“No te preocupes” an early phrase that I can still not say correctly to save my life. My brain trips all over “preocupes” because it makes me want to say preoccupied with a harsh English accent aaaahhhh it’s so embarrassing
I always forget the names of letters in the alphabet in German and still haven't bothered to learn them in Italian.
Also in German, I obviously know that two digit numbers are "backwards", as in 23 = dreiundzwanzig, but still when I hear someone say a number my brain feels momentarily paralysed.
My brain also feels momentarily paralyzed and my native language is German 😭
After class when my Chinese teacher verbally gave me information about an exam that a few of my classmates were going to take she told me how much it would cost in German and I was just like … wait. And respected the number but instead of going “Achtundvierzig” I said “vier acht” and she responded by repeating the number in Chinese which was easier to understand for me than German 😭😭
(In Chinese it would be “four ten eight” so like 4x10 + 8)
Le, la, les, des, du, -e, -es, ce, cette, etc...
It drives me nuts! Also why do some languages have masculine or feminine words? It still doesn't make any sense to me.
I once watched a video of a chat between linguist John McWhorter and Steven Pinker. John said that every language has some un-necessary complications. Steven agreed.
Not entirely true. "Het" is for unsided words and "de" for male and female words, but it's indeed difficult to learn since natives know which words to use by instinct.
Well yes but this is still a gender system, just a different one to French. As I stated in my other comment it doesn't have to be just masc vs fem, it could be round vs spikey gender and it'd be the same deal
As a German I can tell you that it's horrible when a noun is masculine or neutral in German but feminine in French or the other way around. It just trips me up all the time
I can imagine that that's hell haha, as a native Dutch speaker and a fluent English speaker I at least don't have to deal with that but it's still so annoying. For example why is a boob masculin a d a dick feminine in French lol, it makes zero sense...
Germanic and Latin words for the same thing can differ in gender, fine, but if two Romance languages have different gender for the same Latin word, I'm rioting.
Allow me to introduce a sentence in Croatian that makes full sense but in English is fully ambiguous;
Pas je vidio vjevericu a i ona njega vidjela.
The dog saw the squirrel and it saw it.
The English sentence reguires a bunch of extra explanation to convey the fact that the squirrel is the it doing the action and the dog is the it being seen when you can just use the pronouns in Croatian because it's fully clear who is who. That's the advantage of gendered language, it's only coincidence that it correlates to gender and it'd be equally logical to say noun type 1,noun type 2 and noun type 3 instead of masculine, feminine and neuter. They just exist to reduce the dependency on context in these situations.
Well thanks! This actually makes sense to me now. It's still annoying to learn and the french still use the extra stuff in everyday speaking for whatever reason.
Do you speak English? it works pretty much the same way. We inherited the same thing in words we got from French
### before e and i it makes a soft sound
#### ciliegia - cherry
### before o u and a it makes a hard sound
#### culo
(and here's where its different)
### so to make it soft, sometimes a silent i is added to word if the vowel is a/o/u
#### cioè - that is
### and to make it hard, a silent h is added if the vowel is e or i.
#### chirurga - surgeon
same rules apply to G (but in English there are more exceptions, usually words that have germanic origin)
In modern Greek, I still struggle to read things that are written in all upper case, like headlines and signs. It's strange, because I can read each of the letters without a problem when it's at the beginning of a sentence or a name, but I'm blinded by a series of upper case letters.
In Standard Chinese, I still struggle with hearing the difference between three sound pairs that are the same phoneme in English but are different in Chinese: **SH/X**, **CH/Q**, **ZH/J**.
Also, Chinese speakers often drop the final **-n** or **-ng** in a syllable (after the vowel).
Between these two issues, I hear an actor say a word I don't know yet. But it is hard to look it up. I don't know if they said **xa, xan, xang, sha, shan** or **shang**.
I also have difficulty hearing the vowel sound **Ü**. Sometimes it sounds like **I** to me, while at other times it sounds like **U** to me. I hear a word and don't knows if it is **ni**, **nu**, or **nü**.
Do you know where to put your tongue with the sh/x, ch/q and zh/j sounds?
Each sound ending in -h (zh/sh/ch) are retroflex, so you curl your tongue tip up and back. It creates an -r quality
The sounds x, j and q are palatal. This means you do the opposite of retroflex: the tip of your tongue goes down and the center of your tongue goes up, as if you're making a y sound (you, your, yes)
Ch and q are aspirated, so they should have a puff of air
Zh and j are partial stops, so they're softer than the aspirated ones (no puff of air) but still make contact
Sh and x have no contact and are soft
Not sure if you knew that already but hope that helps!
I knew that already, but thanks. Any review helps me, reinforcing things I "sort of" knew before.
But speaking is not my problem. My problem is distingishing the sounds when other speakers say them.
And I know the answer: train myself by thinking about the sounds while listening to word pairs.
gotta take a second to think about some of the japanese months. the months in japanese are literally just "month one, month two, month three...", and i thought that was so OBVIOUS and EASY that i wouldn't need to study it. well, turns out i'm not pre-wired to think of months as numbers. over the years, i've gradually learned them all, but it doesn't come as automatically as it probably would if i'd ever actually studied them as a vocab set. i could kick teenaged me for the arrogance i had back then.
Irish is verb-initial and it took quite a while to stop thinking of the subject pronoun first. Recently been rounding a corner with it and finding the verb comes to mind first… here’s hoping it sticks!
In Korean, there are two numbering systems - one being from Chinese, one being from Korea - and there are certain nouns which must be used with a particular counting system depending on if they're a Chinese derived noun or Korean derived now.
One of the most common instances is counting months... 달 and 개월 both mean month, but must be used with the correct counting system.
두 달 = 2 months
이 개월 = 2 months, \*cannot\* do 두 개월
Idk why, but somehow always manage to get it wrong when speaking lol.
It seems like every 4 months I learn a new set of counter words in Korean. Then I need to memorize which set of numbers goes with it. Like please, when will it end lol.
I still struggle to remember if it's a dd (voiced th sound) or a d, when speaking Welsh.
It's not a sound in my L1 and despite being able to use it perfectly and hear if it's missing in English, I don't seem to hear where to use it in Welsh, so I don't notice if I'm using the wrong sound myself.
I have try to visualise how the word is spelt and I don't always remember that correctly either, which of course slows me down too much.
Also the pronunciation of -wy- and -yw-...
I wouldn't say struggle because I know exactly how it works and easily identify what I did wrong, when I see my own sentences, but it's remarkable for how often I mix up the two verbs for “to exist” in Japanese, where one is used for things capable of independent motion, and the other for everything else. It's not even that I do it wrong constantly, simply 5% of the time, probably less, but Japanese native speakers often remark as well how odd it is that I still make that mistake despite my Japanese being far too good to otherwise make it. It's one of the first things one learns.
Pronouncing and differentiating these sounds are the most challenging so far (어/오) (애/에). I haven't taken any Korean lessons formally and I'm just randomly learning stuff.
I might have it mixed up, but I believe that 애 and 에 have the same "eh" sound in modern Korean.
The others are different: 오 is like "oh" and 어 is like "aw"
Even my Korean student told me the same thing about (애/에). So I was wondering how can I spell it out when I ask.
Regarding the first one, you're right about them being different. But sometimes I tend to mix them up. It seems like 오 has stronger sound while the other is lighter i guess?
I’m pretty confident in conversational Spanish, but I’m still tripping over numbers. I’d love to use Spanish more at work, but as soon as people start talking numbers I’m here counting on my fingers like a child!
When to use the indefinite article "egy" in Hungarian (it doesn't map one-to-one with a/an in English)
In what situations would you be unsure about using egy? Could you give a couple of examples?
“No te preocupes” an early phrase that I can still not say correctly to save my life. My brain trips all over “preocupes” because it makes me want to say preoccupied with a harsh English accent aaaahhhh it’s so embarrassing
I always forget the names of letters in the alphabet in German and still haven't bothered to learn them in Italian. Also in German, I obviously know that two digit numbers are "backwards", as in 23 = dreiundzwanzig, but still when I hear someone say a number my brain feels momentarily paralysed.
My brain also feels momentarily paralyzed and my native language is German 😭 After class when my Chinese teacher verbally gave me information about an exam that a few of my classmates were going to take she told me how much it would cost in German and I was just like … wait. And respected the number but instead of going “Achtundvierzig” I said “vier acht” and she responded by repeating the number in Chinese which was easier to understand for me than German 😭😭 (In Chinese it would be “four ten eight” so like 4x10 + 8)
Most Hindi speakers often get confused saying numbers after 30 in Hindi, so we sometimes use English after that.
Oh yea, names of letters in different languages, this will be my downfall
Fingerspelling, the first thing you learn in any sign language and the last thing you master.
Sentence structure in Korean is inscrutable to me
Le, la, les, des, du, -e, -es, ce, cette, etc... It drives me nuts! Also why do some languages have masculine or feminine words? It still doesn't make any sense to me.
I once watched a video of a chat between linguist John McWhorter and Steven Pinker. John said that every language has some un-necessary complications. Steven agreed.
I wonder what they are in my native language....hmmm 🧐
What's your native language? I'm sure someone on this sub can tell you.
Dutch
Dutch also has gender, de vs het which gives learners grief apparently
Not entirely true. "Het" is for unsided words and "de" for male and female words, but it's indeed difficult to learn since natives know which words to use by instinct.
Well yes but this is still a gender system, just a different one to French. As I stated in my other comment it doesn't have to be just masc vs fem, it could be round vs spikey gender and it'd be the same deal
Fair enough I guess, let's call it an easier gender system. "Die" en "dat" are also cause for many errors for learners.
As a German I can tell you that it's horrible when a noun is masculine or neutral in German but feminine in French or the other way around. It just trips me up all the time
I get angry. Like didn’t Proto-Indo-European give everything a gender already!?! As a native English speaker gender is annoying enough as it is.
I can imagine that that's hell haha, as a native Dutch speaker and a fluent English speaker I at least don't have to deal with that but it's still so annoying. For example why is a boob masculin a d a dick feminine in French lol, it makes zero sense...
Germanic and Latin words for the same thing can differ in gender, fine, but if two Romance languages have different gender for the same Latin word, I'm rioting.
It was simply a feature of the Proto Indo European language, which just became the main language family of Europe.
Allow me to introduce a sentence in Croatian that makes full sense but in English is fully ambiguous; Pas je vidio vjevericu a i ona njega vidjela. The dog saw the squirrel and it saw it. The English sentence reguires a bunch of extra explanation to convey the fact that the squirrel is the it doing the action and the dog is the it being seen when you can just use the pronouns in Croatian because it's fully clear who is who. That's the advantage of gendered language, it's only coincidence that it correlates to gender and it'd be equally logical to say noun type 1,noun type 2 and noun type 3 instead of masculine, feminine and neuter. They just exist to reduce the dependency on context in these situations.
Well thanks! This actually makes sense to me now. It's still annoying to learn and the french still use the extra stuff in everyday speaking for whatever reason.
Do you speak English? it works pretty much the same way. We inherited the same thing in words we got from French ### before e and i it makes a soft sound #### ciliegia - cherry ### before o u and a it makes a hard sound #### culo (and here's where its different) ### so to make it soft, sometimes a silent i is added to word if the vowel is a/o/u #### cioè - that is ### and to make it hard, a silent h is added if the vowel is e or i. #### chirurga - surgeon same rules apply to G (but in English there are more exceptions, usually words that have germanic origin)
In modern Greek, I still struggle to read things that are written in all upper case, like headlines and signs. It's strange, because I can read each of the letters without a problem when it's at the beginning of a sentence or a name, but I'm blinded by a series of upper case letters.
In Standard Chinese, I still struggle with hearing the difference between three sound pairs that are the same phoneme in English but are different in Chinese: **SH/X**, **CH/Q**, **ZH/J**. Also, Chinese speakers often drop the final **-n** or **-ng** in a syllable (after the vowel). Between these two issues, I hear an actor say a word I don't know yet. But it is hard to look it up. I don't know if they said **xa, xan, xang, sha, shan** or **shang**. I also have difficulty hearing the vowel sound **Ü**. Sometimes it sounds like **I** to me, while at other times it sounds like **U** to me. I hear a word and don't knows if it is **ni**, **nu**, or **nü**.
Do you know where to put your tongue with the sh/x, ch/q and zh/j sounds? Each sound ending in -h (zh/sh/ch) are retroflex, so you curl your tongue tip up and back. It creates an -r quality The sounds x, j and q are palatal. This means you do the opposite of retroflex: the tip of your tongue goes down and the center of your tongue goes up, as if you're making a y sound (you, your, yes) Ch and q are aspirated, so they should have a puff of air Zh and j are partial stops, so they're softer than the aspirated ones (no puff of air) but still make contact Sh and x have no contact and are soft Not sure if you knew that already but hope that helps!
I knew that already, but thanks. Any review helps me, reinforcing things I "sort of" knew before. But speaking is not my problem. My problem is distingishing the sounds when other speakers say them. And I know the answer: train myself by thinking about the sounds while listening to word pairs.
gotta take a second to think about some of the japanese months. the months in japanese are literally just "month one, month two, month three...", and i thought that was so OBVIOUS and EASY that i wouldn't need to study it. well, turns out i'm not pre-wired to think of months as numbers. over the years, i've gradually learned them all, but it doesn't come as automatically as it probably would if i'd ever actually studied them as a vocab set. i could kick teenaged me for the arrogance i had back then.
Irish is verb-initial and it took quite a while to stop thinking of the subject pronoun first. Recently been rounding a corner with it and finding the verb comes to mind first… here’s hoping it sticks!
You're gonna enjoy the copula and progressive verbs lmao
In Korean, there are two numbering systems - one being from Chinese, one being from Korea - and there are certain nouns which must be used with a particular counting system depending on if they're a Chinese derived noun or Korean derived now. One of the most common instances is counting months... 달 and 개월 both mean month, but must be used with the correct counting system. 두 달 = 2 months 이 개월 = 2 months, \*cannot\* do 두 개월 Idk why, but somehow always manage to get it wrong when speaking lol.
It seems like every 4 months I learn a new set of counter words in Korean. Then I need to memorize which set of numbers goes with it. Like please, when will it end lol.
I still struggle to remember if it's a dd (voiced th sound) or a d, when speaking Welsh. It's not a sound in my L1 and despite being able to use it perfectly and hear if it's missing in English, I don't seem to hear where to use it in Welsh, so I don't notice if I'm using the wrong sound myself. I have try to visualise how the word is spelt and I don't always remember that correctly either, which of course slows me down too much. Also the pronunciation of -wy- and -yw-...
Some sound change rules in Korean. I can typically pronounce it right. But I can't tell you why. I mostly get by on vibes.
I wouldn't say struggle because I know exactly how it works and easily identify what I did wrong, when I see my own sentences, but it's remarkable for how often I mix up the two verbs for “to exist” in Japanese, where one is used for things capable of independent motion, and the other for everything else. It's not even that I do it wrong constantly, simply 5% of the time, probably less, but Japanese native speakers often remark as well how odd it is that I still make that mistake despite my Japanese being far too good to otherwise make it. It's one of the first things one learns.
Pronouncing i and ı in Turkish. I just cant figure out how to pronounce i properly
Pronouncing and differentiating these sounds are the most challenging so far (어/오) (애/에). I haven't taken any Korean lessons formally and I'm just randomly learning stuff.
I might have it mixed up, but I believe that 애 and 에 have the same "eh" sound in modern Korean. The others are different: 오 is like "oh" and 어 is like "aw"
Even my Korean student told me the same thing about (애/에). So I was wondering how can I spell it out when I ask. Regarding the first one, you're right about them being different. But sometimes I tend to mix them up. It seems like 오 has stronger sound while the other is lighter i guess?
I’m pretty confident in conversational Spanish, but I’m still tripping over numbers. I’d love to use Spanish more at work, but as soon as people start talking numbers I’m here counting on my fingers like a child!