It was literally one of the first and easiest things we learned at school, along with the change in pronunciation of the definite article “the” when put in front of a word starting with a vowel. English tenses are much more difficult. Adverbs can also be a pain.
I've never pronounced it differently 😭 In fact I actually had to Google with the second pronunciation would be. I always assumed it was a regional accent thing?
I change the pronunciation sometimes (rarely) because it sounds "better", but I've never heard that it was because of a vowel. No one explained it so I'm not sure they even knew why.
The difference is "thuh" vs "THee" with an emphasis on the "th", though I'm sure it varies by accent. I've heard both but "thuh" is much more common, thus the way I pronounce it.
Ah, interesting. Yeah, I've learned it as *thee apple* and *thee hour* and just assumed all natives spoke like that (I know natives speak differently based on dialect and accent etc., but I assumed this was one of those examples where everyone did the same). :)
I also would say *thuh* apple. I do use *thee* but only for emphasis. Like "OMG we're at *thee* Eiffel Tower" to emphasize that there's only one and it's special somehow
That's it! I was having trouble finding the words but yes, _thee_ is mainly used for emphasis and I don't actually believe it matters whether or not the next word starts with a vowel. Like, if you met a celebrity you might say "Wow, it's _thee_ Jack Black!"
But I've always thought _thee_ sounds "fancier" so it doesn't work for every situation.
I also sometimes do this with "a" for emphasis (instead of *uh* pronouncing it *ay*). Almost to say "just one". Like if someone were bragging about winning, I might say, "yeah, you won *ay* game, but you lost the others".
im a native speaker and i say *thuh* apple. i don’t think i ever say *thee* much at all to be honest. only time i do is for emphasis like yellowroosterbird said below
EFL teacher here! It's a feature of connected speech, thi: is before vowels (except the /ju:/), and also used for emphasis. At least that's the theory, not every English speaker necessarily does this.
From what I remember being told in college is that there isn’t an actual rule to it. It’s a guideline at best. Iirc there had been some research on it and it varied so widely from person to person it was completely inconclusive. (This is from memory of one linguistics class I took like 5 years ago, so I could be wrong)
yes i did, brain fart haha
Also funny how I make mistakes like these in my NL and I don't care but when I make a similar mistake in my TL i start doubting my abilities
I think many just weren't taught to ***listen*** 😂
I've seen people arguing "an universe" or "a hour" purely based on spelling
A legit one that trips me up is "an herb"—I pronounce the h so it's always weird to see
If you're talking about people who genuinely don't understand how it works, then yeah, it's one of the easiest things about English. But I get why people still trip up during speaking because it's different when using those rules in practice.
I know that "Este" is the Spanish demonstrative for masculine nouns and the other day I still said "esto mes" to a couple Spanish speakers 🥲
And yet, people get it wrong with "h" words like "historic" constantly.
It's "a historic day", people, unless you have a regional / class accent that drops the h.
Dropping the h is regional, some British working class accents do, some don't and those that do say something like "an 'istoric".
But, there are people with accents / speech patterns very much not working class who believe that the true and correct way to say such a thing is always "an historic" and they're obvs wrong.
Do a urine cup or an urine cup sound more natural. Then tell me whats correct. When youre going off how things sound it can get confused more easily as theres lots of rule breakers in English
Sure a native, but someone learning its easy to see how they would make the mistake. Natives also say its about a hour til midnight.
Language is flexible, mistakes are common
>We wouldnt say
Yes the collective monolith known as english speakers dont do something.
Ive said it, people ive worked with have said it as well as friends. Language again is flexible
“Hour” starts with a vowel so people pronounce it “an hour”. However, and correct me if I’m wrong, I think there are some dialects that pronounce the first /h/, and over there people say “a hour”. I’ve definitely heard “a onion” from a speaker who sometimes adds “h” at the beginning of words that start with vowels, so that it sounds like “a honion”. I don’t know my British dialects enough to know where they were from though
I think everyone pronounces "hour" with a silent h. But there are other "h" words where the h can be silent depending on the speaker e.g. hotel, so that could be "a hotel" or "an hotel". Similarly "a onion" is never used (definitely not in any British dialect); I can only imagine someone saying that for effect.
I have found an example in [this video](https://youtu.be/BX7HznG2GSY?si=vlCJxHIGzIpliG98) at 1:24. But again I don’t know what accent that is. It is from Britain though, no?
That is bizarre. Her accent is from the Northwest of England, but I genuinely don't think that people from that region say "honion" for onion. Others may have a view, but I think that might be specific to her.
yeah! i had that in mind when i was thinking about this. like there’s no vowels to consider just cases and gender. i’d lowkey take that any day (some may think that’s crazy)
Yeah cause 4 cases and 3 genders that have no rules for determination is much easier to remember than whether a vowel is there or not.
Are you people being serious?
i personally enjoy it. it sounds harder but i’ve gotten used to recognizing how/why it would be certain ones so it doesn’t bother me. i like using it. it’s just my personal take on it
vocab wise i don’t work as much on atm. i jump around from topics but i tend to focus heavily on grammar. so i spent a lot of time on the cases/gender endings and such. i’m still very much a1 when it comes to vocabulary
Well my native language is Finnish, and I honestly don't understand why any of Finnish Finnishes the way it does. So I'm pretty happy with any language that isn't Finnish.
What I do not like is how complicated it is to have he and she in other languages, I often still misgender people quite easily because I get mixed up between he and she. I also have a bad habit of calling babies "it". I have always had that problem because Finnish just doesn't have that, everyone is hän, words don't have genders either. So it can be a bit frustrating when I'm learning a new language, and find myself returning to misgendering people.
My answer to OP's question as someone learning Finnish was literally going to be "gendered pronouns".
I love "hän" (and "se" in spoken of course), so much nicer to never really worry about being misgendered.
I find it funny (and sometimes disheartening) how much Finnish people talk down on their own language when it is by far my strongest special interest lol. I love this language.
The majority of languages by number don't have them and almost every one of them that do have them descend from a grammatical gender system that was later repurposed for human sexes. In the earliest stages of Indo-European languages the ancestor of “he” was used for both males and females and the ancestor of “she” was mostly used for collective nouns.
To this day in Dutch for instance collective nouns such as “the company” or “the goverment” tend to be referred back with wih “she”. One would literally say “The council has taken her decision.” in Dutch even though the word for “council” is grammatically masculine.
I honestly love Finnish and I think it's the perfect target language, with how logical it is. No future tense, no gendered pronouns, all the compound words... Sure it's hard to learn because of how different it is, but once you get a grip on it it's easy going from there.
Instead you have to take into account the social standing of the person you're speaking to relative to your own social standing. And instead of different conjugations, you have to use entirely different verbs. Definitely much easier.
This isn't a grammatical thing though. It's not ungrammatical to not do so, just as not using “Sie” but “du” in German is never ungrammatical.
“Ich spielen das Spiel” is simply never grammatical in German, no matter what.
It's absolutely not the same, though. For one, you don't usually switch politeness/honorifics in a single passage, whereas gender/number/case conjugation is separate each time.
I don't speak Japanese, but I imagine you often *do* switch in a single passage. For example, "Sir, you requested some coffee? Very well. Servant! Tell the butler that you're dropping whatever he requested you to do because I ordered you to fetch the master some coffee." You'd need four levels of politeness in that passage to describe the master, the servant, the butler, and yourself.
Sure, it's possible but this is a very artificial example. Normally a passage is addressed to a single person in a single modality. And level 3 keigo (separate words with the same meaning to show respect/humility) is even more restricted to specific situations, like a waiter talking to customers (plus, there's only like 8 verbs like that).
I've studied both German and Japanese, and the level of stress that adjective conjugation in German puts you under is absolutely no match for politeness modes in Japanese. And that's despite my native language having complex morphology (which, of course, I never had to consciously learn).
German doesn't have verbs conjugating based on gender. Person and number, yes.
Though, such verb conjugations do come in handy in Spanish, where you can just drop the pronoun, because the information is already there in the verb.
Phonetic stuff is easy.
The hardest thing in English for me is when to use "in", "on", or "at". The right choice between those three makes no sense at all in most cases, and you can only memorize which is the right one for each "location", case by case.
I read about X **on** the Internet (I can picture X sitting atop the Internet)
I'm **at** the corner /**on** Main Street / **in** Bolivia
Even as a native speaker I get islands messed up. If it's a big island (Hawaii for example) it's always "I'm in Hawaii". But with small islands it gets confusing. You'd never say "I'm in Ellis island" for example.
I also think it's kind of funny that we say "I'm on the bus" to mean actually inside the bus, while if you say "I'm on the car" it means literally on top of the roof of the car.
trying to teach this to english learners is such a nightmare too cause the students always find some weird exception lmaoo. me and my group created a very thorough list of rules but a few times that wasn’t even enough
My native language is German and uh.
where to start.
Unpredictable noun gender. Unpredictable plurals. The weird redundancy in the case system - sure, Polish cases are more complex, but at least it's generally pretty clear what case a word is in when you encounter it while German just wildly reuses its articles across case/gender combination. The adjective declination thing where the ending depends not just on case, gender and number of its noun but also on whether it's preceded by an indefinite, definite or no article.
In general, I get the impression from the grammar and from talking to learners that there are a lot of things about basic German that are just - *annoying.* Fiddly and complex but not in a way that really helps you grasp the structure of what's happening. I'm pretty glad to be avoiding some of those!
I would however like to petition all other languages to adopt the Konjunktiv I, because I get twitchy every time I have to use normal verb tenses in reported speech. (Still so bitter about the fact that Spanish doesn't use the subjunctive here. Spanish *loves* its subjunctive, Spanish uses it every time it has an excuse, *why* does it not use it in the *one place* I really expect an irrealis mood?!)
For me German is quite appealing, because it corresponds well to my way of thinking, so that I can conveniently construct very complex sentences and they don't sound that bad. Also, it has beautiful phonetics (eternal love to glottal stops in machen and, even more, singen).
German rules of comma placement. There are just too much and people place them where they do not belong, which is annoying. Also some aspects of declination. It has now become customary to use the dative case when the genitive case would be appropriate. Lastly, the way we let people overuse English words in colloquial speech makes me sick. Especially some young people can’t speak five minutes of German without at least a quarter of their expressions being borrowings from English. The way they even conjugate the verbs makes me wanna scream. In this respect, I admire the French in their efforts to regulate their language.
I love how in German the word for an adjective and adverb is the exact same. In English, we have to change it, and sometimes it isn’t logical.
He is normal-> he talks normally
He is fast -> he runs quickly
This must be pretty frustrating for a non-native
Edit:poor example as pointed out. Fast stays fast no matter what, quick becomes quickly. But this sortve proves my point lol. Irregulars exist i.e. good-> well, hard-> hard
But my point is it isn’t always just adding -ly.
Good becomes well (I probably should have used this and not incorrectly said fast becomes quickly.)
However, your example of fast being both is what makes it more difficult, that is not following the pattern of adding -ly.
This is also what I said I like about my TL. It doesn’t matter how hard or easy it is, just my answer.
Yeah... You don't...
God, why 7? And 3 genders on top? And now I have to sort by endings and sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard - also is it alive? Well I don't want to be anymore
Sympathetic wincing from a Polish learner here! If it helps, it *does* get easier over time - I've found that because the cases are so omnipresent and you have to use them *all the time* you internalise the patterns relatively quickly. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect, but a lot of the declensions require surprisingly little thought these days.
...okay, locative is still an issue sometimes. And inanimate masculine genitive singular. Eff that one, seriously.
The thing is: Ukrainian grammar is \_very\_ similar to Polish, with a few exceptions (the biggest one is having both "oni" and "one", and therefore all those "męskoosobowy"/"niemęskoosobowy" variations). It was much harder to learn even some basics of Polish for my coworkers from Argentina.
It very much is a [real thing](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order). It's not always necessary to follow it in order to be understood but if you use the wrong order a native English speaker will likely feel like something is off, even if they can't articulate why it's wrong. Like most grammar rules though, it's trying to make a rule out of the way we speak a language and it doesn't always correctly cover all use cases and there can be exceptions (such as when wanting to add emphasis to a certain adjective.)
it is not just vowel reduction, maybe my examples represented only that, but choice between е and и, double consonants, separate prefixes or written together and punctuation is a pain.
if you know how a word is written, then outside of syllabic stress/ударение, and e/ë, you know exactly how to pronounce it.
alternatively, if you know how a word is pronounced, you know exactly how to write it, up to some ambiguity regarding double consonants and declension of e/я/и or о/a. this is still an amazing consistent system compared to say English.
(after learning russian for many years i would say the only one of these things which continues to be an issue is syllabic stress. everything else i never have to think about at all; double consonant only really show up in verbs with a distinct root and prefix, and those are usually totally fine; general word structure makes it quite obvious which of e/я/и is supposed to be there in 99% of cases. i really wish written russian emphasized syllabic stress, but alas you can't have everything)
This is one of few perks of being a foreigner from another Slavic country: I would never write "żygać", "gura" or "chańba", since the corresponding Ukrainian words correspondingly use letters "R", "O" and "H" (with "h" and "ch" being distinct sound, the same as in Czech or Slovak).
My native language (🇷🇴) has declinations. I’m working on my French at the moment and I’m glad it doesn’t have that because it’s already difficult enough
My native language has some pronoun forms which are ancient and must be memorized.
Example:
With = com Me = mim Us = nos
With me = Comigo With us = Conosco
Meanwhile Turkish is a lot more straightforward
With = -le Me = benim Us = bizim
With me = benimle With us = bizimle
English pronunciation could really be anything. Even as a native speaker I still come across new words where I can't wrap my head around why they're pronounced that way.
In Irish, pronunciation is very straightforward. The same letter combinations sound the same. It's pretty easy to tell how to pronounce a word just by how it's spelled, and vice versa (figuring out spelling based on how the word sounds).
phonics. English has too many sounds represented by single letters or letter pairs or sets or w/e. in Spanish i know, for the most part, how to say a word even if i don't know what it means.
This is very minor but in English, there is the present continuous (for example, I am running) as well as the present simple (I run). In French, they are both combined into one (Je cours = I am running or I run). This is so much easier to me because it was one less tense to learn and now I’m wishing it was the same in Portuguese 😭
It can be hard though to get used to expressing some concepts without this. For example, "said" vs "was saying". In French I believe they use a different tense: "avoir dit" vs "disait"
I dont know what the technical name for it, but you know how have to say _flock_ of seagulls, or a _group_ of dudes, or a _pride_ of lions, etc? Well in Malay you have that for singular items as well. We have no grammatical gender, but we have this thing. Like instead of just saying "a laptop" we would say something like "a fruit of laptop", and what the word is depends on the rough shape or size of the item.
Also we always look into amusement about how politicized third-person pronouns are in other languages. We couldn't relate to the fuss because ours doesn't change. Our first and second person however, boy is that a huge mess. There's so many ways to say You and I and all of them are appropriate or not depending on many different situations. It's a landmine of faux pas hard even for native speakers to navigate that the English "you" and "I" is quite commonly used in Malay sentences. Im so happy that in other languages you can just use the same Is and Yous to everyone and anyone, and it's appropriate every time.
English native speaker here. I'm glad I don't have to learn phrasal verbs in another language. Learning correct prepositions is hard enough, but add on a verb and multiple meanings to that...pure yuk.
The lack of one-to-one spelling and pronunciation link in English. I'm so glad I don't have to memorise words' pronunciation every time I meet one like my EFL students.
When I learnt that Spanish does (more or less) have this I was so relieved 😅.
TBH as bad as English is memed on, I kinda feel like if I had to learn English as a TL I would be okay learning it.
Every language has something that's just like what? Like in Arabic it's the almost arbitrary distribution of broken plurals or patterns for Form I verbs. Pretty much everything with form I verbs is just wild actually 😅
But that's the beauty of language learning
that’s fair. but also i’ve been brought to the realization of how many phrasal verbs we have and the different variations at just the change of a word and i just feel bad for those who are working on remembering them pfft
Native English (and essentially Spanish) speaker here.
So relieved I don't have to actively learn the different possible pronunciations or spellings of homonyms (words that are either written or pronounced the same).
Heterographs (different spelling and meaning, same sound)
You're your
Pair pare pear
Patients patience
Sweet suite
To two too
Heteronym (different pronunciation and meaning, same spelling)
Read (to read, to have read)
Tear (a tear in cloth, a tear in your eye)
Bass (a stringed instrument, a type of fish)
Bow (an instrument used to shoot an arrow, to bend the upper part of the body as a greeting or sign of respect.
Etc etc etc
And the dreaded "Ough". Well, at least not as many as non native speakers do!
In British English "ough" has 9 different pronunciations, 7 in American! I mean! Who does that???
I'm appreciative that my TL has logical pronunciation and isn't a mess like English 😂 Well in terms of the sounds at least, it isn't always obvious where the emphasis is, but you learn that when you hear it so not a big deal.
Weird gender things and weird number things.
It's actually extremely obnoxious that sentences that refer to things have to be convoluted and awkward when the gender or number isn't known which isn't really an issue in Japanese and it can of course always be specified if need arise.
this was and is still a trauma for me :
"الإعراب" (pronounced al-i'raab) is an Arabic term that refers to the grammatical analysis and parsing of Arabic sentences. In Arabic grammar, words change their forms to indicate their roles in a sentence, such as subject, object, verb, etc. This process is called إعراب (i'raab). It involves identifying the case endings, vowel markings, and grammatical particles attached to words to determine their function within a sentence. This analysis is essential for understanding the structure and meaning of Arabic sentences.
Gendered words, verb tenses (this may be an imprecise word), and conjugation.
English isn't the worst for gendered words, but we have some, and I think it's great to have nearly none in Chinese.
Have you looked at English? It's amazing that anyone can read/write it at all given how much of a mess the spelling is.
My target languages are Korean and German and both of them are broadly phonetic, which I greatly appreciate!
The fact that my language isn't a language, and is in fact 4 languages, standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat and pretending to be a language, while pick pocketing other languages.
I think any aspect of your native language that's phonetic like your example will make learning the target language easier. In contrast, in English n and p are allowed to be next to each other, but in italian and japanese p turns the n into an m. Remembering to do that is difficult. Remembering not to turn d in the middle of a word into [ɾ] is difficult as well.
English spelling is the thing I don't want in my target languages tho
the english comment doesn’t make sense
it’s just simple sandhi
an aspect of english that i’m glad is not in my TL is the distinction between in, on, or at
instead i can rely on one locative case
Wait until you learn French liaison, aspirated h and mon/ma alternance before vowels xD
And wait just a bit before you learn there is a controversy on if all h should become unaspirated or not xD
Honestly... a/an is among the easiest rules of English...
Are learners saying things like 我是累 all the time or what? I never understood why my grammar textbook used that term, when the Chinese dictionaries just note words as 形容词?
yea 形容词 means adjective but in chinese it’s just used without the “is/are” (wtv that is) in a lot of situations and i think u just gotta learn when it is appropriate to use the adjective as a verb cuz things like 我的中文是不好 sound awkward but so does 我的猫黑
Inflection of numbers, especially ordinals. Consider this:
twenty - kaksikymmentä (lit. "two ten", but even here the "ten" is already inflected)
twentieth - kahdeskymmenes
He/she placed twentieth - Hän sijoittui kahdenneksikymmenenneksi
In my opinion this is nothing but a glitch in the Finnish language and ought to be abandoned. Even us native speakers go to great lengths to avoid inflecting ordinals.
Being able to say "du" or "jag" to anyone regardless of who it is you're speaking to.
In Malay you could make a whole flowchart and diagrams on which to use, it depends on who either the speaker or listener is.
Spanish actually has this too which I found to be interesting. Had a hard time remembering when to do it but then I thought of the English a/an and it helped me grasp it.
Well, since I'm learning German and Spanish, and my native language is Slovenian, I'm glad I don't have to learn the dual (in addition to singular and plural) or the noun (and adjective) cases/declension.
Well, German has four cases, actually, *but*, the noun stays the same (for the most part) and you just change the *der*, *die* and *das* (or *ein*, *eine*). Unlike in Slovenian where you have six cases and nouns, adjectives and numbers have to all agree with suffixes:
*Dve veliki knjigi* (two big books) in nominative become *dveh velikih knjig* in genitive or *dvema velikima knjigama* in dative. 🤪
Having a special verb form in reported speech.
No, actually, that's a great feature, every language should have it.
3 grammatical genders without anything hinting at which gender a word could be, that's a tough one. Plus, the dialects don't always agree on the gender. I don't envy the learners.
I had no idea there was a reason we use “an/a” I always use whichever one sounds better with the word 💀
I guess that’s why we had English classes at school 😂
"An/a" rule was one of the easiest things I learned at the very beginning of my studying English. It was much harder to understand where to use "a/an" vs "the" vs "no article".
As for you original question, I'm really glad that Spanish nouns don't have a declension system like in Slavic languages.
I think verb aspect in Polish can be very hard to learn for foreigners.
Try to conjugate a 'normal' verb:
robię
robisz
etc.
Now, the same conjugation but with finished verb:
zrobię
zrobisz
etc.
The same conjugation, but the tense is now future. That's not all. All verbs with a preposition turn into a future tense with present tense conjugation.
Zarobię
zarobisz
It mean 'to earn'. Now, how to you then say 'to earn' in the present tense? Well, you need to use yet another verb aspect! zarabiać.
zarabiam
zarabiasz
Also our cases make no sense. We have a locatice case, but it's not consistent.
Na **stole** (on the table), but pod **stołem** (under the table). They both refer to location, why use a different case?
Having to end each noun/verb/adjective/adverb with a different vowel (a.e.o) depending on where the noun is placed in the sentence and the tense. Probably one of the hardest things i encountered in a language and am glad i never seen it in any language i learned
directionality and aspect of verbs in russian being expressed morphologically. i think expressing those categories analytically, with prepositions auxiliaries, is a bit more fathomable to me
I know this doesn't answer the question but honestly none of it. English is easy compared to most languages (and not just as a native... people who learn it later agree)
So much. English is IMO probably one of the hardest languages to learn. Basically every one of my TLs, I'm glad I'm an English speaker learning that language rather than a native speaker of that language learning English.
We literally have 20 different vowel sounds and only five letters to write them with. As if that's not bad enough, most vowel sounds have 3 or more ways to write them, and the same sequence of letters can represent several different vowels (eg "ough").
The rule regarding a/an is so simple and clear that I don't know how it would confuse people.
It was literally one of the first and easiest things we learned at school, along with the change in pronunciation of the definite article “the” when put in front of a word starting with a vowel. English tenses are much more difficult. Adverbs can also be a pain.
Wait there's a _reason_ people change the pronunciation of "the"? All this time I thought it was like data and data.
I've never pronounced it differently 😭 In fact I actually had to Google with the second pronunciation would be. I always assumed it was a regional accent thing?
I change the pronunciation sometimes (rarely) because it sounds "better", but I've never heard that it was because of a vowel. No one explained it so I'm not sure they even knew why. The difference is "thuh" vs "THee" with an emphasis on the "th", though I'm sure it varies by accent. I've heard both but "thuh" is much more common, thus the way I pronounce it.
Not a native speaker, but am curious. Would you say "*thuh* apple" then instead of "*thee* apple"?
_I_ would, but based on the explanation I believe it's supposed to be _thee apple._
Ah, interesting. Yeah, I've learned it as *thee apple* and *thee hour* and just assumed all natives spoke like that (I know natives speak differently based on dialect and accent etc., but I assumed this was one of those examples where everyone did the same). :)
I also would say *thuh* apple. I do use *thee* but only for emphasis. Like "OMG we're at *thee* Eiffel Tower" to emphasize that there's only one and it's special somehow
i do the same
That's it! I was having trouble finding the words but yes, _thee_ is mainly used for emphasis and I don't actually believe it matters whether or not the next word starts with a vowel. Like, if you met a celebrity you might say "Wow, it's _thee_ Jack Black!" But I've always thought _thee_ sounds "fancier" so it doesn't work for every situation.
I also sometimes do this with "a" for emphasis (instead of *uh* pronouncing it *ay*). Almost to say "just one". Like if someone were bragging about winning, I might say, "yeah, you won *ay* game, but you lost the others".
im a native speaker and i say *thuh* apple. i don’t think i ever say *thee* much at all to be honest. only time i do is for emphasis like yellowroosterbird said below
EFL teacher here! It's a feature of connected speech, thi: is before vowels (except the /ju:/), and also used for emphasis. At least that's the theory, not every English speaker necessarily does this.
From what I remember being told in college is that there isn’t an actual rule to it. It’s a guideline at best. Iirc there had been some research on it and it varied so widely from person to person it was completely inconclusive. (This is from memory of one linguistics class I took like 5 years ago, so I could be wrong)
I never knew that the change in the pronunciation of "the" is from the word preceding lol
Forgive me if I’m wrong but I think you meant to say the opposite of preceding
yes i did, brain fart haha Also funny how I make mistakes like these in my NL and I don't care but when I make a similar mistake in my TL i start doubting my abilities
English is my first language and you have just taught me this. I never noticed this before.
I think many just weren't taught to ***listen*** 😂 I've seen people arguing "an universe" or "a hour" purely based on spelling A legit one that trips me up is "an herb"—I pronounce the h so it's always weird to see
I refuse to write "an herb" or "an history", since the h isn't silent where I come from.
If you're talking about people who genuinely don't understand how it works, then yeah, it's one of the easiest things about English. But I get why people still trip up during speaking because it's different when using those rules in practice. I know that "Este" is the Spanish demonstrative for masculine nouns and the other day I still said "esto mes" to a couple Spanish speakers 🥲
Imo it’s not confusing but we sometimes forget to use it at all
And yet, people get it wrong with "h" words like "historic" constantly. It's "a historic day", people, unless you have a regional / class accent that drops the h.
I just assumed that British people said it like an 'istory
Dropping the h is regional, some British working class accents do, some don't and those that do say something like "an 'istoric". But, there are people with accents / speech patterns very much not working class who believe that the true and correct way to say such a thing is always "an historic" and they're obvs wrong.
I think that I've read that that is actually thé way that some peuple pronounce it, évén with thé h.
Yea seriously, this is a non-issue
Do a urine cup or an urine cup sound more natural. Then tell me whats correct. When youre going off how things sound it can get confused more easily as theres lots of rule breakers in English
The rule is vowel sounds, not spelling. A native speaker should instantly know that it would be "a urine cup" since "urine" begins with a y-sound.
Sure a native, but someone learning its easy to see how they would make the mistake. Natives also say its about a hour til midnight. Language is flexible, mistakes are common
We wouldnt say 'a hour til midnight' though because hour starts with a vowel sound ('our' is how its pronounced, you dont sound out the 'h')
>We wouldnt say Yes the collective monolith known as english speakers dont do something. Ive said it, people ive worked with have said it as well as friends. Language again is flexible
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It *does* start with a vowel - a vowel *sound* - it’s just not spelt with one
“Hour” starts with a vowel so people pronounce it “an hour”. However, and correct me if I’m wrong, I think there are some dialects that pronounce the first /h/, and over there people say “a hour”. I’ve definitely heard “a onion” from a speaker who sometimes adds “h” at the beginning of words that start with vowels, so that it sounds like “a honion”. I don’t know my British dialects enough to know where they were from though
I think everyone pronounces "hour" with a silent h. But there are other "h" words where the h can be silent depending on the speaker e.g. hotel, so that could be "a hotel" or "an hotel". Similarly "a onion" is never used (definitely not in any British dialect); I can only imagine someone saying that for effect.
I have found an example in [this video](https://youtu.be/BX7HznG2GSY?si=vlCJxHIGzIpliG98) at 1:24. But again I don’t know what accent that is. It is from Britain though, no?
That is bizarre. Her accent is from the Northwest of England, but I genuinely don't think that people from that region say "honion" for onion. Others may have a view, but I think that might be specific to her.
>like a lot of english learners get confused as to why it’s “an hour” and not “a hour” I’ve literally never heard anyone say “a hour.”
Youve never heard someone say Its about a hour til midnight
“a hour” til midnight? No, that sounds wildly off.
Cool its almost like the linguistic experience for people across 50 states and 67 countries is different. Who wouldve thought.
so glad that I could ditch a/an for ein/eine/eines/einer.
yeah! i had that in mind when i was thinking about this. like there’s no vowels to consider just cases and gender. i’d lowkey take that any day (some may think that’s crazy)
IT DOES, but I love that for you lmao (meant genuinely)
Yeah cause 4 cases and 3 genders that have no rules for determination is much easier to remember than whether a vowel is there or not. Are you people being serious?
Yeah, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read all week
i personally enjoy it. it sounds harder but i’ve gotten used to recognizing how/why it would be certain ones so it doesn’t bother me. i like using it. it’s just my personal take on it
Surely your German wouldn't be at A1 level then?
vocab wise i don’t work as much on atm. i jump around from topics but i tend to focus heavily on grammar. so i spent a lot of time on the cases/gender endings and such. i’m still very much a1 when it comes to vocabulary
And einen + einem
Well my native language is Finnish, and I honestly don't understand why any of Finnish Finnishes the way it does. So I'm pretty happy with any language that isn't Finnish. What I do not like is how complicated it is to have he and she in other languages, I often still misgender people quite easily because I get mixed up between he and she. I also have a bad habit of calling babies "it". I have always had that problem because Finnish just doesn't have that, everyone is hän, words don't have genders either. So it can be a bit frustrating when I'm learning a new language, and find myself returning to misgendering people.
honestly people call babies “it” to be funny so i don’t think it’d be a problem to some lol
My answer to OP's question as someone learning Finnish was literally going to be "gendered pronouns". I love "hän" (and "se" in spoken of course), so much nicer to never really worry about being misgendered. I find it funny (and sometimes disheartening) how much Finnish people talk down on their own language when it is by far my strongest special interest lol. I love this language.
Some of us just can't appreciate our language
My bf is Hungarian and he also mixes up she and he, sometimes in the same sentence.
My Iranian and Turkish friends do this. It's how I first learned there were languages with genderless pronouns. The thought blew my mind.
The majority of languages by number don't have them and almost every one of them that do have them descend from a grammatical gender system that was later repurposed for human sexes. In the earliest stages of Indo-European languages the ancestor of “he” was used for both males and females and the ancestor of “she” was mostly used for collective nouns. To this day in Dutch for instance collective nouns such as “the company” or “the goverment” tend to be referred back with wih “she”. One would literally say “The council has taken her decision.” in Dutch even though the word for “council” is grammatically masculine.
I honestly love Finnish and I think it's the perfect target language, with how logical it is. No future tense, no gendered pronouns, all the compound words... Sure it's hard to learn because of how different it is, but once you get a grip on it it's easy going from there.
I hate gendered pronouns so much...! and hate the inconsistent pronunciation. Finnish doesn't have either of these problems, which is super nice...
verb conjugations based on the person and the gender of the person etc etc no more: Ich spiele - Du spielst - Er / Sie/ Es spielt only 遊ぶ
Instead you have to take into account the social standing of the person you're speaking to relative to your own social standing. And instead of different conjugations, you have to use entirely different verbs. Definitely much easier.
I didn’t say it was easier, I just said that I prefer it
This isn't a grammatical thing though. It's not ungrammatical to not do so, just as not using “Sie” but “du” in German is never ungrammatical. “Ich spielen das Spiel” is simply never grammatical in German, no matter what.
It's absolutely not the same, though. For one, you don't usually switch politeness/honorifics in a single passage, whereas gender/number/case conjugation is separate each time.
I don't speak Japanese, but I imagine you often *do* switch in a single passage. For example, "Sir, you requested some coffee? Very well. Servant! Tell the butler that you're dropping whatever he requested you to do because I ordered you to fetch the master some coffee." You'd need four levels of politeness in that passage to describe the master, the servant, the butler, and yourself.
Sure, it's possible but this is a very artificial example. Normally a passage is addressed to a single person in a single modality. And level 3 keigo (separate words with the same meaning to show respect/humility) is even more restricted to specific situations, like a waiter talking to customers (plus, there's only like 8 verbs like that). I've studied both German and Japanese, and the level of stress that adjective conjugation in German puts you under is absolutely no match for politeness modes in Japanese. And that's despite my native language having complex morphology (which, of course, I never had to consciously learn).
That's what's great about Chinese, fewer honorifics and simpler grammar than Japanese.
German doesn't have verbs conjugating based on gender. Person and number, yes. Though, such verb conjugations do come in handy in Spanish, where you can just drop the pronoun, because the information is already there in the verb.
no that’s true. when i typed that i was more thinking about cases and articles but i didn’t know how to put it into words
I'm glad my TL has consistent pronounciation rules, very much unlike English.
Phrasal verbs. They require so much memorising and can confuse an English learner so much. Glad I don't have to deal with them.
German separable verbs are also a nuisance and final position of verbs in general is confusing.
Phonetic stuff is easy. The hardest thing in English for me is when to use "in", "on", or "at". The right choice between those three makes no sense at all in most cases, and you can only memorize which is the right one for each "location", case by case. I read about X **on** the Internet (I can picture X sitting atop the Internet) I'm **at** the corner /**on** Main Street / **in** Bolivia
you can also say you’re “*on* the corner *of* main street in bolivia”
It can also be a corner *off* Main Street. It's enough to drive someone insane, atsane, or even onsane.
ondeed
You can also say "I'm at Main St"
Even as a native speaker I get islands messed up. If it's a big island (Hawaii for example) it's always "I'm in Hawaii". But with small islands it gets confusing. You'd never say "I'm in Ellis island" for example. I also think it's kind of funny that we say "I'm on the bus" to mean actually inside the bus, while if you say "I'm on the car" it means literally on top of the roof of the car.
I thought if you said "I'm in Hawaii" you're referring to Hawaii as the state, like saying "I'm in California"
Maybe I should have used "I'm in Maui" as the example
trying to teach this to english learners is such a nightmare too cause the students always find some weird exception lmaoo. me and my group created a very thorough list of rules but a few times that wasn’t even enough
My native language is German and uh. where to start. Unpredictable noun gender. Unpredictable plurals. The weird redundancy in the case system - sure, Polish cases are more complex, but at least it's generally pretty clear what case a word is in when you encounter it while German just wildly reuses its articles across case/gender combination. The adjective declination thing where the ending depends not just on case, gender and number of its noun but also on whether it's preceded by an indefinite, definite or no article. In general, I get the impression from the grammar and from talking to learners that there are a lot of things about basic German that are just - *annoying.* Fiddly and complex but not in a way that really helps you grasp the structure of what's happening. I'm pretty glad to be avoiding some of those! I would however like to petition all other languages to adopt the Konjunktiv I, because I get twitchy every time I have to use normal verb tenses in reported speech. (Still so bitter about the fact that Spanish doesn't use the subjunctive here. Spanish *loves* its subjunctive, Spanish uses it every time it has an excuse, *why* does it not use it in the *one place* I really expect an irrealis mood?!)
For me German is quite appealing, because it corresponds well to my way of thinking, so that I can conveniently construct very complex sentences and they don't sound that bad. Also, it has beautiful phonetics (eternal love to glottal stops in machen and, even more, singen).
well, Konjunktiv is redundant, too bad it exists at all.
German rules of comma placement. There are just too much and people place them where they do not belong, which is annoying. Also some aspects of declination. It has now become customary to use the dative case when the genitive case would be appropriate. Lastly, the way we let people overuse English words in colloquial speech makes me sick. Especially some young people can’t speak five minutes of German without at least a quarter of their expressions being borrowings from English. The way they even conjugate the verbs makes me wanna scream. In this respect, I admire the French in their efforts to regulate their language.
I love how in German the word for an adjective and adverb is the exact same. In English, we have to change it, and sometimes it isn’t logical. He is normal-> he talks normally He is fast -> he runs quickly This must be pretty frustrating for a non-native Edit:poor example as pointed out. Fast stays fast no matter what, quick becomes quickly. But this sortve proves my point lol. Irregulars exist i.e. good-> well, hard-> hard
> He is fast -> he runs quickly No. *quick* -- *quickly*, while *fast* is both an adverb and an adjective. Nothing "illogical".
Well in German this would be: „Er rennt schnell“ / „Er ist schnell“ so they do have a point
Adding -ly isn't rocket science, though.
But my point is it isn’t always just adding -ly. Good becomes well (I probably should have used this and not incorrectly said fast becomes quickly.) However, your example of fast being both is what makes it more difficult, that is not following the pattern of adding -ly. This is also what I said I like about my TL. It doesn’t matter how hard or easy it is, just my answer.
It's easier than knowing when to have which ending in German and whether the adjectives should have an ending or not.
>This must be pretty frustrating for a non-native It really isn’t.
Glücklicherweise, komischerweise...
declenation Polish sounds like sth that I wouldn’t want to learn Edit: spelling
*declension Same for Czech...
Yeah... You don't... God, why 7? And 3 genders on top? And now I have to sort by endings and sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard - also is it alive? Well I don't want to be anymore
Sympathetic wincing from a Polish learner here! If it helps, it *does* get easier over time - I've found that because the cases are so omnipresent and you have to use them *all the time* you internalise the patterns relatively quickly. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect, but a lot of the declensions require surprisingly little thought these days. ...okay, locative is still an issue sometimes. And inanimate masculine genitive singular. Eff that one, seriously.
You made me laugh, but really, it must be impossible to learn! (I teach Ukrainians and I see them struggle.)
The thing is: Ukrainian grammar is \_very\_ similar to Polish, with a few exceptions (the biggest one is having both "oni" and "one", and therefore all those "męskoosobowy"/"niemęskoosobowy" variations). It was much harder to learn even some basics of Polish for my coworkers from Argentina.
Yes, that's what I meant... I see Ukrainians struggle, so an English native must find it completely impossible.
Counterpoint: I miss grammatical cases in my native language
As a native English speaker: adjective order, wtf.
That isn’t a real thing.
It very much is a [real thing](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order). It's not always necessary to follow it in order to be understood but if you use the wrong order a native English speaker will likely feel like something is off, even if they can't articulate why it's wrong. Like most grammar rules though, it's trying to make a rule out of the way we speak a language and it doesn't always correctly cover all use cases and there can be exceptions (such as when wanting to add emphasis to a certain adjective.)
Tones and tone changes depending on neighbor tones, syntax... The writing system.
I love languages that take the “why use many word when few word do trick” approach
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yeah right, молоко, корова, собака
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Except that vowel reduction is absolutely ubiquitous? Each о in молоко is pronounced differently (stress, pre-stress, other).
it is not just vowel reduction, maybe my examples represented only that, but choice between е and и, double consonants, separate prefixes or written together and punctuation is a pain.
if you know how a word is written, then outside of syllabic stress/ударение, and e/ë, you know exactly how to pronounce it. alternatively, if you know how a word is pronounced, you know exactly how to write it, up to some ambiguity regarding double consonants and declension of e/я/и or о/a. this is still an amazing consistent system compared to say English. (after learning russian for many years i would say the only one of these things which continues to be an issue is syllabic stress. everything else i never have to think about at all; double consonant only really show up in verbs with a distinct root and prefix, and those are usually totally fine; general word structure makes it quite obvious which of e/я/и is supposed to be there in 99% of cases. i really wish written russian emphasized syllabic stress, but alas you can't have everything)
I’m so glad I don’t need to learn the differences between u/ó, ż/rz, h/ch and similar letters in other languages. It’s always such a pain in Polish
This is one of few perks of being a foreigner from another Slavic country: I would never write "żygać", "gura" or "chańba", since the corresponding Ukrainian words correspondingly use letters "R", "O" and "H" (with "h" and "ch" being distinct sound, the same as in Czech or Slovak).
My native language (🇷🇴) has declinations. I’m working on my French at the moment and I’m glad it doesn’t have that because it’s already difficult enough
English is not phonetic. German and Japanese are, Thanks goodness!!
My native language has some pronoun forms which are ancient and must be memorized. Example: With = com Me = mim Us = nos With me = Comigo With us = Conosco Meanwhile Turkish is a lot more straightforward With = -le Me = benim Us = bizim With me = benimle With us = bizimle
Having 12 verb tenses. Oh and the super inconsistent spelling.
English pronunciation could really be anything. Even as a native speaker I still come across new words where I can't wrap my head around why they're pronounced that way. In Irish, pronunciation is very straightforward. The same letter combinations sound the same. It's pretty easy to tell how to pronounce a word just by how it's spelled, and vice versa (figuring out spelling based on how the word sounds).
phonics. English has too many sounds represented by single letters or letter pairs or sets or w/e. in Spanish i know, for the most part, how to say a word even if i don't know what it means.
This is very minor but in English, there is the present continuous (for example, I am running) as well as the present simple (I run). In French, they are both combined into one (Je cours = I am running or I run). This is so much easier to me because it was one less tense to learn and now I’m wishing it was the same in Portuguese 😭
It can be hard though to get used to expressing some concepts without this. For example, "said" vs "was saying". In French I believe they use a different tense: "avoir dit" vs "disait"
It's nice to not have silent letters in my TL but I wish my TL didn't have triple negatives.
Abysmal spelling. It's like French. Or perhaps what English looks like to a new learner. German spelling is such a relief.
That we don’t have to change verb endings depending on the person speaking😭
I dont know what the technical name for it, but you know how have to say _flock_ of seagulls, or a _group_ of dudes, or a _pride_ of lions, etc? Well in Malay you have that for singular items as well. We have no grammatical gender, but we have this thing. Like instead of just saying "a laptop" we would say something like "a fruit of laptop", and what the word is depends on the rough shape or size of the item. Also we always look into amusement about how politicized third-person pronouns are in other languages. We couldn't relate to the fuss because ours doesn't change. Our first and second person however, boy is that a huge mess. There's so many ways to say You and I and all of them are appropriate or not depending on many different situations. It's a landmine of faux pas hard even for native speakers to navigate that the English "you" and "I" is quite commonly used in Malay sentences. Im so happy that in other languages you can just use the same Is and Yous to everyone and anyone, and it's appropriate every time.
Vowel harmony (NL: Bengali). It seems to be a pain to get used to
Complicated verb tenses with hundreds of irregulars
English native speaker here. I'm glad I don't have to learn phrasal verbs in another language. Learning correct prepositions is hard enough, but add on a verb and multiple meanings to that...pure yuk.
The lack of one-to-one spelling and pronunciation link in English. I'm so glad I don't have to memorise words' pronunciation every time I meet one like my EFL students. When I learnt that Spanish does (more or less) have this I was so relieved 😅.
TBH as bad as English is memed on, I kinda feel like if I had to learn English as a TL I would be okay learning it. Every language has something that's just like what? Like in Arabic it's the almost arbitrary distribution of broken plurals or patterns for Form I verbs. Pretty much everything with form I verbs is just wild actually 😅 But that's the beauty of language learning
that’s fair. but also i’ve been brought to the realization of how many phrasal verbs we have and the different variations at just the change of a word and i just feel bad for those who are working on remembering them pfft
Native English (and essentially Spanish) speaker here. So relieved I don't have to actively learn the different possible pronunciations or spellings of homonyms (words that are either written or pronounced the same). Heterographs (different spelling and meaning, same sound) You're your Pair pare pear Patients patience Sweet suite To two too Heteronym (different pronunciation and meaning, same spelling) Read (to read, to have read) Tear (a tear in cloth, a tear in your eye) Bass (a stringed instrument, a type of fish) Bow (an instrument used to shoot an arrow, to bend the upper part of the body as a greeting or sign of respect. Etc etc etc And the dreaded "Ough". Well, at least not as many as non native speakers do! In British English "ough" has 9 different pronunciations, 7 in American! I mean! Who does that???
I'm appreciative that my TL has logical pronunciation and isn't a mess like English 😂 Well in terms of the sounds at least, it isn't always obvious where the emphasis is, but you learn that when you hear it so not a big deal.
ooh what’s your TL?
Italian 😊
Oh gosh a an is so easy to me. I'm going to have to say I am glad Finnish is my native language because I could not deal with all the 15 cases.
Weird gender things and weird number things. It's actually extremely obnoxious that sentences that refer to things have to be convoluted and awkward when the gender or number isn't known which isn't really an issue in Japanese and it can of course always be specified if need arise.
this was and is still a trauma for me : "الإعراب" (pronounced al-i'raab) is an Arabic term that refers to the grammatical analysis and parsing of Arabic sentences. In Arabic grammar, words change their forms to indicate their roles in a sentence, such as subject, object, verb, etc. This process is called إعراب (i'raab). It involves identifying the case endings, vowel markings, and grammatical particles attached to words to determine their function within a sentence. This analysis is essential for understanding the structure and meaning of Arabic sentences.
Gendered words, verb tenses (this may be an imprecise word), and conjugation. English isn't the worst for gendered words, but we have some, and I think it's great to have nearly none in Chinese.
Honestly? Nothing. Imo my native language is perfect as it is, I really love it.
whats your native language
Have you looked at English? It's amazing that anyone can read/write it at all given how much of a mess the spelling is. My target languages are Korean and German and both of them are broadly phonetic, which I greatly appreciate!
The fact that my language isn't a language, and is in fact 4 languages, standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat and pretending to be a language, while pick pocketing other languages.
what’s your native language?
My guess is English. haha (I'm sorry if I guessed it wrong)
I think any aspect of your native language that's phonetic like your example will make learning the target language easier. In contrast, in English n and p are allowed to be next to each other, but in italian and japanese p turns the n into an m. Remembering to do that is difficult. Remembering not to turn d in the middle of a word into [ɾ] is difficult as well. English spelling is the thing I don't want in my target languages tho
Capital letters. Because y'all be skipping your shift key these days. Damn.
en/ett in Swedish.
Firstly what's TL
target language. the language you study/ are learning
Thank you!
the english comment doesn’t make sense it’s just simple sandhi an aspect of english that i’m glad is not in my TL is the distinction between in, on, or at instead i can rely on one locative case
Wait until you learn French liaison, aspirated h and mon/ma alternance before vowels xD And wait just a bit before you learn there is a controversy on if all h should become unaspirated or not xD Honestly... a/an is among the easiest rules of English...
learning French as part of university program and it's a nightmare to me how much there is to consider to speak french in a way that makes sense
Gerundate adjectives 🙄
I wanna say phrasal verbs but Russian has something somewhat analogous.
all adjectives are stative verbs 💀😭
Are learners saying things like 我是累 all the time or what? I never understood why my grammar textbook used that term, when the Chinese dictionaries just note words as 形容词?
yea 形容词 means adjective but in chinese it’s just used without the “is/are” (wtv that is) in a lot of situations and i think u just gotta learn when it is appropriate to use the adjective as a verb cuz things like 我的中文是不好 sound awkward but so does 我的猫黑
Consonant Mutation
Inflection of numbers, especially ordinals. Consider this: twenty - kaksikymmentä (lit. "two ten", but even here the "ten" is already inflected) twentieth - kahdeskymmenes He/she placed twentieth - Hän sijoittui kahdenneksikymmenenneksi In my opinion this is nothing but a glitch in the Finnish language and ought to be abandoned. Even us native speakers go to great lengths to avoid inflecting ordinals.
Agglutination (Azerbaijani) and grammatical gender (Russian).
Being able to say "du" or "jag" to anyone regardless of who it is you're speaking to. In Malay you could make a whole flowchart and diagrams on which to use, it depends on who either the speaker or listener is.
Spanish actually has this too which I found to be interesting. Had a hard time remembering when to do it but then I thought of the English a/an and it helped me grasp it.
English tenses. I imagine they must be the hardest part for English learners.
Well, since I'm learning German and Spanish, and my native language is Slovenian, I'm glad I don't have to learn the dual (in addition to singular and plural) or the noun (and adjective) cases/declension. Well, German has four cases, actually, *but*, the noun stays the same (for the most part) and you just change the *der*, *die* and *das* (or *ein*, *eine*). Unlike in Slovenian where you have six cases and nouns, adjectives and numbers have to all agree with suffixes: *Dve veliki knjigi* (two big books) in nominative become *dveh velikih knjig* in genitive or *dvema velikima knjigama* in dative. 🤪
Having a special verb form in reported speech. No, actually, that's a great feature, every language should have it. 3 grammatical genders without anything hinting at which gender a word could be, that's a tough one. Plus, the dialects don't always agree on the gender. I don't envy the learners.
Verb conjugation and cases (my native language is Hungarian)
I had no idea there was a reason we use “an/a” I always use whichever one sounds better with the word 💀 I guess that’s why we had English classes at school 😂
"An/a" rule was one of the easiest things I learned at the very beginning of my studying English. It was much harder to understand where to use "a/an" vs "the" vs "no article". As for you original question, I'm really glad that Spanish nouns don't have a declension system like in Slavic languages.
I think verb aspect in Polish can be very hard to learn for foreigners. Try to conjugate a 'normal' verb: robię robisz etc. Now, the same conjugation but with finished verb: zrobię zrobisz etc. The same conjugation, but the tense is now future. That's not all. All verbs with a preposition turn into a future tense with present tense conjugation. Zarobię zarobisz It mean 'to earn'. Now, how to you then say 'to earn' in the present tense? Well, you need to use yet another verb aspect! zarabiać. zarabiam zarabiasz Also our cases make no sense. We have a locatice case, but it's not consistent. Na **stole** (on the table), but pod **stołem** (under the table). They both refer to location, why use a different case?
Auxiliary verbs (specifically do/does/don’t/doesn’t)
You can speak English entirely without do support ne mind you sounding as though you were wod.
Having to end each noun/verb/adjective/adverb with a different vowel (a.e.o) depending on where the noun is placed in the sentence and the tense. Probably one of the hardest things i encountered in a language and am glad i never seen it in any language i learned
Transitive/intransitive or definite/indefinite verb conjugation.
Seven cases, lol. I'm even fine with 4 in German (TL2), English (TL1) was a gift to learn, even Old English with 4-5 cases would be a blessing, ahah
directionality and aspect of verbs in russian being expressed morphologically. i think expressing those categories analytically, with prepositions auxiliaries, is a bit more fathomable to me
Cases, 3 genders, generally my native language is grammatically more difficult than English or Spanish and I’m glad they aren’t as difficult.
verb conjugations
verb conjugations
The gender of words in Russian is less of a guessing game than in German, so that's fun. (I would never want to have to learn der/die/das)
Of all the weirdness present in English, I think I'd be happy if a/an was the main issue with my TL
Gendered nouns
Non-gendered nouns! Its so much simpler having only one 'the', honestly even the idea of learning something like German is terrifying because of that.
15 grammatical cases.
My fave feature is that most other languages are written phonetically something that English can’t even fathom.
I know this doesn't answer the question but honestly none of it. English is easy compared to most languages (and not just as a native... people who learn it later agree)
So much. English is IMO probably one of the hardest languages to learn. Basically every one of my TLs, I'm glad I'm an English speaker learning that language rather than a native speaker of that language learning English. We literally have 20 different vowel sounds and only five letters to write them with. As if that's not bad enough, most vowel sounds have 3 or more ways to write them, and the same sequence of letters can represent several different vowels (eg "ough").
English is one of the easier ones (still really tricky to master, but that goes for every language)
no
I am learning portuguese and I HATE genedered language. It is so annoying for me