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As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word “yacht” is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: “The Chaos” (poem)
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
It’s way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
And for a foreigner, this is actually helpful.
I think there are at least three versions from the original author, IIRC.
It’s what it’s
I dislike you
Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。They are not all the same sound. And that is very important in Mandarin.
I mean, that’s just because Europeans (and places Europeans colonized) are not used to tonal languages. I started leaning mandarin recently, and while the tones take some getting used to, they are quite clear to differentiate
That’s because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question “when you boat go water?” is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.
Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn’t incentivise you to learn. It’s something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.
Very true. I was born in Brazil and thus learned Portuguese as my first language. Then moved to the US when I was five. My parents sat me down in my grandparent’s basement and taught me English, it had to be done quick as school was starting very soon. Many years later I would return to Brazil and spent three months there. Starting with crude vocabulary and building it up as I went, over hundreds of interactions. The best way to learn a language, is out of necessity. Whether it really does hinge on you being able to communicate with others or if self-imposed. I wish more people saw it as something that must be done. Unfortunately, Google Translate enables laziness.
The word for yacht is jacht in Dutch, so that one’s easy.
What makes it slightly harder is that jacht can also mean hunt.
However, the hardest part of learning English when you’re Dutch is trying not to sound like Mark Rutte.
Louis van Gaal has entered the chat.
I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it’s easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
As a Hungarian I can confirm. We mostly read words letter-by-letter. No weird shit like “rebel” and “rebel” sounding different because one is a noun, other is a verb 🤡
Or “queue”, are you drunk, English? And the native speakers’ favourite mixups, “there” and “their”, “it’s” and “its”.
You can blame the French for “queue”, it was like that when we got it.
Fuck censorship.
English is just Esperanto with no rules.
It’s easier than Dutch at least
Lol absolutely not
Dutch is a normal, sane language like any other
English is a clusterfuck. Simple on the surface but a complete mess underneath
I think English native speakers are heavily overestimating the weirdness of their own language and severely underestimating the weirdness of other languages.
Sincerely, a German.
Nee, Englisch ist tatsächlich idiotisch. Deutsch mag auf den ersten Blick kompliziert erscheinen ist aber erstaunlich regulär.
Inwiefern ist deutsch bitte ein weniger chaotischer clusterfuck als Englisch?
Wenn du ein unbekanntes deutsches Wort liest, kannst du es sogleich richtig aussprechen. Dies ist in Englisch selten der Fall, auch für Muttersprachler.
Das H in “gehen” wird nicht als h ausgesprochen. (ˈɡeːən) Hier die Lautschrift, falls du mir nicht glaubst. Ich habs am Anfang auch abgestritten. “Der Weg” und “weg” verwenden identische buchstaben, aber die Aussprache ist unterschiedlich. Das “ch” in machen und michael sind zwei verschiedene Laute. Das “ch” in “Chef” ist ein sch ( ʃɛf ). Nur kleine, schnelle Beispiele.
Nichts gegen die Eigenheiten vom Englischen beim Lesen. Ich sitze nur gerade in einer Fortbildung um Deutsch als Zweitsprache zu unterrichten und du würdest dich wundern, wie abgedreht unsere Sprache ist.
Beispiel Zeitformen: wir verwenden für die Zukunft beim Sprechen in der Regel das Präsens. “Ich gehe morgen zur Schule”. Für die Vergangenheit benutzen wir beim Sprechen eine andere Zeitform (Perfekt) als beim Schreiben (Präteritum) - beides natürlich mit Ausnahmen. Erklär das alles mal einem Engländer.
Von willkürlich gegenderten Artikeln (nicht nötig auf englisch) und unseren Fällen (oh man) will ich gar nicht erst anfangen.
Englisch hat Auspracheeigenheiten, aber deutschsprachige sollten echt nicht mit Steinen werfen.
Zum H: der ist dazu da die Vokale zu trennen. Wir sagen nicht geen, wir sagen ge’en, wie du selber richtig geschrieben hast. Für solche Vokal-Konsonant-Kombinationen gibt es einfache Regeln, genauso für die Diphtonge. Versuch mal Ausspracheregeln zu English zu finden. Es ist einfacher, die Aussprache eines jeden Wortes auswendig zu lernen.
Zu Zukunft mit Präsens: völlig regulär, gibt’s auch in vielen anderen Sprachen, zB die Slawischen. Ich behaupte nicht dass unsere Grammatik für einen Engländern sinnvoll und intuitiv einfach erscheint, ich sage dass die deutsche Grammatik - allem voran die Schreibweise - sehr viel regulärer ist. Normalerweise ist eine Sprache je einfacher zu lernen desto regulärer sie ist, minus die flektierenden vs synthetisierenden.
Die Artikel sind nicht willkürlich, sie folgen dem Laut. Ich bin aber einverstanden dass sie genausogut willkürlich sein könnten. Dies ist aber bei allen mir bekannten Sprachen mit grammatikalischen Geschlecht der Fall, lateinische sowie slawische, Deutsch ist hier keine Ausnahme.
Die Fälle sind sehr nützlich, da ohne sie vieles zweideutig wäre, so wie in Englisch. Die Inpräzision ihrer Sprache scheisst mich ehrlich gesagt etwas an.
My japanese teacher: Mein japanischer Lehrer, mein Japanischlehrer, mein japanischer Japanischlehrer? Wer weiss!
Dann solche Sachen:
Dutch is also a complete clusterfuck with no ryme or reason half the time
I think “Eunuch” might be a worse offender of this
Not really, the only thing that is harder to pronounce is the ‘ch’
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of “Simone Giertz” from Sweeden whose name’s pronunciation sounded like ‘yecht’ to me.
Shit like this is why I doubt it when people say you can learn English by learning the spelling of sounds, because no you can’t.
You don’t have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
Me to the Japanese every day.
Someone beat you to it but they deleted their comment :(
fucking!
This is almost certainly copied from Facebook, not blurred especially for Lemmy.
They should unblur it before posting it here.
No doubt mate.
I’ll say fudge-diddly-darn if I want to and you can’t stop me.
Lookout guys, we got a badbutt over here.
I love that it’s blurred like a Japanese adult comic, enough to say technically, but not enough that you can’t literally see everything.
deleted by creator
Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.
The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl. jachten), which means “hunt”, and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we’d have yacht airplanes.
Yes, and a Polish person tells me this is the correct way to make the Yah sound at the start of the English word, yacht.
I imagine it’s the same for the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Though perhaps not for the French or Spanish.
fun fact: the word “Yacht” derives from old german “Jagd”, which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as “Yacht” and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
Yacht is also feminine in german (instead of the more pleasing das Yacht…) for the same reason as you say:
https://lemmy.ml/post/31227837/19058439
(thanks to @ephera@lemmy.ml and @barsoap@lemmy.ee for the explanations)
TIL that Jägermeister and Yacht have the same root.
Linguistics is fun and weird.
Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
- die Fregatte, die Trireme, und die Galeone unter anderen sind aber auch weiblich und sind auch Fremdwörter für bestimmte Arten Schiffe.
Yeah I’m non-native. Natur is another one that triggers me, mostly because of the mother nature connotation in english
Well you’re in luck, it’s die Natur!
Edit: that’s also a pretty like-native way to think about articles, so well done!
oh wow, I guess I only hear it referenced in dative and assumed it was masculine
As in English.
isnt that just all boats/ships in english?
Yes.
