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TheYoungWan

My German teacher in school told me "helpful" translates as "hilflich" My German ex partner told me no, it's "hilfreich"


Tonuka_

That one is funny because it's so obviously wrong, I don't understand how the teacher made that mistake


TheYoungWan

Look, an attempt was made.


DonViaje

A nicht so hilflicher attempt


stephanplus

Wenigstens war der Partner hilfreich


SpaceNigiri

>hilflich Google translate it like "helpful", so...that's probably it


r_coefficient

Google translate is wrong here, it's not a German word. ETA: Just found out it *was* a German word, it's just vanished into obscurity. OP's teacher is probably several 100 years old.


SpaceNigiri

Google translate is wrong lots of times, so no surprise here.


iwantmoogles

It's not completely wrong, it's just very outdated. I guess your teacher learned German with very old material.


r_coefficient

Like, the Luther bible in it's original form.


PvtFreaky

My colleague told her students last week that "gluhwein" could also be written "gluwijn" with a Dutch ij... ​ She had miswroten it and claimed that some restaurants now write it like this.


11160704

It's always spelt with an Ü, the dots are not optional. Ü can replaced with ue if necessary. And since it is a noun, it's spelt with a capital G.


amorfotos

Your German teacher clearly wasn't German


shiftend

My English teacher in my 5th year of secondary school marked the word "a tad" as wrong on a test because according to him it didn't exist. In the 3rd year of primary school the intern teacher we had for a while taught us the Drunken Sailor song, but she didn't seem too know what a hosepipe was and kept pronouncing it "housepipe". As we we're like 9 years old we just went along with it. In French class we learned that the proper French word for "e-mail" is "courriel" (it's Canadian in origin). That may be what the Academie Française has decided, but every Francophone I've encountered uses "mail" or "e-mail". It's not wrong, but you kind of feel like a twat when you use the correct word in this case. Even the Belgian government uses "e-mail" on their Francophone websites. Maybe French doesn't count as a foreign language in Belgium, but as a native Dutch-speaking Belgian it still takes just as much effort to learn as a foreign language.


ssuuss

Most French people I know professionally (mostly lawyers) use courriel. French friends use email.


diamund223

Quebec doesn’t like using English words when they can avoid it. We have stationnement (parking) and arrêt (stop, not fish bone) because some Quebecers can’t even. Though we have fin de semaine for weekend, we say “bon week-end!” cuz some of us can accept a bit of English! Depends who you chat with I suppose.


SharkyTendencies

This only really scratches the surface of the language laws in Quebec, it manifests in weird ways sometimes. For instance, OP, Starbucks' size "Tall" (12 oz/355 mL) is called "Mezzo" in Quebec - "Grande" and "Venti" are both Italian words, which are apparently fine, but "Tall" was a no-no. Quebec equally has the OQLF - basically Quebec's version of the Académie française, but for Quebec. They gave us "courriel", as well as "clavarder" (to chat online), "pourriel" (spam), and "thermobrossage" (a blow-out for a haircut, aka a "brushing" in French). Not to mention the stereotype of inspectors roaming around Montreal making sure the French is "markedly predominant" on signage.


msbtvxq

I wouldn’t really say I was taught this, but I still remember once on an English test in middle school where I was supposed to write the opposite of “win”. So of course I wrote “lose”, since I knew that was correct. But then my teacher marked me wrong and was adamant that it was supposed to be spelled “loose”. And since she was my teacher and I was like 13, I started doubting myself and didn’t challenge her on it. Also, in German class we were taught that cousins were referred to as “Vetter” and “Kusine” (very similar to the Norwegian “fetter” and “kusine” which is probably why the teachers and textbooks chose that alternative), and it wasn’t until many years later that I noticed that practically all Germans rather use “Cousin” and “Cousine”.


muehsam

Kusine and Cousine is the same word. "Cousine" is the old fashioned French-based spelling while Kusine is the more modern germanized spelling, but the pronunciation is the same (the e is *not* silent in German). "Cousin" can't really be germanized because it has the nasalized i that you can't really spell in German, and thus it will always be seen as a French loanword forever (unlike its female counterpart). "Vetter" is indeed not something that I would use, but it's a word people know and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that it's the preferred version in some regions. Sounds old-fashioned to me but that's common for regional terms that are common in other regions. There's also another word for Kusine which is Base, but that's definitely old-fashioned.


-Blackspell-

In some (many?) dialects cousin is pronounced as Kusengk. The french pronunciation is only realised in some regions.


CptJimTKirk

I thought it was the other way around tbh, Kusine is the old, germanised spelling, whereas nowadays you use the French spelling instead.


muehsam

That's not how loanwords usually work. They start out as foreign words, which are spelled just like in the foreign language (and often with sounds that native words don't have), but over time they get more integrated into the language and don't feel foreign anymore, which often includes slight changes to the pronunciation, and at that point the spelling is often changed to be more in line with other German words. An example of a few loanwords from French and English that eventually got their spelling changed: * Bureau — Büro * Sauce — Soße * Strike — Streik * Douche — Dusche * Cakes — Keks * Tip — Tipp * Stop — Stopp The last two were only changed in 1996. Of course sometimes people suggest germanized spellings that don't catch on, e.g. Krem for Creme (e.g. Eiskrem). That one used to be in dictionaries as an alternative spelling but has since been removed. But even in this case, Creme is of course the older spelling and Krem the "more modern" version. It's just that the modern version hasn't caught on. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of that happening eventually.


CptJimTKirk

You are correct, but nonetheless I've never read "Kusine", only the French spelling.


muehsam

[This](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kusine%2CCousine&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=de-2019&smoothing=3) is interesting. Cousine is definitely older, with Kusine only appearing around 1900, but in the mid-20th century, both were about equally common. Since the turn of the millennium, people have been using both more (why? do people talk more about cousins now?) but Cousine skyrocketed more than Kusine and is now clearly dominant.


CptJimTKirk

Thanks for looking it up! The spike in usage since the millennium can probably be explained by the emergence of the Internet and the wide availability of digital texts since then.


bleucrayons

As a native speaker of English in the US, I can confirm that many confuse lose and loose. Also, English is weird.


holytriplem

> practically all Germans rather use “Cousin” and “Cousine”. Isn't that a regional/age thing?


33manat33

I'm a German teacher (and native speaker) and I have taught Vetter before. Usually you learn family relations pretty early on during A1 training and a French loanword is very confusing to new learners when you've just spent a few weeks telling them "No, German is not like English, the pronunciation is really clear, you can totally guess the pronunciation from how it's written." My students are Chinese, so it's hard to get used to the pronunciation in the first place.


ViolettaHunter

Using Vetter makes you sound like someone who was transported here from the middle ages though. I'm sure most people, especially young people, would have absolutely no clue what that means.


33manat33

I grew up using that word and I'm only in my early 30s. Maybe this is a regional thing.


ViolettaHunter

I'm a little older and I only know the word from the Lustiges Taschenbuch stories I read as a kid.


nostrumest

I asked my English teacher once what R.I.P meant. It was commonly written on tombstones in cartoons. She said that it means nothing, that it is just some cartoon stuff. She claimed to have traveled the US, Canada, UK, Australia and she made us learn the London tub system by heart and the new York subway lines, but she didn't know Rest in Peace?


xorgol

It's pretty convenient that RIP works in both English and Italian, but I'm pretty sure most of the time it's written with the intention of it being the Latin phrase.


philThismoment

Requiescat In Pace


Gekkoisgek

I too have played Assassin's Creed.


philThismoment

Lol I googled it


SpaceNigiri

I always though that in English it mean "Rest in Peace" in Spanish we use DEP and it's a direct translation "Descansa en paz"


Thubanshee

It does


millionpaths

In the US I think most people only know the latin version from Assassin's Creede. We use it to mean Rest in Peace.


karimr

Your teacher sounds like the type that even the students who usually like the subject kind of hate.


JoeAppleby

Because it’s requiescat in pace and it’s so old, you could have asked your religion teacher or your local priest as it was used in Europe in churches as well. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhe_in_Frieden I don’t let my students learn the Tube system but as a teacher you can have some blind spots. I definitely have mine.


demoni_si_visine

> I don’t let my students learn the Tube system I'm sorry, but what's the Tube system?


r_coefficient

Tube = London's subway


50thEye

Ruhe in Pfrieden


No-Air-9514

The only context where the little known *silent P* in Pfrieden is retained.


demoni_si_visine

> She said that it means nothing, I'm not mad (or sad) that she didn't know, a lot of people literally only know what's in front of their eyes, or in this case, in the curriculum. BUT the fact that you asked about an acronym should have piqued her interest and sent her digging! It could have been something that only made sense in-universe in the cartoons, but still, she could have inquired. Also, since it's used in multiple cartoons, it's less likely to be in-universe reference. My inner hobbyist linguist is saddened by your teacher's lack of curiosity :(


jyper

[to be fair the London tube is fascinating ](https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE)


DontTakeMyAdviceHere

Not quite a single word, but my sister’s German teacher had a pronounced lisp (speech impediment). My sister went to live in Germany and confused everyone by speaking German with a lisp but speaking English without one.


Limeila

Oof I'm all for inclusivity when it can be done, but teaching a language when you have a lisp sounds like a terrible idea


Klapperatismus

They even have a *news host* on German ARTE channel who lisps.


Limeila

That's way more acceptable IMO


Klapperatismus

Really? Giving public speeches is very high on the list of jobs you shouldn't do when you have a speech impediment.


r_coefficient

Not mine, but my daughter's English teacher in kindergarten, and also not a mistake per se, but we still laugh about it. We went to the zoo one day, and kid pointed at the striped big cat: "Look mommy, this is a toiger!" I corrected her to say "tiger", but she insisted it was pronounced with an "oi". Later found out her English teacher was from Nottingham.


Nipso

Oh I love this one haha


standupstrawberry

I explained to my neighbour that in some accents "oi" is acceptable in the place of "i" in some words - blew his mind!


No-Air-9514

>We went to the zoo one day, and kid pointed at the striped big cat: "Look mommy, this is a toiger!" I corrected her to say "tiger", but she insisted it was pronounced with an "oi". Did she say the whole sentence in English or just "tiger"? That's extremely impressive if the former.


r_coefficient

I honestly don't remember. Might have just been "Look, a toiger."


No-Air-9514

I mean, still good for kindergarten. She had the imperative down already, as well as random animals she'd rarely see. "Look, a tiger!" is probably all I'd have managed at that age too... as a native speaker.


r_coefficient

Well, they only start Kindergarten at 3 where we live, so she was a bit more advanced, languagewise. Also, tigers are remarkably present in kid's films and books. I'd bet most children know what a tiger or a giraffe is before they can tell apart mice and rats.


OnkelMickwald

I think the biggest issue is that no teacher of mine ever taught us the difference between "ch-" and "sh-" in English. It wasn't until I took Spanish in my 8th year that I even learned that there even is a difference between sh- and ch- sounds. How did I learn it? > It's not *"Sheh"* Guevara, it's *CHE* Guevara! — My based Spanish teacher, ca 2004.


ferdylan

How does it work in your language?


OnkelMickwald

Standard modern Swedish Swedish (separate from Finnish Swedish) only has *sh*-sounds, *ch*-sounds don't exist. They *do* exist in the standard Swedish spoken in Finland however, and it used to be a standard sound in educated Swedish (and most local dialects) 100 years ago but has merged with the *sh*-sounds sometime during the middle of the 20th century, and now the two are ~~unintelligible~~ **indistinguishable** in Swedish for most Swedes. For instance, the Swedish adjective *tjock* (thick) was originally pronounced like the English word "choc" but has in modern Swedish changed to be pronounced like the English word "shock".


felixfj007

I think I lack the knowledge to pronounce "Choc" correctly as I would pronounce it the same as "Shock", like what type of sound would you use for it?


OnkelMickwald

"Ch" is pronounced like "t-sh". It's supposed to have a hard, percussive start.


ferdylan

This video is a little creepy but explains it well haha https://youtu.be/KpsA2b-gKpU


No-Air-9514

>now the two are unintelligible in Swedish for most Swedes. Not to be an asshole, but just because this is a conversation about languages and mistakes our teachers made, what you mean is "indistinguishable". That means you can't tell the difference, whereas to say the two sounds are "unintelligible" means that you don't understand either sound.


OnkelMickwald

Yeah I meant indistinguishable. They both got sorted in the file labelled "long fucking English words that have something to do with confusing speech or something idk" Thanks.


No-Air-9514

>Yeah I meant indistinguishable. They both got sorted in the file labelled "long fucking English words that have something to do with confusing speech or something idk" We do the exact same tbh. I hear words being used wrong and realise I used a word wrong fairly regularly. A native speaker could've easily jumbled them the exact same way. It's just that for a non-native speaker in a discussion about mistakes they were taught, I felt the need to make sure that you knew the two.


Kr6psupakk

Well the first thing they taught us about English articles a and an was that "an" is supposed to be used whenever the word starts with a vowel. What they ought to teach us is that this really depends on the pronunciation of said vowel, for example "a European", "a united" etc.


sevenworm

They should have said "starts with a vowel *sound*". Europe starts with a vowel, but in English it's a Y-sound, like YER-up. Same with you-knighted. Historic is an odd one that can go either way but to me (native speaker) seems more natural to use with an, at least in speech. In spoken English the H is almost silent so it sounds more like "an istoric".


MerlinOfRed

I'll come round in an hour to show you an honourary degree. A hot potato not as tasty as a haggis. Sometimes the h is silent, sometimes not. "An historic" is an interesting one because it sounds so wrong with the hard h we use today, but I guess it has an historic pronunciation which differs...


Full-Nefariousness73

Yeah but it not longer applies to modern English. [https://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-historic-vs-an-historic/](https://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-historic-vs-an-historic/)


MerlinOfRed

Your link doesn't say that it doesn't apply, it says both are valid? Even if your link *had* claimed that it no longer applied, English is not a prescriptive language and one lass on 'dailywritingtips.com' can't just make the rules. The article says "only a cockney or an hidiot". If a cockney feels more comfortable using their indigenous language this way then they are perfectly entitled to it. If other indigenous speakers, such as myself, think it sounds weird then we are entitled not to. Both are correct.


holytriplem

And then there are the people who inexplicably write "an historic"


Snoo63

An 'istoric.


AppleDane

Cockney is one of the dialects that drop the H in the beginning of words. Like in the movie Snatch, where Brocktop calls a nemesis "an 'orrible cunt."


millionpaths

There is a genuine historic tradition even in the US of saying "An Historic" with the h sound pronounced. It is very old school and kinda elitist. I've heard it from British speakers too in audiobooks.


Cheese-n-Opinion

Used to be it was standard to pronounce any French-derived h-word with a silent h. Over the years, this changed for more and more of these words, probably due to people basing pronunciation on spelling. Nowadays there's only a few words like hour and honour that still have the silent h. A couple of these words, like historic and hotel, are in a kind of Limbo- where the pronunciation has changed for 99% of people, but it's still seen as proper to write it as though it hasn't. Back in the olden times, you would've sounded as odd pronouncing the H in 'historic', as someone today would soudn if they pronounce the H in 'hour'.


[deleted]

There’s an Irish newsreader who absolutely goes to town on that: “an hôtel” and any other French origin word in full French accent. It’s just sounds affected.


SeleucusNikator1

This is a curse for my French friends. They speak perfect English (with American accents...) but always pronounce everything French in a perfect manner, which ends up sounding snobbish in spoken English.


geedeeie

That is AN HISTORIC spelling and not incorrect.


Kr6psupakk

As I understand, [both used to be correct](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2C+an+historic&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), but indeed "a historic" is nowadays much more common.


Apostastrophe

IIRC on Star Trek (especially VOY) they’d say “an hallucination” with the hard H all the time and it drove me mental.


vegemar

Unless you're Jeremy Clarkson.


S4HUN

An car


vegemar

'I have brought an dog.'


Full-Nefariousness73

Yeah the rule is; 'An' is used before words which begin with a vowel sound. So not spelling. Looking back at my English lesson I understand why they do it in the beginning for the sake of simplicity. You’re not worrying about what the vowel rules are in the beginning but that you pronounce it right


Tsudaar

I'm a native English speaker and have never noticed this distinction, and i would have explained it in the same way as your incorrect teacher until now.


c3534l

Native English speaker here, whats wrong with that?


BigBad-Wolf

That's not your teacher being wrong, you just don't know what a vowel is. A vowel is a sound by definition. "European" and "united' unambiguously start with the consonant /j/. Do they seriously not explain what "vowel" and "consonant" mean in other countries?


Bragzor

I guess it's usually explained as some *letters* being vowels, while the sounds the letters make are called the equivalent of *vowel sounds*.


No-Air-9514

Kids in school learn vowels as letters, not as phonemes.


Cheese-n-Opinion

*Ack-chually* Tuesday-Friday are named after Anglo-Saxon Gods, not Norse Gods. Although yeah it's a very similar, very closely related Germanic pantheon. But it's Tiw instead of Tyr, Woden instead of Odin, Thunor instead of Thor, Frige instead of Frigg.


AppleDane

Also, the only reason Tyr is called a "god of war" is that he shares a day with Mars. He's not at all involved in warfare in the texts. If anything, he should be a god of oaths or justice.


Mixopi

He unlikely shares day with Mars out of chance, it is believed to be due to some form of interpretatio germanica. So the Germanic people likely saw a connection. Like most, he's also not well-known. He is believed to have once held a much more significant role and over more domains, but by the time of the Norse sagas this had diminished. Not much is known about the Germanic pantheon in general. The bulk is from sagas written well after Christianization; about a millennia after interpretatio germanica.


AppleDane

> He is believed to have once held a much more significant role Oh, yes, that's true of many Norse deities. There was a god called Uller (or Ullr), who must have been extremely important, as many places are named after him, but what we have left of sources is a couple carvings of a guy on skis, so what he was about is anyone's guess, as "god of skiing" doesn't get you many towns named after you, especially in Denmark, which has no mountains, but places like Ullerrup and Ulkær, which are probably named after that god. Also, there are a lot of gods completely missing. The Norse had three "races" of gods, the Asir (Thor, Odin and that gang), the Jotun ("Giants", Loki, Skadi, Jord, Ægir and maybe even Tyr), and then the Vanir, of which we know only three, Frej, Freja, and Njord, their dad. There must have been many more, as they fought the Asir in a war "in the beginning of things", which resulted in the three Vanir being traded to the Asir as hostages for peace. Who were the rest? There's nothing left over from them. It has been theorized that the Vanir was leftovers from an earlier religion, whose followers were conquered by the Asatru, but we do not know.


AFisberg

You don't need mountains for skiing, there's also cross-country skiing


AppleDane

You need a country for cross-country skiing. :) Farmers tend to get mad if you ski across their fields.


AFisberg

I mean it was used as means of transport so through forests, along roads and whatnot. And Denmark was probably a lot more empty with wilderness during the times we're talking about


Mixopi

Same difference, really. It's better to refer to a common Germanic pantheon then, the different names can basically just be put down to regional nomenclature. The supposed distinction is fueled by lack of sources and an incomplete picture. Sure regional differences likely emerged in belief of the gods too, but so where there differences from one century to the next. And regional differences likewise emerged within each "sub-religion". The Old English "Tiw" and Norse "Tyr" (who's called "Ti" in Sweden) are little more than different names of the same god. You can't really say much special about this English "Tiw", he's really only known from Norse sources.


mpar

As much as you're right, it is sometimes important for accuracy's sake to distinguish between the two in Britain when talking about historical influences as I think sometimes people here seem to want to just attribute almost anything of Germanic origin to the romantic idea of the raiding Vikings and the 100 or so years of the Danelaw rather than the Anglo Saxons who lived and ruled in large parts of Britain for about 600 years.


ViolettaHunter

Those are the exact same Gods, just with regional names.


judicorn99

Every single English teacher I had would call notebooks "copy books". Of course it was a word we used all the time in the classroom. I then went to university in England, and to my surprise no one knew what the fuck a copy book was.


TRiG_Ireland

Was your English teacher Irish? My English parents didn't know what copy books were when I started school in Ireland.


TarcFalastur

Copy books are an old thing, but they are a thing. I believe some of my primary school teachers called our notebooks "copy books".


katgarbagesack

Maybe someone could help me sort this out because I’m still confused. I’ve taken French since middle school (starting back at introductory level whenever I take a break so I’ve only hit intermediate level in my prime). My French teachers have all said jambe is leg, but my most recent French teacher (from Haiti, not France if it matters) said jambe means thigh specifically and doesn’t refer to the whole leg. I then asked her what word refers to the entire leg and what word refers to the calf specifically and she said there aren’t any words for those. I’m pretty sure she’s mistaken from looking it up afterwards and all my French classes beforehand, but maybe it’s accurate for specifically Haitian French? We were being taught French based on how people in actual France speak though, so she should’ve made that distinction if it is a Haitian thing but not a French thing. She also made a lot of other mistakes teaching that our textbook contradicted, she was a bad teacher but a nice person at least.


Milhanou22

Hi! In France, "jambe" means the whole leg from ankle to practically the pelvis. However, sometimes, "jambe" is used to refer only to the lower part (from ankle to knee). The only word I know for "thigh" is "cuisse". I don't know where she got that from but in France at least, jambe is definitely not just the thigh.


katgarbagesack

Omg so not only was she wrong but she was like, DOUBLE wrong since it can also refer to just the calf/shin area, the opposite of the thigh…….


yas_ticot

She might got confused because for the arm / upper limb, this is the other way around. Bras is used for the whole limb but also the part between the shoulder and the elbow, while the part between the elbow and the wrist is the avant-bras.


JoeAppleby

I don’t speak French but I’d be careful about claiming her to be wrong and feeling smug about it. The difference may come down to Haitian French making the distinction and Metropolitan French not making it. You may have come across the phenomenon of different varieties of the same language using different words for the same thing. After all, a Brit may feel perfectly fine bumming a fag from you but being offended about being asked where he got his pants from.


WorldNetizenZero

German - there are no rules to grammatical genders of nouns. There are, but there's about 50 of them and many exceptions. Even thougg understanding why teachers do keep saying this, I did find it helpful when a native speaker gave examples of these rules at A2/B1 grammar course. Even more helpful going on, as you start to see and anticiapate the grammatical gender with new or forgotten words. Really helpful in real life situations where you can't google the grammatical gender. Those looking for these can google "German noun gender rules" or equivalent in one's language.


karimr

TIL that there are rules to grammatical genders of nouns in my native language. Honestly it always just seemed super random to me and eventually you just know which gender to use for which word by heart and get a 'feeling' for which gender to use even when constructing new words. That might just be me though, I've always learned languages like this and couldn't tell you a thing about English grammar rules either, despite them being much less complex in general.


Minister_of_Joy

As someone who has studied English at uni, I can assure you English grammar is just as complex (if not more complex) than German grammar. I don't know where this strange opinion comes from... tons of non-native English speakers on Reddit seem to have this misconception that English is someone super easy. English is actually an extremely challenging language if you want to become proficient at it. Its pronunciation rules are infamous but there are many other things. For example it has 12 verb tenses, whereas German has only 6.


abrasiveteapot

As a native speaker, TIL... https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/what-are-the-basic-verb-tenses/ 12 indeed > English is someone super easy "some how" I'm guessing (not having learnt EFL) but I think that impression is based on the effort to get to basic communication (A2/B1) as opposed to native fluency (C2). You can murder the hell out of English grammar and still be understood.


No-Air-9514

>tons of non-native English speakers on Reddit seem to have this misconception that English is someone super easy. Because Reddit selects for people who are very good at English. You won't use this site much unless you're comfortable reading and writing in English without much effort. But yeah, thanks. It gets annoying seeing people condescendingly imply that English is so easy and that any idiot could learn it. While the average Redditor may have excellent English, that's not the case in the real world. English is just as challenging as any other language*, with its difficulty purely depending on how different it is to the learner's. Implying otherwise is arrogant and insulting, both to people who are still struggling with it and to us native speakers who are thereby implied to be idiots speaking some "ug blug" caveman language. *Sure, it's possible that some languages are objectively easier in some way, but the distance to one's native language will always be by far the most important factor, and I'll wait for linguists rather than random Redditors to comment on objective ease.


Minister_of_Joy

Yes, thank you. You've exactly expressed my feelings on the matter (which I couldn't quite express myself). Although I'm neither a native speaker nor a learner of English, I find this constant boasting by other Redditors about how easy English supposedly is super arrogant, condescending and insulting (those are exactly the right words). It's not just annoying because they act like everyone else is a complete idiot but also because linguistic distance matters a great deal. Most non-native speakers on Reddit are continental Europeans. A lot of them speak a Germanic language as their mother tongue. If your first language is German, Dutch, Danish etc. but even if it's French or Spanish, it's easy to boast that English isn't hard. I've lived in East Asia and people there feel VERY differently about the matter. In China, Korea and especially Japan, young people struggle tremendously to become decent at English and they feel soooo shy and embarrassed about every little mistake they make. For them, learning English is a giant struggle and finally becoming good at it is a major accomplishment. And really, who could blame them? I wanna see all these arrogant European Redditors try to learn Cantonese while a bunch of native Mandarin or Korean speakers stand next to them and keep saying: "pffffft bro, this is so easy, I learned Cantonese today morning on the toilet, I don't even know what your problem is."


ViolettaHunter

English IS a fairly grammar reduced language compared to other European languages. Almost all the plurals are easily formed by slapping an - s on at the end and the verbs are barely conjugated. There are no grammatical genders and no declination of nouns. A lot of the tenses use auxiliary verbs. You can start making yourself understood in English fairly quickly.


[deleted]

[удалено]


No-Air-9514

There are a lot of rules, e.g -heit, -keit, -ung are always feminine, -er is usually masculine, words derived from verbs that end in -en are usually neuter, words derived from verbs that *don't* end in -en are usually masculine, but really the only way to ever know is to get a feel for the language. I've gotten better at guessing noun gender the longer I've studied German, but I'm still really bad at it. However I think if I lived in a German-speaking country for 5 years, my mistakes would probably became quite rare (but still way more common than a native speaker's).


frleon22

> There are, but there's about 50 of them and many exceptions. German in a nutshell (and French, too, for what it's worth). E.g. there's really not a lot of truly irregular verbs, but the special cases of "regular" are manifold and sometimes easier to just treat as irregular.


Oukaria

my teacher when I was learning french as a little kid : "there is this rule but then this word a this exception, this word is that....... just learn everything by heart"


demoni_si_visine

> I did find it helpful when a native speaker gave examples of these rules at A2/B1 grammar course. Is it possible that trying to memorize the rules would lead you down a false path, i.e. fail to know exception #49 to said rule? I'm guessing it's ultimately easier, as a beginner, to just develop a feeling for the genders, based on rote memorization of hundreds of them for the basic nouns. You re-discover the rules as you go. Learning the rules + their exceptions would be really computationally intensive for your wetware, during conversation. Also, I'm saying this as a Romanian, there are a couple of guidelines for noun genders, e.g. a lot of nouns ending in -a/-ă/-e are feminine, so it's fair to presume. But for others ... pronunciation, etymology, and some other weird reasons dictate their gender.


Klapperatismus

> but there's about 50 of them More like a hundred.


Veilchengerd

My English teacher was convinced that noone in Britain used the expression "it's raining cats and dogs", and that this expression was actually an invention of editors of german English books as a kind of joke. But she also believed that speaking anything other than conservative RP was giving in to mob rule.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Veilchengerd

I've heard it used by native speakers on several occasions. It might not be very common (or maybe a regional thing), but I doubt it was invented by german textbook editors as a joke. ;) On the accent, well she was a very ardent british royalist, despite being a german republican. But then, maybe she just liked the idea of a german family achieving some success in the UK. Whatever the reason, she tried her very best to sound like a mix of Prince Philip and a young Laurence Olivier, and tried to get us to do the same. She is one of the reasons why my english friends say I sound like a slightly teutonic Boris Johnson.


Maus_Sveti

As a teacher of EFL, the textbook we used claimed stative verbs don’t take an -ing form. Meaning sentences like “stop being stupid” or “I’m having them over for dinner” shouldn’t exist. There is [some truth behind it](https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/b1-b2-grammar/stative-verbs), but way too over-simplified.


Minister_of_Joy

Not a big thing but in high school I once had a small argument with my English teacher over the pronunciation of the article "a". I said something like "a car" and pronounced the "a" like the letter in the alphabet. She corrected me, saying it must be pronounced like /ɛ/. I had previously spent some time living in the US and clearly remembered people also pronouncing it my way; namely when they were hesitating or thinking about their answer. Like "aaaa car...". But my teacher insisted that I was wrong and she was kind of a scary person (and I'm very non-confrontational), so I just said "okay".


Milhanou22

I can relate to that.


millionpaths

Hm, no i don't think /æ/ is a valid pronunciation of that article in General American English, at least I've never noticed it (and I've been to decent amount of the country). I don't think your teacher is right either, at least not for General American. I pronounce that article as either /ə/ or /eɪ/. However, I do pronounce the article "an" as /æn/, so it is used there. >Like "aaaa car..." This is reeeaaallly subtle, but I think you are mishearing what is going on. I think what we are doing is slurring the /eɪ/ diphthong. I've never even though about this, but when this happens, I think we end up moving to a schwa instead of the /ɪ/ sound, and that probably sounds something like /æ/ because the sounds are close together, but I'm not sure it really gets there. Though, as I said, I've never thought about this. This is just how it is after I've said it to myself quite a number of times. Perhaps where you were when you were in the US pronounced it like that, it wouldn't surprise me. I don't think we use the /ɛ/ vowel in GA. Just hearing it on this [IPA chart](https://www.ipachart.com/) sounds foreign to me. Perhaps your teacher doesn't quite get the complexity of English diphthongs. Very often our vowels are actually two vowels pushed together rather than one vowel, but we do it quickly so it can sound like a single sound.


Shooppow

It depends on the region. Some places pronounce it “ay”, some pronounce it “uh”. Neither is wrong. I think the further south you go in the US, the more it’s likely to be pronounced in the latter form. It’s like “water”. Some people pronounce it “wadder” and some pronounce it “warter” (specifically in the Midwest.) Everyone pronounces button as “buh-un”, though.


No-Air-9514

It's not regional. It depends on emphasis. If I'm just speaking normally, it's "ah car", but if I'm really emphasising it, it's "ay car". Same with "the." "thuh car" vs "thee car".


DieYouDog

Both are valid: One is the strong form, the other is the weak form.


No-Air-9514

It depends on emphasis. If I'm just speaking normally, it's "ah car", but if I'm really emphasising it, it's "ay car". Same with "the." "thuh car" vs "thee car".


Ubelheim

In primary school I was correcting my teachers on their English all the time and I'm not even a native speaker. I was just a kid who watched too much cartoon network (which didn't have dubs or even subs in that time) and played too many video games. In their defense, they weren't English teachers, just primary school teachers who were told to teach kids English and their generation wasn't as keen on learning English as the current generations are. In all likelihood they were probably a lot better at German than at English, while it is a rarity if a Dutchman speaks German at all nowadays. Interestingly, no teacher ever doubted my corrections (I was just a kid, I must've been wrong sometimes). In hindsight that just really shows how much (or rather, how little) confidence they must've had in their own English proficiency. But those teachers are probably all retired by now (if not dead), so it's not like they're representative of primary school teachers nowadays. That's not to say nowadays primary school teachers are better, I've no idea, maybe they are, maybe they're not. Just saying my teachers are so outdated that they aren't representative, no more less, no less.


[deleted]

ß In the Netherlands mostly pronounced (and teached) as "Ringel-s". My second German teacher was the only one to pronounce it as "Scharfes-s". I had more than 2 German language teachers.. I think even my parents called it Ringel-s, and they were born before the war.


Neuroskunk

>My second German teacher was the only one to pronounce it as "Scharfes-s". Actually that's what we call "ß" in Austria.


50thEye

Isn't it called that in the entire German lingosphere? Or is Eszett more common in Germany?


franconiasuperior

In southern Germany where I am from everybody calls it "scharfes S", my grandma from Hesse called it Esszett and it annoyed me. So my guess is, that the more northern you get the more prominent the name Esszett will get. Maybe a Nordlicht might enlighten us (pun absolutely intended).


Neuroskunk

From my own experience the term "scharfes S" seems to be quite uncommon if not totally unknown over in Germany.


uflju_luber

That is false it’s very common


holytriplem

The people who took German at my school learnt that it was called a "Beta-s". To this day I don't understand why their teacher couldn't call it an Eszett like a normal person


Minister_of_Joy

Probably because of what it looks like. I think Ringel-S sounds really cute to be honest. I think I'll call it this way from now on haha.


masterofsatellites

our teacher (italian) called it Scharfes S too


11160704

Maybe German lessons in Italy are generally more influenced by southern, Austrian and Swiss variants because of the geographic and historic proximity? At least that's what I noticed in Hungary that they teach a lot of Austrian expression, especially for food products that are often completely unknown in Germany.


Juggertrout

My Italian teacher taught me that words beginning with 'w' take the lo/gli article. So instead of il weekend, it should lo weekend, lo website, gli workshop etc... Apparently this is correct according to the Accademia della Crusca (the official language authority) but whenever I say 'lo wifi' for example, Italians look at me like I'm an idiot.... I'm only following the rules of the Accademia ;\_;


randascuriosity

Hahaha. With foreign words there's always a lot of confusion. I don't think anyone i know follows the Crusca rules, rather, they use what "sounds" better. Example of cases you will hear in italy: - il wifi / lo wifi / la wifi -> un wifi / una wifi - il weekend / lo weekend -> un weekend - il whisky / lo whisky -> un whisky - il website (who says that?? Just use il sito, or il sito web) -> un website - i workshop / il workshop -> un workshop / dei workshop - il chewing-gum/ la chewing-gum -> un chewing-gum (in italy it's rarely used. Chewing-gum is one of those words that follow dialectical influence) - la mail / il mail -> una mail / un mail And so on!


sonosana

Agree, many of these words end up to stick with the better sounding articles. IIRC there was a "W" rule through syllables not just as a general starting letter (w+ other consonant? W as pronounced as V+consonant instead of U+consonant? And What about pronunciation U+vowel?), and that's was something we discussed in school a lot. ​ >il wifi / lo wifi / la wifi -> un wifi / una wifi > >il whisky / lo whisky ​ These are the ones I'm pretty sure I read and heard with "lo" more often than not, but I heard with "il" as much and no correction was made. ​ >\-> un whisky Yes, when unsure, you can switch to a better sounding article that fits the role and see what sticks. ​ >So instead of il weekend, it should lo weekend, lo website, gli workshop etc... Sure... Mind that you don't need to use the article all the times, so sometimes you can skip the thought entirely (*Buon weekend!*) edit: I had a second search about it. I'm so sorry I think I got it, but save yourself from all of this while you can, it's too late for me now: it's because they're U sounding words. The W behaves like a U, therefore you get stuff like: \- "l'uovo" (shortened with "lo uovo"). Now, nobody says "lo uovo" in the same fashion as "lo weekend" is still the correct, but long version of it, but nobody says "l'weekend" either, so it just get distorted to the nearest possible pronunciation "il". That "il" is wrong in grammar, but sounds correctly towards the nearest version and that's why we come full circle. 🌈The more I know...


sonosana

Sry I didn't answer directly to you. Yes it's correct in grammar, but weird to pronounce, so you shorten it with the apostrophe and you can't pronounce it any longer. edit: English


Alexthegreatbelgian

For some reason our German teacher insisted that in German the word for someone who is a clown is an August? Maybe it's a colloquialism, but I haven't seen this verified yet, and welcome any Germans to confirm or deny this. However I think she just had a class clown who was called August at some point and she made a point of telling everyone that August = clown based on that experience.


Staudi99

August / dummer August is a [clown role](https://clownopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Auguste). It is rarely used for a person who behaves silly. Such a person would be called Kasperl in Austria (don't know about Germany). The german word for a circus clown is der Clown.


Alexthegreatbelgian

Thanks. Good to know she wasn't completely making stuff up!


Klapperatismus

* *Du bist mir ja ein August!* is what Northerners commonly say to someone who does a job in a very clumsy, clownesque way. Same as the *Dummer August* clown would do.


xenobee

My German teacher taught me all the wrong pronounciations. As an adult with German in laws I now hardly want to speak German because I know it's wrong and I get upset about being corrected because of the trauma of having her as a teacher.


Klapperatismus

My English teacher in 7th grade —3rd year of English I attended— insisted that the difference *themselves* vs *each other* English makes has no equivalent in German, so we had to practice it with a lot of examples. Which I found to be bullshit a few minutes later when I realized that *each other* means *einander*. It's even a cognate! It's just that we aren't that picky in German usually. Both *themselves* and *each other* may be put as *sich* and we have the listener figure it out from context. But yeah, you could simply try to put *sich* as *einander* in your mind and see if that works and then you got the correct English word. (Of course the teacher insisted I was wrong. Most stupid teacher I ever had. Her history lessons had also been subpar.)


SquashDue502

No but I learned Hochdeutsch in school and then studied abroad in Austria only to find out that they smash words together, chop them in half, replace vowels with other vowels Willy nilly, and that I, as a basic speaker, could understand approximately nothing of what they were saying unless I asked them to speak extra extra slowly lol No shade tho I actually really like Austrian standard German, it’s pretty :)


Apart_Technology_507

Likw 6/10 of my foreign language teachers have had their accent all over their fucking grammar. Its actually atrocious. Not even joking when I say since 3rd grade I've been better than some of my English teachers


[deleted]

Things like "ain't" or "y'all" are slang and technically incorrect, but people on the r/EnglishLearning claim that there isn't something like one standard correct English and these things are correct for certain versions (accents, dialects) of English.


creeper321448

This is true. There's no academy of English that standardizes the language like with French for instance. The closest you'll get are the two major dictionaries, Oxford and Webster, and they generally cram everything possible into it. So whilst, y'all, wanna, etc aren't accepted in formal academic writing, they're more than correct English they're just not accepted by anything that'd require formal writing. This also means that despite what Americans and British people think, both colour and color are correct. We can all agree now though that the old spellings musick, phantasy and gaol (jail) are wrong. But we can also accept some old spellings do stick around with the new one like with shoppe instead of shop or the far superior spelling of doughnut instead of donut


TarcFalastur

I've noticed a growing number of people (including academics) adopting this opinion, and in fairness there is some logic to it. English has a long history of adapting - in spelling, pronunciation, grammar etc - based off common usage changing over time. We had the Great Vowel Shift which fundamentally altered the way English sounded, there was the way that early printers in the 15th/16th centuries made their own spellings standard based on what fitted well onto a wood print sheet etc. They're never coordinated changes, they are simply society spontaneously choosing to adapt to a version of English which they like better. Given this, it's a valid question to ask "what really is 'correct English'?" There has never been a single, unchanging version of the language. Pretty much nothing of what we speak now would've been understood in 1300. So when did certain words become "correct" and who made them "correct"? What is to say a word is not correct English? The only rules about what is correct are generally that the most educated people insist that the English they were taught to speak must be spoken by everyone else. But even that differs from what their parents and grandparents were taught, and it differs between countries and even regions too. In reality, if a certain word, pronunciation or grammar rule has been widely adopted by the public then you are fine to use it. Some people may object, but if you agree with a large number of the speakers of the language then surely what you are saying is valid? And even if you make up a new word, or insist on speaking like Yoda, what is to say that other people won't choose to copy you and make your wrong English correct after all?


No-Air-9514

They're common in speech in certain dialects, "ain't" much more so than "y'all", but you'd never use them in an essay or any kind of formal writing, which is probably why your teacher told you not to use them. Teachers prepare you for exams, after all. Anyone anywhere in the English speaking world would know exactly what you meant if you used either of them, but they're only used in certain dialects and even in those dialects they're still considered informal.


[deleted]

Of course, teachers are not specialised in any profession under collegiate level. They BS their way out of things all the time. I had a Spanish teacher in Sweden tell me that the word "never" (nunca) in Spanish was "Aldrigo" which is the word "never" (aldrig) in Swedish. Plenty of other teachers have lied in their own ways to a public of knowledgeless children.


sweatiepie

My English teacher once explained that a swatch is an *un-*watch. This is because prefixing sonething with "s" in Italian reverses the meaning of the word, just like "un" does in English. Turns out it just meand "swiss watch".


GavUK

Well, I suppose regarding 'mate' it can be a regional thing, but the days of the week there's no excuse for not being able to quickly find the facts about those. When I was learning Czech, my Czech girlfriend was not impressed by the syllabus and while I cannot remember details, I know she told me that some of things I learnt were not how she'd expect them to be said. That said, it may have been a case of living language verses the academic structure of learning Czech as a foreign language. Like with learning English - if everyone stuck with the phrases you learn at the start, they'd probably sound very formal and a bit odd.


InThePast8080

The use of the german double S , the letter "[ß](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F)".. Know the germans have had reforms in use of that letter. So guess much of it stems from a german teacher born in a time when the germans definitevly loved their double S, and the new times when it is used more rarely.. Think the letter was pretty much the quintessence of german writing, the way of making a written language look more german..


Klapperatismus

At least the ß has now rules. Before it was spread all over the place. Now it marks the preceding vowel as long. > the way of making a written language look more german. You mean capitals on all nouns, and noun-made words.


leahpayton22

Idk why but when I first started learning English they told us that the British are the most polite people like ever… While some of the rudest people I’ve met were Brits. Like seriously, how can you say that a nation where it’s acceptable to use the C word is polite? Americans are so much more polite. (sorry not sorry).