then it just stuck.
For any non-native speakers who worry about their pronunciation: English being a lingua franca means native speakers like me hear a LOT of different accents (there are plenty of accents in English itself) so your pronunciation and grammar really does not have to be perfect for someone to understand you. I feel like the biggest thing is getting consonants right, vowels are super flexible (American english especially blurs vowels into that “uh” vowel sound all the time).
If you want to say “I want to buy a car”, I will probably understand if it sounds like “Ay Went Tu Bey a Care”
If you say it like “I Vend Du Bey a Ger” I will probably not understand. Maybe that’s just me, but in my experience the hardest accents to understand are ones that pronounce vowels weirdly and also cant bridge them together with English consonants. It can make an entire sentence sound like gibberish
I would agree with that. Consonants seem to be the most important thing.
My hovercraft is fooool of eels!
They tuk ma jerb!
It sucks when dealing with older people over the phones though. I used to work in call centers and people were like I wanna speak with an American when in fact I am one. 😭
Thut os trea O egrui wath yie
As a Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka Chinese speaker, who is learning English and German, I believe much difficulty is due to the different language systems. Any Chinese guy would find Japanese much easier than English. However, I find German easy to learn once I have mastered English because they share the same system.
Yep, the main difference with German/English is German doesn't use "do" the way English does, e.g. "do you want" is "willst du" or something, not "tun du willst". Also German puts verbs mostly on the end of a sentence, AFAIK. Plus it's even more fussy with articles (der/die/das/den/dem/des = the/of the).
@@JohnOstrowick verb goes second, and if there are two verbs, for example a helper verb like have, and another verb like seen, ie have you seen, then the verb second one is put at the end. Hast du den Hund gesehen? For ex
@@JohnOstrowick In the main sentence, put the conjugated verb to the second position and, if existent, the unchanging verb at the end.
In neighbouring sentences, put the conjugated verb at the end and, if existing, the unchanging verb right in front of it.
Be aware that neighbouring sentences might substitute for a position, ergo placing the verb in the main sentence directly behind the comma.
E. g.:
"Dass Hunde gerne Wurst essen, haben wir alle gewusst"
(We all knew that dogs like eating sausages)
The rate at which the world is bombarded with English is what makes it so easily learnable. You get far more exposure to it than any other language.
I'm an American, but I've talked too and listened to foreigners speak on the internet. They often say our biggest export is our culture (which includes the English language), like they say when you're watching a movie it's either from your home country, or American.
@@fasteddy9312 Exactly! I've been to more than a dozen countries and the amount of American influence is quite surprising. The last country I visited was the Philippines, and I was staying at this modern district called BGC. You can find almost all the American food chains you can think of, like Denny's, Fridays, Chili's, Krispy Kreme, Shake Shack, Buffalo Wild Wings, etc, in the Metro area. People listen to American music, watch American films, American brands is ubiquitous.
Even when I studied in France back in college(2015), the movies that I've watched with my host family were American films with French subtitles. All my host brother listened to were music from American artists. And many slangs we use here in the US, a lot of the younger generation know or use.
Culture is our biggest export lol
@@alistairt7544 well yeah, the Philippines was colonised by the us for quite a while (even if not officially, it was effectively colonised), hence the amount of american influence. Hell, even our government uses english more in writing and enforcing laws more than our national language. i could go on an extensive rant about how it further separates the educated and privileged from most people which contributes to the increasing gap in income and opportunity in the country, but I've rambled long enough.
@@noakinn well don’t worry about it. Now they are being colonised by the Chinese instead, so English will probably be replaced soon.
English is just the easier language in the world.
You should’ve mentioned how English also has more vowel sounds than most other languages. Most languages have between like 8-14 but English has over 20.
And they are all written with 5 letters
Just why, why the f***, and there arent rules to know what vowel is correct
We're taught AEIOU and sometimes Y.
A: apple, agent, all
E: ebony, evil
I: igloo, ice, in
O: otter, orange, ooze
U: under, uvula
Y: just copy e?
I seem to be missing a lot.
8-14? My native language and the language I'm currently trying to learn (Serbian and Japanese, respectfully) have just 5 vowels total
@@AkaiAzul And how tf do they teach the other 15 sounds?
My mom's second language is english (first is bengali) and I've always told her that her english sounds fantastic even with the accent and even if she wants someone to check her writing, it's readable, but this video is helping me understand why she's self conscious.
As a Georgian who has learned C2-level English, I've completely forgotten how hard the language is. I take a lot of these things for granted now, but I can never forget how much I struggled with the non-sensical pronunciation of words like "shore" and "sure"
like "For Shore" vs "for sure" even worse in the American South where you can go "far shore to the right of the Catawampus house for a tab and get were you want to be.".
The pronunciation is the worst for me. It is so confusing when you have a language where you have very few silent lettres in a word (3 ways to lengthen a vowel: die, dehn, boot and 2 ways to shorten a consonant: heck, tritt and 3 sounds comprised of several lettres: schnee, ich, ei). Every other sound is directly linked to a lettre. No they're, there, their. No view and few. No thourough, taught, thought, through, though (I mean there is a reason why people write this one as tho: it is half as long and sounds exactly the same). The worst offender tho is any word that has a silent e at the end, because it impacts the vowel before the last consonant. Why not write write as wrait or wreit or wriet to avoid confusion with writ (a short i sound instead of the long one of write). When I hear a german word I dont have to ask myself how it is written (except for some edge cases, mostly with long i sounds or consonant clusters, like Schifffahrt, but even those follow certain rules. Also certain is a perfect example for how to avoid the silent e ending, like in octane. Except for the origin of the word there is no reason to expect one spelling over the other...). When I hear English it can happen, that when I try to look up the word I get a completely unrelated result, because I used the wrong spelling, even tho phonetically I was correct.
I think the -ough words are the toughest (see what I did there). Hard to say as a native speaker, but there’s a lot of variation as to how it is pronounced
@Giorgio Fegatini I often forget that there are people who actually try to learn the Georgian language. I do not understand why someone would do that, but I still respect the hell out of someone who makes even a small bit of progress in what I imagine to be a VERY painful process.
@@steggyweggy True, learning to pronounce the -ough words is rough, and I've certainly had a tough time with it. No matter how thoroughly I tried, it was never enough. I've come to accept that some words can only be learned through trial and error. Although there may be a useful rule somewhere, it probably would have too many exceptions for anyone to care. Unless we have some kind of breakthrough in language learning, we'll have to stick with the rigorous process of watching English movies and talking to English-speaking people. Although it's not efficient, it definitely is fun.
That's interesting and nice to keep in mind, but even as a Hungarian speaker (a language that's very different from English), I find English much easier than most other European languages. For example, English only has an extremely simple version of verb conjugation (adding an "s" to the verb in singular third person, present tense), this is so much easier than German, Spanish or French or pretty much anything else I know of.
English also doesn't have a grammatical gender, and has easier word order rules than French for example.
"I give you the book." or "I give you this" have the same order when "this" takes the place of "the book", but in French, in if you substitute the object with a pronoun, its place in the sentence gets switched, and the same is true with the dative.
Similarly, the placement of adjectives. In English (and Hungarian for that matter), they are always before the noun they refer too. "The good dog", "the white dog", "the naughty dog", but in all the Romance languages, sometimes it's before and sometimes it's after, depending on the adjective, one more thing that you have to memorize and consciously keep in mind when you speak.
@@xunqianbaidu6917 Yeah, I get that the point of the video was mostly to tell native English speakers that the stuff they find basic and intuitive may not be so for everyone.
Which is nice but I think it's also interesting that despite all this, I still think English is one of, if not the easiest to learn as a foreign language.
Fellow hungarian here. I studied german in high school and I found the gender system very hard, especially because the grammar is very heavily based on it (den or dem). Whats the gender of a noun? I know there are some rules, but it seems like there is no system and its a guessing game. Contrast that with spanish, only 2 genders, easily differentiated with some exceptions, and it doesnt really play a role in the grammar.
also, in english, you don't have to change the number of the other things that refer to the noun (except for verbs). you don't say "thes beautifuls girls", you say "the beautiful girls".
The way I’ve often heard it put is that English is easy to learn the basics, but an absolute pain to master - a lot of the most fundamental elements are simpler in English than in most other languages (which makes it straightforward to get a basic level of competency as second language), but things like pronunciation, spelling, tenses, and the sheer volume of vocabulary make it nightmare to come close to sounding like a native.
@Immortal Science of Hauntology - the proof that it is as hard as any language is the fact that most people don’t learn to speak it perfectly. Even with its apparently incredibly simplistic conjugations, people still can’t manage to remember to add an S for third person, or when to use present perfect, or to negate verbs with “don’t”.
I've been learning Japanese for the past three years about, and just merely learning a new language has opened my eyes in seeing how difficult English is. By no means is Japanese easy at my stage, but trying to think in either language helps me see some of the pitfalls English learners could fall into when learning my native language.
Speaking as someone who picked up Japanese and currently sits at late beginner/early intermediate level, it really put into perspective for me just insane the English language is and how lucky I am to have it as my native language. I fully agree with the comment on how English is "not a language, but rather three languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be a language."
Dude I think you forgot to put "how" in the middle of "just" and "insanse"
@@dimi5862 Dude you mispelllled "insane"
@@adrianjamesgamboa5236Vude you misspelled “misspelled”
@@Forgued dude yu misspelled “dude”
@@vallano8970 dode you misspaled "you"
i'm always fascinated with the kinds of English mistakes that people with different native languages make, and how they're caused by the ways in which those languages differ from English. I'm also aware that a lot of the time when something "sounds wrong" to native ears and can easily be corrected, that doesn't necessarily mean we understand the grammar behind it. The existence of these complicated and unintuitive rules which we nonetheless have a perfect subconscious grasp of is pretty crazy to think about.
Yeah, like how English has a very specific adjective order that must be followed. Every native speaker knows how to follow the order by heart and knows when someone messes the order up, but nobody can list the order off the top of their head.
@@5h0rgunn45 adjective order? I just pile up all the adjectives I want to say in one line
@@typhoonn3478 red little riding hood sounds bad
the fact that native speakers still make you're and your mistakes baffles me tho
As a Dutch person who picked up English without even trying and can speak it decently well, this video was really interesting.
Yeah but Dutch is really close to English and has similar grammar except for the "do" thing on verbs, which comes from Celtic, IIRC.
@@JohnOstrowick nah it's because all the media everyone watches is in English
@@tenzaemtade6146 It is propably both.
Weirdly, as a Swede who speaks only English and a tiny bit of Spanish I can't understand spoken Dutch at all, but I can actually sort of read it. About as "easily" as reading Danish at least, which I've never learned either but that's a very closely related language to Swedish. (Meaning I can usually get the rough meaning of half to three quarters of a text.)
As a sidenote, Afrikaans is even easier to read, on the level of Norwegian. Couldn't understand a word of it spoken, but reading is pretty easy.
Unrelated, when I heard Dutch spoke at first I thought it was Queen's English with a thick German accent or German with and thick American accent, be fore i realized I didn't understand a word.
I struggle a lot with the two present tenses in English. But I've realised that the "ing" tense is a liiittle bit similar to how we use a position verb with another verb in Swedish ("jag sitter och läser", "jag står och bakar" etc), and that realisation made it easier for me to understand how there can be two present tenses to begin with. I still struggle with picking the correct present tense in English though. I hope I got them all right in this comment at least.
Generally, -ing is when the action is currently being done, and the present simple tense is a general or habitual action. For example "I drink coffee" = I may drink coffee every day, every week, I've done it many times and I'll do it again. But "I'm drinking coffee" is when you're holding a cup of coffee as you speak. Also stative verbs use the simple present and very rarely the -ing form. "I love this house" for example, but "I'm loving this house" would sound strange.
All tenses are correct in your comment! It's written just like a native speaker, and I say this as a native speaker who studies linguistics :)
@@Pining_for_the_fjords i'm loving it!
@@Pining_for_the_fjords "I'm loving this house" doesn't sound weird at all. It's the same habitual/present thing, it's just a little harder to grasp because love is a much more abstract verb than "drink". "I'm loving this house" would be said in the context of a house tour, or even in the first few days/weeks/months of living in a house.
@@kekker_ babelingua did a cool video on this exact topic! ua-cam.com/video/P4ADkl_wmlA/v-deo.html
As a native English speaker the part of this video that made me go “wait wtf that is weird” was when you showed the phrase “I am doing yoga next saturday”. I’ve never thought about how odd that future tense is.
We use it to talk about future plans. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow. I'm meeting with the principal on Wednesday. And don't get me started about why we use a present tense to talk about something that has clearly happened in the past. (I've told you a thousand times!)
German does that too, in speaking, people seldom use the actual future tense. They just use the present and a word to indicate that it is, in fact, happening in the future.
@@xaviotesharris891That example is of the past perfect. 4:56
@@w.reidripley1968 Yes. I agree. At 4:56 there is on the screen an example of past perfect (I had fucked off) and past perfect continuous (I had been fucking off). I paraphrase, of course, but what's your point?
Or are you, Mr. Ripley, trying to catch me out on my phrasing of "something that had clearly happened in the past"? Are you aware that the past perfect in English is very often used to reference an event that happened before such a time that you are already talking about in the simple past?
e.g., I had been fucking around all afternoon on the computer when I finally saw some boobies. Or ... When the police found the tatty remnant of John Wayne Bobbit's severed dick, it had lain in the snow for several hours.
WTF is your point, Mr. Indeterminately-Talented Ripley?
NB: If you are not a native English speaker, you should probably shut up here. If you are, you should probably know that I went to school to learn how to teach English to non-native speakers of English. That is, I know what the fuck I'm talking about, and I'm pretty sure you don't, and you should probably shut up now. 'M'kay?
@@w.reidripley1968 Wrong, it's of the present perfect. Past perfect would be "I had told you", not " I have told you".
My mind is blown how if you simply analyze the diffrences between 2 languages and how those diffrences makes it hard to speak for the foreigner, it completely explains the accents. The Russian and Chinese examples were gold
Yeah. As a native Russian speaker, I often find myself struggling a bit with those freaking articles.
Like, how on earth should I know where to put my "the" or "a" next? I mean, yeah, sure, if we are talking not about some random butcher from street, but a specific one, widely known around the world, we will call him THE butcher.
However, why did I just said "around the world"? Why is "the" there? I'm pretty sure it should be there, but why, exactly?
Back in school my teacher told me that if you're writing or talking about something first time in the text/conversation you should use "a" next to it, like, "I had spotted a chicken at the back of the barn", but sometimes I see people just completely ignore that and it's really confusing, why this is the case. I consistently get C-1/C-2 ("Advanced") during tests but I still don't have a clue where it is correct to put articles and where it is not. Just kinda swinging it. Apparently, it just works. Well, most of the time, at least
@@VasiliyOgniov think of "world" as a planet. This becomes much easier then. When you talk about THE world you mean Earth world. When you say "a world" it might be some random planet or even just a concept. I never heard about using "a" when you introduce something to the dialogue. When you say "a chicken" it might be any chicken. But "the chicken" is that one specific chicken you saw somewhere or talked before or had in memory etc. You can think of it as a name when you use "the" and an object type when you use "a"
@@holesmak Oh. It does make sense, yeah. Okay, but isn't it kinda obvious that I'm talking about Earth in this context? We are yet to colonize any other planet, so when I'm saying "around the world", there is only one world to refer. However that logic ("this specific world") definitely checks up.
So, "a" should be used when someone is referring to something non-specific opposed to something concrete? Is it a strict rule without exception or just a general one?
Anyways, thank you for clarification
@@VasiliyOgniov you add context by adding an article. You might be talking about some fictional story or scientific discoveries and they are not limited to Earth. Also world may have different meaning. From "third world countries" to world as a solar system or even universe. So its better to clarify a bit using article.
I don't know the rules myself its just something I figured out and got taught by my native English friend's. But generally yeah. I'm not aware of any exceptions but I'm sure there is
@@holesmak Thank you very much! At the very least it now kinda makes sense in my head
40 years studying English and counting...because you never stop learning. The first 20 years are the worst ones: most people in my country throw the towel after 10 years or so...
It is very easy to grasp the basics of the English language and to get to the intermediate level. It is fast compared to other languages. Going from intermediate to advanced (meaning: I can watch a movie without subtitles, I can have a normal conversation with native speakers without sounding like Tarzan even if my vocabulary is limited) is the 40-year march of the Israelites through the desert. English has a plateau the size of Alaska and you feel like an Inuit. You only see snow and more snow and you think you don't progress because you only see a white landscape for years and years . Most people in my country never get through the plateau. I am one of the lucky ones that pulled it off. Once you get through the plateau, things are normal. Not easy, but normal.
The worst things are spelling, phrasal verbs, grammar being more about memorizing every case than about rules and (number one) stress-timed rhythm. So people say "Hows gone" when they mean "How is it going?" (real example). You have to figure out what word is coming next. So if you don't understand a word, you can miss the entire sentence. This doesn't happen in other language: for example, in French, which I have studied as a foreign language too.
What country?
I couldnt disagree more. English has been by far the easiest language ive studied. The phrasal verbs are a piece of cake, the grammar system is the easiest ive seen (words dont even have genders and verb conjugation is insanely simple- and the absence of cases makes it incredibly easy to learn). You just have to learn the stress on the words, the same way you have to do it in e.g. Russian.
I like that analogy and it seems true to me. Foreigners I know get to a certain level after a few years, and that's usually where they stay for a very long time. But it's adequate. They're using English. They know more languages than I do.
Um english grammar is much much more easy than french grammar .In my opinion at least
As a french speaker, for me the hardest thing about english is lexical stress, French is one of the few languages without it (or at least it's so non-existent that NOBODY knows about it in France) and to this day I couldn't even tell you where is the stress in any english word
French lexical stress is just the last syllable of whatever goes. I'm a Russian speaker, Russian lexical stress is a mess you have to learn by heart so officially there's a rule that says "if the word is originally French, put the stress on the last syllable minus parts that were added in Russian". Ballet, boulevard, bouquet, actress, réalisateur (film/play director), parter, baguette (bread, also painting frame), baton (bread), comme il fault (exists as one world without blanc spaces), puree, bullion, côtelette (mean a different dish here though - minced meat balls), salad, pomme'd ore = tomato, menu (could write a long list of foods here), etc.
Tbf, I don't know many languages that do use lexical stress the same way English does, and it's sort of a nightmare for native English speakers too. Growing up, you see a word for the first time in writing, you just make a guess on where you think the stressed syllable is, internalise that and assume that's the pronunciation, then feel like an idiot when you say the word out loud later and everyone looks at you like you've lost your mind
ones that spring to memory for me are celebrity and canal, I thought the stress went on the i in celebrity, and the first a in canal
Also really annoying how the stress shifts in different variations on the same word (terrific/terrified)
also there's a really good Tom Scott video on lexical stress, he compares it specifically to French too iirc
@@crptpyrthis is because for the supermajority of any language’s existence, the supermajority of people were illiterate. That is to say, the problem with English stress is not with the speech, it’s with the script.
I've been living in Sweden for the past year and learning the language the entire time. The first time I realized that Swedish only had one verb tense that covered ALL possible instances of the present made me want to drop to my knees and weep with joy ^_^
The weird thing about English phonology is that it has big consonant clusters that are kinda hard to pronounce, but doesn't have many simple ones that are common in other European languages like /kn/ or /pt/ or /dl/.
Even many articulate of English speakers tend to say "street" like "shchreet" because our R is further back in the mouth.
i'll grant /kn/ and /pt/ as pretty common, but /dl/? which languages have that?
@@robynkolozsvari English does have dl in the middle of words, like needless. But if you're talking about dl at the beginning of a word, I only know of Polish, which itself only has it in two words I know, dla (for) and dlaczego (why).
We have pt like in leapt or dreampt
@@endme4002 I would argue there's no p sound in dreamt. but I understand it would be easy to automatically insert between the m and t.
As someone who had some experience teaching English in Hong Kong, I agree that students struggle a lot with tenses. That combined with an obsession to have a single 'right' answer, led to different schools developing different 'the single right way of englishing', and made the students think that English is less flexible than it really is. For example, to help them understand when to use perfect tenses, we tell them that if we see the word 'since' + 'time', then they use perfect tenses, or we teach them if conditionals, which is very confusing for them when they just find people not conforming to the sentence structures of the 4 if-conditionals, because people don't just write thinking 'ah i will put a 1st if-conditional here'.
Another thing i think is worth mentioning is the prepositions, it's something that even native English speakers will have some difficulties in, and really, if you think about all the different ways prepositions are used, you will realise that even when considering 'in' 'on' and 'at', it's still complicated and most of them will quite often either forget to use them at all, or be completely wrong.
Is there a correct way to use certain prepositions? Kind of an absolutist statement. Is it more inherently correct to say "I will work on Sunday" vs "I will work Sunday?" I think it would cause a big argument if one were to say one was more correct than the other. Unlike many languages, English has so many idioms and dialects, it can sound like you are imposing one standard on another if you start making corrections that just aren't correct in another dialect, which is why native English speakers have to be very careful when making corrections for minor things.
@@marmac83 Certainly there isn't one singular right way to use all prepositions, but 'I will work Sunday' does sound very unnatural to me, then again I am not a native English speaker.
I'm only talking about what I noticed from people learning English in Hong Kong as their second language, as well as my own experience. Though I will say, that even with prepositions there is an obsession with 'the correct', in that my teacher used to teach us the proper way to use prepositions, like how 'on' and 'upon' are not interchangeable when used in the context of 'upon my arrival/on my arrival', and we can only use 'upon'
I do have to say though, when people here learn English, there is much less a concern of what is correct and not correct in another dialect, we are just concerned with not losing too many marks to grammar mistakes and speaking fluently. And that usually also points to there being a single 'correct English' standard, if there is even one to begin with
@@hea1655 "At my arrival." Yeah whatever "English" they're teaching is inflexible and unnatural.
This is very true. English is actually a crazily super flexible language. I am a Chinese Canadian, and I would much prefer to use the English translator to translate other languages. For example, the Japanese put their verbs at the end of the sentence. "I study Japanese at home tonight" would become "Tonight at home, the Japanese language is the one i study". However, Chinese always put their pronoun at the beginning of the sentence, so looking back at the sentence, it becomes something bizzare like "The Japanese language studies me". (only in soviet Russia?). Usually I would use the English translator when I play Japanese video games, but occasionally I would switch to Chinese because the Japanese and Chinese all have like 30 ways of calling "I" as a person. Anyways, i just wish everyone in the world all understands each others languages.
Many languages have that. Czech has it even worse. Spanish has para/por. And you know what? You dont even have cases in english. And for plurals you just have “s”. And you dont even modify words by the gender and quantity of the subject 😂 english is insanely easy, you just havent taught other languages.
As a non-native speaker of English. I'm surprised that he didn't talk about the actual hardest part of English pronunciation. The vowels.
Most languages have on average 5-6 vowel sounds, while English has a whopping 20 distinct vowel sounds (if we're including diphthongs). Not to mention, the vowel letters (a e i o u) have more than one pronunciation.
Yeah, might is will isi ini singli viwil littir it this piint
How come I is often pronounced as "ai" and A as "ei"!? I have seen no other language do something like that
It would be not hard if it got actual rules, the guarani has the rules of spanish except that the consonants actually sound how they should be (in spanish the J sounds like H) and is easy to learn the 12 vowels with that
I learned English as a foreign language primarily by immersion on A TON of native content, lots of tv shows, and I'm lucky to have the right to "not pay that much attention to these parts of the language (like pronunciation) because i learned it naturally through immersion.
Imagine being a monolingual beta (if you know, you know)
lol same thing for me, i just listened to a lot of english content. It's a really good way not only to learn pronunciation, your brain also handles the usual word placements, how people use prepositions and articles, tenses, etc, so you will just have a feeling that it's right to say something that way and not the other, sometimes without even knowing a rule.
@@whateverwhat4638 yeah, exactly. I also find myself repeating the words i don't know in my head without thinking about them.
Lol
@@diobrando666 yeah, i basically didn't take English classes at school, except the ones that were mandatory, and there i learned to pronounce the verb "to be" as TOBY. Yeah, not so great.
Edit: autocorrect is BS
I come from an alpha chad country 🇦🇿
as a native speaker english tenses have always been really interesting to me . its wild how i can just automatically understand something so complex that non native speakers take awhile to learn
@@epsi Then you hit Fish, fish and Fishes. Fish a bass, fish 2 or more bass, Fishes a whole kettle of different kinds of fish. By the way what is a "Bive"? It is old English it is plural what is one of them called?
"it's wild how I can just automatically understand something so complex that non-native speakers take a while to learn" No, it's not wild. It's known as a native language.
@@g3523jaen i know lmao i was talking about how interesting different languages are . not everyone is dense
@@rainboSnails yeah. I'm so dense, that I only speak 6 languages.
@@g3523jaen i never said you were dense . i dont understand why youre pressed . chill before this becomes a Thing
I'm so glad I learned English through experience like games and videos and not through school which not only sucks but explains things weirdly. I learned it not by learning rules but just by remembering how words are spelled and when to use them
Same.
My friend suggested that English should remain the world lingua franca because, since English is so hard to learn, people will preserve their native language and only use English when they _have_ to. "It's so bad, it's good!"
That, or we can collectively agree to reform and standardize English to have consistent grammar, pronunciation, spelling etc.
Reforming it wouldn't make it any easier to learn, and it may very well complicate things for native speakers. But the idea it's so bad as a lingua franca that it encourages language preservation is hilarious!
@@gavinwilson5324 I don't agree... If we take difficult words and simplify their spelling (for instance, though becoming tho in informal writing) you'll spend less time having to learn both the pronunciation and the spelling, since knowing one induces the other.
If native speakers get laxer with replacing dental fricative with /f/ and /z/ (or any other pair), then you don't have to learn to do/differentiate those, either.
If "which" and "who" (and "whom", I guess) become synonyms, then you don't have to learn the grammar behind those.
It's not easy, but it's not impossible!
@CJH36 Samueru same with Danish speakers tbh
@CJH36 Samueru btw, I know you guys can speak good English but sorry the accent really comes through and I can easily spot the pronounciation blunders a Norwegian makes while speaking.
Or we can maybe make a new artificial language with easy grammar easy pronunciation an easy writing system and a logical structure and then make it the international language.
English is definitely a tough language to learn but feel that its complexity is worth it because compared to other foreign languages you can be so damn specific with how you convey ideas, and this is all down to having extremely odd tenses/ sentence structures.
As a native speaker, English is incredibly malleable and can take form of anything you wish. Leading to beautiful poetry, books, and sentences that include words that can perfectly describe the situation.
@@geekzombie8795 in which cases ?
When I was going to university I realized how difficult it was for people who used English as a second language to be specific. When I tried to learn other languages I realized many languages may have more simple words with highly specific contexts. The consequence of this kind of language seems to be an extraordinary inflexibility. The strict rules almost imposed restrictions on creativity. The more creative the subject or abstract the more the complexity of the English language came out and the harder it was for people I talked to to grasp certain concepts. When I tried to speak other languages I realized there was an odd efficiency to the English language. English is like drawing ven diagrams of meaning to derive hyper specific contexts even when there are no individual words that exist within the language to describe that. Other languages have to compensate with a much larger lexicon. A lot more words that are very prescriptive rather then intuitive. I have difficulty learning prescriptive language as a result. You have to speak in many more simple sentences rather then a combination of abstract concepts to derive specific ones. Someone who is very good with the english language can be the most concise over the largest number of concepts with the fewest sentences. By contrast being poor with English causes the exact opposite issue in which the concepts get messy far too quickly and things get lost in translation even between native speakers.
Yes! I love this about English, my native language lacks some of these features and I always feel weird not being able to do things like the "I do go" emphasis, sometimes I find myself literally unable to fully express myself in my own native language because of this. And that was an example in and out of itself, can't emphasize "my OWN language" like that in my own language 😂
thats basically what i was thinking like i have noticed a lot of other lauguages its like you cant really say certain things you can english because those words litreally do not exist or if they do its kind of limited.
To be fair, all languages are difficult. And yes, there are challenging parts about English as well. But, I have to say, I grew up in Sweden and I’ve learnt both German and English, and what I’ve learned from it is that English is actually, for basic proficiency, much simpler than the alternatives. You can easily convey your message in English, and you can often make basic sentences very quickly when learning the language. Compare it to something like German, where there are the dative, accusative, genetive and nominative cases, the nightmare of der das and die, and so on. English is extremely well suited for international business.
Honestly, I am glad that English became the lingua franca.
It is not the easiest, but at least its grammar is simpler than most European language like German, french, Russian.
no, because you just learned English at a very young age. You can just do that with any language.
I learned Turkish, Russian, English at young age (plus my native language), learning German at the moment, and English feels like the easiest language in this list 😅 It has weird rules (“suggestions”), but for work and similar use cases it seems the easiest to use.
For German, you could speak without ANY declination and with SVO word order, and still be understood by native speakers. Like most languages, the hard part is learning the language fluently with perfect grammar, which i still sometimes struggle with in English after 10 years, especially pronouncing voiced consonants and using the correct past and future tenses.
@@EminMastizada English's relative easiness is also a product of its pervasiveness. There are simply far more instances where you'll be exposed to it passively and far more resources that are readily available (TV/Movies/Books etc)
thanks for the video! the thing about slavic language speakers having trouble with articles is very true; i'm polish and i've noticed that even relatively high level ESL speakers have trouble with those. tenses as well, honestly even i have to remind myself when to use present perfect vs present simple sometimes and i'm halfway through my master's in english lol. speaking from my experience as a polish ESL learner, i think people can sometimes forget how complex english can be because it's relatively easy to grasp the basics to be able to communicate, but then you get tripped up on something like the adjective order, lol.
I think articles are not so bad, they make sense most of the time. But present perfect sucks, definitely. As for adjective order, isn't it universal (at least in indoeuropean languages)? I've never memorized the rules for it, I think I learned from a Tom Scott's video that different types of adjectives are intuitively placed in the same relative positions.
Jestem Anglikiem i uczę się polskiego. Podziwiam każdego, kto uczy się angielskiego jako drugiego języka, bo wiem że nie jest łatwy.
(respectful) Counterpoint: English actually isn't that hard in the grand scheme of things, it's just harder than the average English may consider. English is much more grammatically simple than a lot of languages: no grammatical gender, simple verb conjugations, fewer tenses than some other languages, (arguably) no tones, very limited inflectional morphology, strict word order, SOV word order (fairly common, globally), not ergative/case-marking etc. I have John McWhorter as my professor rn and something he is always talking about is that English has lost a lot of its most difficult features centuries ago. Due to historical circumstances, English has had to have been learned by a lot of adults, and adults suck at picking up complicated grammar, so we have lost a lot difficult aspects that Old English had. Also the fact the English is not a language isolate, and actually comes from a massive language family, many people around the world natively speak a language that it related to English in some capacity, which will allow them to learn English much faster than otherwise. English is complicated, but most languages on Earth are generally much worse in some way. Yes, some of our systems are annoyingly inconsistent, but all languages on Earth have some inconsistencies, many of which are much worse. English is a dominant language on Earth for a reason (other than colonialism ofc).
I'm not in a very intelligent state right now so I might have missed the whole point of your video -- I apologise if that was the case. I love your content!
a big problem with english for language learners that was touched on shortly at the very end is orthography. i mean, in almost every word in my last sentence, there’s gonna be no rules for stress, consonants and vowels do not sound the way they are taught, silent letters, different pronunciation when stringing words together vs. when they’re isolated, few rules for what pronunciation to choose for vowels and consonants, etc. english spelling is really a mess. it makes it a beautiful language for sure. also don’t forget the absolutely arbitrary and ridiculous amount of irregular plurals and irregular past tense/perfect aspect conjugations. i ate? he leapt? she felt? i rung? i shot? i brought, i could, i paid, it shone, it broke, it shook, it made, it flew, it thought, it shut, i won…
@@henrystoes6508 As a German learner, the simple past in German also has a lot of irregulars (that then spill into present tense and past perfect irregular conjugations as well) so I imagine it might be a frequent attribute of Germanic languages.
I agree with your comment. Learning English is hard no doubt, but it’s a relatively simple language grammatically. The hardest part is pronunciation but even then, many native English speakers are used to figuring out what a non-native is trying to say. Plus the vast amount of really good and popular media that is originally in English makes exposure to it a lot more frequent
Why have adults in other cultures kept their inconsistency while the English didn’t in those places?
Almost every person I’ve ever heard saying:
“Hahaha English is so simple and easy!”
didn’t speak English well. Just an observation.
The hardest part of the English language is that in order to pronounce words properly you have to learn each word separately. It's like each word spelling is it's own unique symbol for a pronunciation, with similarities to other symbols rather than rules.
@StellarKnight not really... in most languages I've seen, you can read and pronounce properly almost any word you see even without context the first time you see it.
@@Fetrovsky vietnamese and chinese fr, there are rules for how words should be written and they're pronounced exactly that way, you write the words how you pronounce them
Yes.
I think it is the main reason that so many native English speakers throw their hands in the air and proclaim "I don't know how to pronounce this word", when confronted with a new word. I have been puzzled by that for a long time, as I know most words are pronounced as they are written. It's kind of the point of writing things, at least when using an alphabet. Except for English.
@@stellarknight04 no. Chinese is not like that, Japanese is not like that.
@@MrHkl8324 Chinese and Japanese (when written in Kanji) aren't phonetic at all, instead, the written symbols allude to the word's meaning.
English is a language that tries to be phonetic, but fails at doing so. You can't tell how to pronounce a word just by knowing how to spell, nor viceversa. Instead, you have to memorize each word twice (once for spelling, once for pronunciation). Learning pronunciation is specially hard for non-native learners because of this, since they have no way to even grasp that there is a difference between the pronunciation of many different words.
I love how you, while presenting your argument, explained where the stereotypical accents come from - that’s a short but great deconstruction of the whole accents topic 💪
i'm brazilian and i studied when i was younger in a school where they taught as foreign languages spanish and english. i liked at first spanish bc it's similar to portuguese and it made me feel special lol really, pretty much every brazilian has a basic knowledge of spanish since it's common for us to travel to neighboring countries and meet tourists from these. when the classes went beyond the verb "to be" (it tends to repeat for a long time) i started finding english actually easier especially due to the verb tenses. in both spanish and portuguese the verbs are always tensed not only according to time but also to person and number and the irregular ones will be tensed irregularly in all tenses, so for example the verb "fazer" ("to do") in the infinite present tense is flexed in portuguese as
+ singular 1st person: "faço"
+ singular 2nd person: "fazes"
+ singular 3rd person: "fazem"
+ plural 1st person: "fazemos"
+ plural 2nd person: "fazeis"
+ plural 3rd person: "fazemos"
language gender is also mostly absent in english. i only know these things bc it's my native language, but i get how hard it is for non natives. on the other hand i hate how inconsistent the pronunciation is in english. it is completely obvious in portuguese and even more in spanish but like the "ou" in "bout", "dough", and "thought" ??? there's no intuitive rule. i only know bc of practice
We're sorry about the spelling and pronunciation thing, but it's an unfixable problem by this point.
For example, "Let me take off my boot because I'm about to have a bout of gout"
In American English, "about" and "a bout" are only able to be told apart by rhythm. "About" and "a bout" both rhyme with "gout".
In Canadian English, "about" almost rhymes with "boot", but "bout" still rhymes with "gout".
In British English, good luck because the first question is asking "Which British English?"
If we changed the spelling to fit the pronunciation, the sentence which can be understood by all becomes mutually incomprehensible.
aprendi mais aq nos 12 anos de escola slk.
eu também estudava espanhol na escola e sai sem entender nada. achei muito mais difícil e as inclinações verbais muito mais irregulares do que no inglês. a única parte fácil pra mim foi a similaridade nos sons com o nosso português, de resto, ladeira abaixo
As an American English speaker I've certainly noticed a lot of these points while trying to learn other languages. This was a very good and fun video. I enjoyed it a lot.
Usually when I think of people dealing with others struggling with English I think of people just talking louder. As if shouting or yelling would correct any confusion.
Slower is the key, and clear articulation. A bit louder, so it isn't as mumbling can help. But shouting at the same speed isn't helping.
@@Liggliluff Yes, exactly.
This brought smiles. As an elderly German student, who is a native English speaker, and in a class with native Mandarin and Spanish speakers, I can identify. I am often called on to explain details of English grammar. I am one of those fortunate souls who went to a grammar school and a high school where formal grammar was taught.
In my first attempt at learning German in the days beyond recall I identified a word as a gerundive, though technically English doesn't have one. My German teacher then asked me what country I was originally from, as so few Americans learn the grammar of their native language.
The thing I find interesting though, is that English is one of the few languages where people can say absolute gibberish, and the common English speaking population can almost always understand what they mean.
I’m a native speaker but I had to take speech therapy for years so I definitely relate 😅 English sounds are HARD
As a native speaker with dyslexia who had to spend years of remission to grasp its spelling and written grammar I completely agree.
@@pascalfibonacci What's remission?
@@Anonymous-df8it Being held back a grade, like being old enough to be in 4th grade but held back in the third grade. Been there done that. I was not diagnosed as having Dyslexia until I was a sophomore in collage.
@@Delgen1951 Why didn't they just hold you back for [insert native language here] classes and let you move on with everything else?
@@Anonymous-df8iteverything is written you can’t solve a math answer or write a good history essay if you spend 10 minutes trying to read a sentence
Lovely video! 🤩 One of the things I love about English, which is hard for non-natives, is when to properly use the "to" infinitive, the "bare" infinitive, and the gerund to introduce embedded clauses: "I was planning on doing/*do the cleaning myself;" "I want to see Brasil defeat/?defeating Germany in the World Cup;" "I went *(to) take care of it." Another one is the subtle differences that arise from placing adjectives/participles after the noun, something in which English is very similar to Ancient Greek (attributive vs. predicative use): "I found the lit candle" vs. "I found the candle lit."
"There's no visible light." "There's no light visible."
thank you for putting this into words so well because i've been learning korean lately and whenver i try to explain to friends or family that doing so has made it even more apparent that english sucks complete ass, they ask for an example and my mind goes blank. i will be referencing this in a lot of conversations over the next week, thank you :D
My first and only native language is Portuguese. My only exposure to English outside of the internet was when i spent only 2 weeks in Ireland. I recognize that as a speaker of a Latin based language, there'll be a lot of similarities between these two languages, but I have to mention, that to me English always seemed very easy. Yes there are things that can cause a notch on my mind but also sometimes I find myself struggling with a sentence cuz it's so simple, that it sounds off, I feel like it should be more complex. The things that you pointed out as not making sense are indeed nonsense, but they're so easy to remember that after a few times using them you're already used to it. I have only studied Germanic and Latin languages, and between them, I found English to be the easiest, there might be some less complex languages out there, but English is definitely a smooth language to learn.
You're right. This guy is just glossing over how most other popular languages have much higher initial barriers than English (e.g. tones, complex grammatical cases, crazy verb conjugations, gendered nouns, agglutination)
same here, english also makes me feel like using more specific words without sounding like a movie character
It depends more on what language you are learning from
I would like to highlight that your written English is excellent for a non-native speaker who seems to have only picked it up from the internet. Better than many native speakers in fact.
I agree that English seems relatively easy to start learning (though mastering it is a whole different matter).
What do you mean with similarities? I mean, Portuguese seems to have big differences; English is a germanic language. I'm native german and am surprised by some similarities; there are even a lot of words in english which are directly originated from german (kindergarden, zeitgeist, doppelgänger, schadenfreude etc.).
I’m an English as a Foreign Language teacher, and all my students happen to be Russian. I always emphasize that there are NO difficult or easy languages as a category, subjective difficulty and simplicity is determined by your linguistic, cultural and educational background. Compared with Russian, English really is easy IN CERTAIN ASPECTS, and compared with Chinese it is more difficult IN CERTAIN ASPECTS
I don't know, I think Russian has several features which make it absolutely brutal for non-slavic learners, mainly the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns and the grammatical aspect of verbs.
As a German learning english, one of the thing which confused me the most is when you say "I am *in* a car." but "I am *on* a train."
Reading the logic behind this seems so arbitrary to me, since my imagination of the difference of being "in" or "on" something is whether you (or the object) are (is) surrounded by walls or not.
So in my understanding if somebody says he is "on the plane" I imagine him being literally ontop of the plane, on the roof, the plane underneath him. While if somebody says she is "in the plane" I correctly imagine her being inside the cabin, surrounded by the side walls of the plane (and optionally the roof).
ive been thinking about the 'she doesn't speak' vs 'she speaks not' for so long it's so nice to hear someone else say that it doesn't make any sense!!
The phenomenon is called "do-support", in case you want to look it up :)
You can technically say "she speaks not," but people will probably think it sounds antiquated. Means not that it isn't fun though. (Then again I did have to restructure that sentence quite a bit to make it work.)
Lool exactly, it is completely understandable. Its kind of like reading Shakespeare but simpler. Most native English speakers, I reckon, can understand most of what's going on in a Shakespeare play, despite it being quite different from modern English, so these sort of English phrases like the one you brought, are easily understandable. I don't see an issue with people speaking that way at all.
I've always thought the not at the end of a sentence to be a more fancy way to emphasize how not the situation is.
As a foreigner (and a polyglot), l can say that English is one of the easiest languages, just because it is EVERYWHERE. Lots of stuff on the Internet is written in English, as well as in every bookshop or other resources you can find the English textbook, material etc. And the majority of the whole population is native, so it is not that hard. Much harder to study Japanese, because lots of useful things are in Japan, but not everyone can afford going to it.
Not to mention the 10,000 characters you have to learn... Such a primitive system....
@@eladpeleg745 Not necessarily. In japanese school children learn ≈1800 kanji. After going to uni, students know approximately +2000 kanji. Add up scientific terms and characters that person learns at work etc. and you have roughly 5000. However, it is sufficient to know ≈1800 for speaking japanese fluently (there is a list of kanji of each level, for instance beginner (N5) knows kanji 日(sun) 月(moon) and so on).
@@tobeflyhigh Never the less it is a more primitive system of characters more closely resembling Egyptian Hierogliphs
@@eladpeleg745
More primitive is implying a lack of sophistication and complexity, when in fact the opposite is true.
Japanese as least in terms of space taken by individual characters is much more efficient than English in conveying information.
@@LancesArmorStriking But also equally tedious to learn... If you wish to argue that a logographic system is superior then go ahead
My favorite podcast Lingthusiasm has a interesting podcast on languages from empires, where they make the case that actually, English IS easier than most to learn by the same rule that makes Mandarin Chinese and Persian easier to learn. The more non-natives that have to learn and speak the language, and the longer the language has existed as the language of the empire, the more the difficult parts of the language will just drop out of use. This is why Mandarin Chinese has only 4-5 tones when most languages in the region average at 8 or more tones, or why Persian's tenses are easier than most languages in that region (if I remember the podcast's example right, might be wrong about why they said Persian was easier).
BUT, for the same reason that it's about the age of the language as an empire's language and frequency of correct usage by speakers, that's also what gives us the most annoying thing of all. The more common something is, the longer it takes for it to lose what makes it difficult. This is why most of the irregular verbs in a language are the most commonly used words. So frustrating!
English tenses are by far the hardest thing for me. I'm from Germany and we pretty much spent most of our time in school learning the rules, but I just can't remember them. I got very bad grades in middle school because it was all about the rules. Almost everything I know about languages is intuition, even in German, so my grades got a lot better with experience.
Relatable
I'm sure you do a pretty good job, though it also works in reverse from a native English speaker ... the German simple past tense (does it sufficiently replace all the forms we use in English (imperfect 'was doing', etc. plus a 'once off happening' (... I did, ... did do, etc.)) ... plus the concept of a past conditional passive in a sub-clause (three or four verb bits at the end of the sentence, I've always found mind-blowing!! :) )
0:26 The scale of gaining a god-complex from the popularity of one's educational UA-cam videoes goes from '1' to 'CGPGrey'.
This latter negative sentence at 5:31 truthfully makes sense even within English morphology!
Fun fact: oddly enough, English shares three of its most unusual phonemes with a totally random and completely unrelated language: Cree. The English r, short i, and th are all also present in the western dialects of the Cree-Innu-Naskapi dialect continuum.
Also, we need to bring eð and þorn back because as it stands, there is literally no possible way of knowing whether a th is voiced or not. You just have to already know.
Yes, but as it was the same in old english. Those two symbols having different meanings in English dictionaries is a modern creation of the IPA alphabet. In old English both represented th in voiced and unvoiced forms and was sometimes just up to the writer to choose one. That’s why thorn remained popular in written Middle English and eth died out centuries before. Regardless of which you used, it’s assumed to be unvoiced by default but you usually voice it when between vowels, so when it’s voiced at the end of a word we add an e like bathe or lathe. The only real problem nowadays is th at the beginning of words.
If the two old English th graphs were consistent we would’ve just kept them because that’d be cool and useful instead of using a digraph, but they weren’t and th is the best we’ve got.
@@jacobhayes4085 What they were used for in the past is irrelevant to my point. They're cool and useful now, and using th for both is dumb.
@@5h0rgunn45 you said bring back, not repurpose. My bad
@@jacobhayes4085 I guess if you read it that way, your response makes sense. What I meant was we should use them for modern English to distinguish between the th in 'this' and the th in 'thing' like they do in Icelandic.
Gross. We should just stick to Greek δ/θ
Japanese does have tenses, just 2 of them, past and present. There’s no distinct difference between present and future in japanese
I didn't know that, I suppose that would also affect their ability to acquire certain tenses, haven't read any literature on it though
@@kklein Actually Japanese not have present tense. They called past and non-past. Because the non-past can be present and future too.
Which in fact makes the japanese tenses very easy (atleast for my Hungarian nativeness which use the same past non-past method, except for only one verb what have a future form too).
@@tovarishchfeixiao Technically, English also has Past and Non-past. The "future tense" is just the same as present conjugations, sometimes adding the "will" particle (which doesn't qualify it as a separate tense, "will" is just like other particles like "would" or "must", and there's no "would tense" or "must tense").
be going to, present continuous and even the present simple conjugation can be used in a future sense.
Truly a tarded language
@@CarMedicine Subjunctive tense, Necessitative tense (I had to look that last one up)
On the other hand, the tenses are much simplified compared to many other European and other languages that have six or so versions for each tense. For most American verbs, it's just "V / V(e)s" like "go / goes" for one tense. Lots of other languages have many more. Also, the articles don't change based on gender or number, and the adjectives don't change depending on gender or tense. There are no declensions. Some tenses just use an extra verb (like "will") rather than new conjugations for that tense. Spelling is inconsistent, but English doesn't have thousands of characters to remember. And more...
Rewatching this video every time I work on my conlang. Adjusting Native English Speaker biases!! This was so helpful!!!
i would definitely analyze maximal English syllable structure as CCCVCCCC, not CCCCVCCCC. in the case of "strengths," the initial three consonants would be /s tʃ ɹ/ (or /s t ɹ/ for some) not /s t ʃ ɹ/ (and the final four depends on analyzing the coda as /ŋ k θ s/ rather than /ŋ θ s/ with homoorganic stop insertion but the four-consonant analysis feels more reasonable than for the onset)
(also there are other examples that DEFINITELY have four consonants in the coda- my favourite is "texts" /tɛksts/ with /k s t s/ for a coda)
"angsts" arguably ends in 5 consonants though this is uncommon... plenty of "texts" "sixths" and "twelfths" to go around to justify the CCCC coda
I definitely dont think the... palatalized? (is that the right word) "t" sound that appears in "tr" is helpful to analyze as 2 different consonants
@@robynkolozsvari The ts in 'texts' is one single alveolar affricate (an affricated s), so that makes 'texts' CVCCC.
@@Cloiss_ i think you meant affricate or postalveolar. (using wikipedia)
@@urinstein1864 i'd argue that unlike /tʃ/ which definitely appears as a true affricate (phonologically acting as a single consonant), /ts/ in English should be understood as a cluster. phonetically you could count this as an affricate, but phonologically it kinda has to be a cluster (no distinction in usage between eg laps, rats, tacks /læps/ /ɹæts/ /tæks/, plus the morpheme boundary in the specific case of "texts"); no /ts/ phoneme in English
As a person whos first language is English, videos like this make me relize things about English that I've never realized before.
I love that English has both "He's not" and "He isn't" side by side which have similar meanings but not identical meanings to most people.
Plus, English tenses don't always match with other languages that do have tense because semantics means English tenses do a lot of heavy lifting: "I ate" and "I have eaten" both signify a past event, but only one has (default) effect into the present day... and it's not the "simple past". The future construction isn't always considered a real tense (because "shall" and "will" are modals expressing intention) and present tense verbs often signify future effect (e.g., "I see the doctor in five days" is a future expression and not a present one).
English is... an odd duck.
I could have gone my whole life before realizing there is he’s not and he isn’t lolol
It's a bastard language, cobbled together from old French, German, Latin, Celtic roots. I love the adaptability and the expressiveness that's possible with all the different ways you could choose to phrase the same information. It makes the poetry so rich and nuanced.
You also don't have to follow it's rules. You'll still be understood. You can make English do whatever you want it to. When I was 11 I cared deeply about spelling and rules and I would correct my teacher. But I've learned that 'poor' English is still English. It's richer and more complex and more alive than some people would like it to be.
what different meaning does "he's not" have from "he isn't"?
@@TheFlyfly I'm wondering the same thing
I think those are more like general reminders that any language will be hard to learn if your own language is very different from it. For me, English actually stands out as a pretty easy language to learn compared to my own (as in, I've had a lot less trouble learning English than an American would probably have learning Portuguese)
Thank you for speaking out for us non English people!
Even though I spoke English growing up, it's not the so-called "native" version, but a localised and simplified version (I'm Malaysian). The pronunciation is quite hard for me sometimes, I can never distinguish some sounds which English speakers seem to see as different, such as the "u" in "but" and the "a" in father, or the "a" in "cat" and the e in "met". It took me years to learn to pronounce the "th" properly, even then, something I just slip back into "t" or "d".
To be fair, for the spelling part, my knowledge in Chinese helped me a bit, that is to not expect consistency in the English spelling, but to memorise every word as if I memorise Chinese characters. As for the future tense, I pretty much give up on the subtle differences and just speak whatever I feel is right, but that's of course not okay with exams.
A feature that is tricky to most learners of English are the phrasal verbs. From the spanish perspective (wich is my mother tongue), there is a single word for each action, and to learn that in English you can change the meaning of a phrase by adding a preposition constantly makes you wonder wether the action that you want to express needs a preposition or not. Also, I would add comparatives and superlatives as sth a little tricky for some people.
For me, the problem with the consonant clusters isn't even the sheer amount of consonants there can be in a row, but that some combinations of sounds are really hard to pronounce, it took me a while to be able to pronounce /ɝl/ (the "rl" in "girl" and "world"), and I still have trouble with words like "depths" (/p/, /θ/ and then /s/, seriously??? I just say /depfs/, still awkward but pronounceable)
To be fair, there are non-rothic English accents that doesn't pronounce the R in "girl" and "world". The R only appears if the next letter is a vowel. So /ɡɜːl/ and /wɜːld/.
Yeah ten of millions of us don't pronounce the r in those, it just flavours the vowel sound
For the former, you could just opt to drop the r completely. One of the two main accents of English does, giving /əː/ instead of /ɚ/ for /gəːl/ and /wəːld/. Even without dropping it completely, there are a lot of ways to pronounce /r/ that seem to be accepted, though [ɹ̠ʷ] is standard for the most part.
For the latter, personally, I barely pronounce the "p" in "depths." Pretty much all I can hear of it is just the pop from the mouth opening. /θs/ from what I can tell seems to largely just be starting a /θ/ and then quickly pulling my tongue back to make the /s/. That said, swapping /θ/
@@Liggliluff oh, true
@@angeldude101 ooo, the "ths" thing is really helpful. Thanks
Since English is already accepted as the international language, if we ever make it the official international common, it should probably be a simplified cut down version, but also have it be backwards compatible with English.
I am a russian-speaking finnish-learning person, English for me got quite easy after maybe 3 years of hard work on studying. The only actual problem there was was perfect tenses, as Russian doesn't have anything like it, but a simple explanation made it bearable
I'd argue about that, Vitas. Russian gets there -- by way of verb aspect: its _vid._ Different method, same meaning.
Feels very strange at first to English speakers, but becomes easier with experience.
As a czech i can say that the biggest problem was the sentence structure itself, like when do i need to use the word “do” or “the” but after that its very easy
LMAO i love how you didn’t even mention the absurd orthography till the very end. here in China so many people have to rely on specialized PRINTED BOOKS to help them memorize words and their spellings, since the orthography can look innocuous (another ridiculously hard to memorize word btw), but it can be so haphazard at times.
also the whole ‘just remember the roots and regular affixes’ thing doesn’t really work. i mean, i have incorrectly used the adjectival suffixes -ist, -ic and -istic so many times for a given root, that it’s pretty much random. i’m convinced that English orthography and morphology are just hostile to EFL speakers at this point 😅
anyway, another great video as always ❤
词根的话还是得学点希腊语和拉丁文😷
When I started learning Latin I realized how wordy English is. I feel like English is a bit unique from Indo-European languages in that it keeps a lot of the conjugations for tense, aspect, mood, etc. but instead of changing the verb it just adds more and more auxiliaries. It's kind of a trade off between memorizing a bunch of conjugations versus putting in more and more words until it's a soup of a sentence.
Okay, but then you look at French and realize that English is just fine.
The way these figures in the video are drawn is very catchy in my opinion. All of them contain some sort of traditional outfit that is supposed to represent different nations, it's very cool
As a Dutch speaker, English is relatively easy compared to other languages. I usually don't even think about the pronunciation because I already know how to pronounce a word or phrase correctly. I think this has something to do with English being very prevalent in the Netherlands and English is closely related to Dutch. I find it easier to learn/speak English than German, even tho German is supposed to be closer to Dutch. A lot of people in the Netherlands indeed pronounce "th" (ð, θ) as "t, d or f", however, I think younger people find it easier to pronounce "th" correctly.
As a native English speaker, who is learning Dutch, I can definitely say Dutch has been super easy to learn for me so far. I’ve always heard now and again that Dutch is one of the easiest languages to learn for us, but I didn’t realise that until I started looking into it myself. There’s SO many similarities.
@@casluvs Yeah, I don't speak Dutch, but I lived in the Netherlands for a few months. It's strange, hearing often _feels_ like you're hearing English, before you pay attention and realise you can't understand the words....😅
Yeah I don't get the fuss with the (ð, θ) letters, Icelandic, Spanish, Faroese and Greek - just in Europe - use them.
Native English speaker, Dutch is close enough that I can just kind of guess my way through Dutch wikipedia, even though I've studied dick-all dutch.
Your indignant way of speaking of things is hilarious. Fantastic video!
***
The absence of V in chinese suddenly explains the woman in my bluetooth speaker saying:
Top loot shoes twice and reedy to pell. (So it sounded to me, a Brazilian)
I am Ukrainian and now trying to teach some English to my mom, who never studies English (she wasn't familiar even with simple words like "yes", "no", "happy birthday" etc)
1) hardest thing in English is its phonetics, you can't predict how to pronounce word unless you have seen and heard dozens of similarly written words. There are rules for pronounciation but there are so much of them and exceptions are still not rare that learning this rules becomes pointless. It all comes to brute force and remembering pronounciation for each word. You could say people will see patterns with time and its true but my mom for example need just a little bit of English to be able to communicate so she dont learn how to write, she dont have good vision already so when she learns words she dont always see them but only hear so such patterns won't appear and she has to remember pronounciation for each word.
2) Articles aren't useful, despite author saying they are. I simply cant imagine situation where someone would be confuse about context without article. Yes, particles have function but it indicates something that is obvious without article,therefore making article useless.
P.s. I didnt use any articles in this comment and i doubt anybody missed the point because of it
The point, we got. 😊 The articles... we regretted not seeing.
Take Dostoevsky's _Idiot._ The English needs an article, or else the title ends up not meaning some particular idiot, but calling you one. So the English title gets an article: _THE Idiot,_ by Dostoevsky.
I know this wasn't the point of the video, but English actually has quite simple grammar when compared to many European, and non-European, languages. It used to be much more complex, but it was simplified down to the point that a lot of linguists actually call the simplification(and the adoption of many French words) a creolization.
This has got to be the most beautiful outro music of any UA-cam channel! Subscribed right away :).
Yeah, phonology's hard af. I spent four months, thirty minutes every day, learning to distinguish between different English phonemes.
I still have trouble with æ and ɛ
@@tomasbeltran04050 I think æ was sent here from the heaven to punish us for our sins.
@@tomasbeltran04050 Some of us just one day learned to distinguish them at some point, but before that? Raw frustration 😂
@@krzychukar676 Completely deserved if your language(s) ha (ve)s [not sure if you're already bilingual natively or not so...] tenses, tones [like Mandarin], genders, declensions [like Russian], conjugations [like Spanish], flowing syllable times over stress times, final devoicing, rolled R's, throat R's, post-positions, uncertain word order, or some other blemish.
Also deserved if you failed to have empathy from an English speaker who just wants to not be that monolingual guy, and insisted on switching to English at the first mistake instead of a good exchange.
I still struggle hearing the difference between /s/ and /z/, and I hate the American name "zee" because it sounds like "cee", while the British "zed" is unique.
Many situations it's clear, "Dragonball C" is Dragonball Z, and "press the C/CR button" is the Z/ZR button on a Nintendo controller. "Ctrl+C to copy" is Ctrl+C, "Ctrl+C to undo" is Ctrl+Z, but "press Alt+C to [command]" can be either Alt+C or Alt+Z.
Here just to say that I've learned english at age 16, just from internet, so I understand both sides of the people :>
If I didn’t grow up speaking English, I don’t think I would ever have the resilience to learn it.
Love the topic here since it's something I think about a lot, for whatever reason. You should really do a video on why English is this way too, since it's fascinating to learn the origins of quirks in this absolute homunculus of a language.
As an English speaker who likes to learn languages, I've never had much of a problem pronouncing new sounds, some took practice but after a little bit pronouncing sounds like "Х" and "Ы" in russian or the german "R" were as easy as saying any sounds
Being English, and a learner of a few foreign languages, I would say English having a big phonology is quite helpful. It certainly covers most of the areas of Romance and other Germanic languages and slavic. Notable exceptions, trilled/rolled 'r', the French 'r', the guttural 'ch' sound (found in Spanish j and g, German 'ch', similar to Scottish 'loch') and the sound similar to Welsh double L 'll'.
Explained in a witty manner. Good work.
Yeah, your critique is on point. For me as a native Russian speaker it is always a pain in the ass when it comes to pronouncing unknown words, let alone articles and those freaking tenses. It's manageable, but to this day I don't get it completely and instead I learn it to know by heart or just use my intuition
But you guys have noun cases that have to match your pronouns, which makes it tricky. Ya hatchu, Tiy hatchish, etc.
@@JohnOstrowick oh I'm agree with you in that regard. To think about it, it's also quite tricky. It is a good point you make, but as a native speaker I usually don't even think about it.
I can't imagine how hard it's like to learn Russian as a non native speaker, especially aspects like that
I'm currently doing a grammar class for English at uni (it's just a side course for stem students) and half the course is just tenses. Like present perfect, simple past, the progressive stuff etc etc. I think I'm doing quite alright with the past tenses, but oh boy do I hate the future.
I have no idea what the rules are and half the time I still forget them because German basically doesn't do future tenses and idk... It's a mess
German _does_ do future tenses. People are just neglecting them.
Verp*&sen Sie (Es ist ein Witz hahaha)! Sie haben "werden".
@@lonestarr1490 Well, the people are doing the German, aren't they?
Well, English doesn't technically have a present tense, which is probably why it's confusing. Past tense is generally the -ed suffix, present has none, present perfect has -ing, but future... there is no suffix for it. Instead, you (usually) use the word "will" followed by the some other tense. The future of "walk" is "will" + present: "will walk". The "future perfect" is "will be" + present perfect: "will be walking" (similar to how present perfect is "am walking" or "is walking"). You can use past perfect ("will have walked"), that weird one that I think is called pluperfect ("will have been walking"), etc., but every "future" tense follows the rules of some other tense.
@@kekker_ the -ing form is called the progressive. There is a perfect form using the word “have” followed by the past participle of the main verb.
As Russian, the article thing is just so true. Articles are very confusing and inconsistent and I use them when I just "feel", that it's needed, but I cannot usually explain why exactly article is needed in this exact situation.
I consider English easy because of one single thing: verbs don't change based on the pronoun.
For example, the verb eat:
I eat
You eat
He/She/It eats
We eat
They eat
It's the same word each time. It only changes at the third person, you gotta add an s, but it's really consistent so easy to remember.
In French, the verb eat (manger) would be conjugated like this:
Je mange
Tu manges
Il/Elle/On mange
Nous mangeons
Vous mangez
Ils/Elles mangent
In Spanish, the verb eat (comer) would be this:
Yo como
Tu comes
El/Ella/Usted come
Nosotros comemos
Vosotros coméis
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes comen
It changes with each person, and it's also the case in other tenses.
My main language is french. In school I learned english and spanish, and I found english so fucking easy because of that.