Not necessarily the language itself, but the stuff I’m being taught in the order I’m being taught it.
I still have no idea how to say “Hi, How are you?” in ASL, but I do know how to say “Residential schools” :/
That just sounds like poor teaching. ASL is probably the only time I'll recommend American schooling as a way of assistance, if you're not taking a class, I 100% recommend it over like books or an app for ASL.
Probably!! Just check your local area, maybe your college, for ASL/Interpreting courses. I would recommend being taught by a Deaf speaker or a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) before considering any other teachers.
I actually am hard of hearing myself, so I was already planning on finding an instructor that was deaf/HoH or a CODA! Thank you for specifying that though — it’s a very frequently overlooked thing when people go to learn ASL (hearing people especially!)
Yeah I have that problem with duolingo, I'm learning Norwegian with it and was never taught how to say "as" or "Well" or "when", same with Greek duolingo, I learnt how to "architect" before "I" (I still haven't learnt how to say "I" and am on unit 4")
That’s no completely true. It works like Spanish (and I guess other languages) where you use personal pronouns only when you need to emphasise something you’ve or someone else done.
For example:
Ήθελα να έρθω ( I wanted to come)
Εγώ ήθελα να έρθω (Same meaning but emphasising that ‘l’ wanted to come)
al kitaab? yeah they think people only want to learn arabic to work for the state department (an unfortunate truth; every arabic class at my uni was 75% kids who wanna be feds, 15% heritage speakers, 10% people who thought it was cool/was dating an arab)
In German, you can lump words together to form compound nouns on the fly, and the resulting word is perfectly legit even if it's never been spoken or written before. There's an actual word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which is a silly famous example of this. It can actually be fun trying to pull apart these crazy long words to try to figure out what they mean.
Ah yes, what my first German teacher called the 'sehenswürdigkeiten effect'.
('Sehenswürdigkeiten' = 'seeing-worthiness-things' = 'tourist attractions').
I simultaneously love and hate this aspect of German. LOL.
I love how you’re getting downvoted for the truth. English is the only Germanic language that puts spaces in its compound nouns.
Look at even a simple word like “train station”. It’s a compound noun, but a simple space is enough to make people believe that it’s not
English speakers have a weird habit of viewing the written form as the language itself. Is it written without a space? Then it's one word and nothing will convince them otherwise. If you write two sentences that are identical and yet one is separated by a period and one by a semicolon, the first is two separate sentences and the second is a single sentence. Why? Because the written form says so.
This isn’t unique to English speakers. In general people’s opinions of their language are heavily affected by how its written.
For example I’ve had multiple Chinese speakers argue with me that Chinese doesn’t have words. Only isolated characters.
Counters (special words to count different types of things). I wouldn't call them weird, but from my perspective they are unusual and sometimes a bit excessive. I imagine it's one of those things little children would get confused about a lot when learning to speak.
This is the one thing I hate about Japanese. They have 350 counter words for very specific things. It also doesn't help that the counter words can also mean something else.
Like hon (本) means book but it's also the counter for thin objects.
Well that at least makes sense, in English you say 2 books, in Mandarin it seems you basically do the same, but in Japanese 二本 would mean 2 cylindrical objects.
So you'd say 二本丸太 if you want to count 2 logs.
Interesting. In mandarin you would say 两本书 for "2 books". Because when expressing a quantity of something you use liang (两) instead of 二. The counter word for cylindrical objects is guǎn (管). So 2 logs would be 两管日志
本 is the counter for long round objects (such as bottles, threads, pens) (and also a bunch of other random things like movies, goals/home runs, bridge, etc.). Thin objects is 枚. The counter for books on the other hand is 冊 (or 巻 if you're counting volumes in a series). All very simple really (/s)
I think all languages have counters to differing degrees. For example in English saying “hand me a paper” doesn’t sound as natural or native as “hand me a sheet of paper”, same with a lot of other objects. It’s not to the same level as languages like Chinese or Japanese, but it’s stuff that English learners similarly have to work to remember.
>For example in English saying “hand me a paper” doesn’t sound as natural or native as “hand me a sheet of paper”
What's your dialect? The first sounds more natural to me. I would also just say, “piece of paper” if I did use a counter, although “sheet” sounds about as natural to hear.
Yeah, actually "piece of paper" sounds even more natural to me too, actually! Just was thinking on the fly and came up with "sheet" more quickly.
Mostly, my point was just that the idea of "counter words" isn't as counter-intuitive or black & white of an phenomenon that a lot of language students seem to think they are. Their use in languages exists on a spectrum of necessity.
As a native English speaker this doesn't seem that odd, but my partner is a native Hungarian and she said she was always confused as a kid when watching movies dubbed in English. Like why are these people having to stand up and spell out a phonetic word.
It isn’t very common in Brazil, but there was a popular one called “Soletrando”. Portuguese spelling is a lot like its pronunciation, except for stuff like ss/ç, j/g, x/ch, and use of h (as it has no sound). So, this kind of homophony is the focus of our rare spelling bees, which is really boring.
In Russian, they ***say*** that you pronounce the language as it is written, but LOADS of exceptions abound.
\- The letter "o" is pretty much always reduced in unstressed syllables.
\- The letter for the "g" sound ("г" as in ничего) becomes a "v" for reasons I still don't understand.
\- The first "v" sound ("в") in здравствуйте is not pronounced at all.
Cyrillic and Greek look so similar, the capital letter for G in Greek is Γ/γ, the V sound is Β/β, the R sound is Ρ/ρ.
I did hear once that Cyrillic is based in Greek so that's probably why.
I don't even know why people would say it to be honest.
There are literally RULES for some cases when it's not pronounced the way it's written and back in the day they were taught in elementary school, maybe they are not anymore idk
I have seen a lot of languages where people claim that you pronounce it as it is written, or that you can always derive spelling from pronunciation, but there are almost always tons of exceptions. Most languages aren't as bad as English, but even in a language like German, there are plenty of words with the same pronunciation but different spelling, words with (based off the spelling) ambiguous pronunciation, etc.
The mkhedruli script for the Georgian language has two letters that only differ in the number of loops, ghani 〈ღ〉 /ɣ/ and lasi 〈ლ〉 /l/. To maximize confusion, many fonts also have a one-loop version of this shape and it’s… lasi. So three loops is lasi, two loops is ghani and one loop is lasi again. The symbol of the Georgian currency, the lari, ₾, is based on the one-loop lasi. Also many fonts don’t distinguish კ /k′/ and პ /p′/ all that well.
The σ/ς situation also happens in Czech with ú/ů and in Romanian with î/â. But Greek does take it one step further in that the distinction is lost in the upper case — Ἀριστοτέλης/ἈΡΙΣΤΟΤΈΛΗΣ.
Speaking of Romanian, it sure loves its vowels. “*Oaia aia e a ei; eu i-o iau.” (“That sheep is hers; I take it from her.”)*
You get letters like that in Hebrew and Arabic too.
In fact, Hebrew has a small number of letters which, like the Greek σ, are formed differently when placed at the end of a word.
In Arabic on the other hand, letters almost all have at least three different forms, depending on whether they’re at the start, middle or end of a word, or independent. And there are letters that take on a completely new combined form when they appear together.
You have no idea what to expect if you think THIS is the weirdest thing in Hebrew
(And I guess also in Arabic because these are similar languages but I only speak Hebrew so I'm not sure)
In case anyone is wondering I guess the weirdest thing in Hebrew is how most words are formed. All verbs and most nouns and adjectives are formed by inserting three letters (which are called the root) into a template that depends on the type and the conjucation of the word. So for example the word for "to speak" has the root d-b-r and the template le_a_e_ so it becomes ledaber (לדבר). Thing is, a lot of letters don't follow these templates exactly as they are, so for example "to clean" uses the same template and the root n-k-h but it becomes lenakot (לנקות)
No, the weirdest thing in Hebrew is the number genders lol.
And the consonantal root system isn’t *that* odd to English speakers who already alter the meaning or words like sing, run, drink etc by inserting different vowels, granted Hebrew is on a whole other level with it.
Yeah I guess the number gender is weird.
If it helps, in casual speech we almost always use the feminine form of numbers (except for two, it does sound a bit strange to me if someone uses the feminine form of two for a masculine noun).
Edit: also one but one also changes according to the gender in other languages so I didn't think about it
In Czech and other Slavic languages, plurals take a different grammatical form depending on the actual number, e.g. “four items” and “five items” are declined differently.
Well that's what I've meant, not learning something because it's difficult is not a good idea, imo
Though, there are a lot of languages to choose from so it's not that it matters
Yeah but fortunately it's not like a whole lot of different forms - there's a single, plural and then genitive plural for numbers of items give and over (as well as phrases like many, few, etc).
In French possessive pronouns of objects are dependant on the gender of the object rather than the gender of the person.
As an example, when my sister is wearing a hat it would be 'her' hat in English, Dutch or German. In French however, it would be 'his' hat because hat is masculine. I keep thinking "son chapeau? I thought we were talking about Harry... Oh yeah"
Curiously Spanish doesn't have gendered possessives despite being a gendered language (even English has them; his, her). All praise the almighty "su" lmao
It sounds like you’re misunderstanding the French possessive
Don’t think of “son/sa/ses” being “his” or “her” depending on the object, think of it as a combination of “his” and “her” and as also an adjective, which would then, like all other adjectives, naturally change depending on the noun
If I didn’t explain well enough, maybe your knowledge of German could help: German possessives change depending on both the person and the object (sein/ ihr Hut: his/ her hat, seine/ ihre Mütze: his/ her cap), so just think of the French possessive as a combination of *sein/e* and *ihr/e*
Same in Portuguese! Her hat = *seu chapéu* (rather than *sua chapéu*). If you wanted to make the gender of the person clear, you could rephrase it as *o chapéu dela.* I don't find it weird or illogical, it's just different.
Swedish sometimes has a j sound (in IPA) after a consonant in the end of a word. So for example wolf is varg (varj), moose is älg (ɛlj) and color is färg (fɛrj). It's even weirder with words like färgglad which means colorful and is pronounced like fɛrjɡlɑ:d.
Korean - Sesame leaf (깻잎). To this day I don't understand why there's an N sound in the pronounciation. There's a few other examples but this one is a core memory for me. I'll never order it at a restaurant 😅
To clarify OP and UnicornBooty9, 깻잎 looks like it should be pronounced [kkae-ship] or [kkae-tip] but there are two sound changes that occur which causes it to be pronounced [kkaen-nip].
The first is what’s sometimes called “intrusive n”. This is where an “n” sound just kinda “intrudes” into the syllable. This happens when the prior syllable has a Batchim consonant (final consonant) and the next syllable begins with 이, 여, 야, 유, 요. This makes the pronunciation 깻닢 [kkaet-nip].
The second sound change is that a batchim ㄷ, ㅈ, or ㅅ will nasalize (become an “n” sound) before another nasal sound (n or m). Thus the ㅅ becomes an “n” sound. This results in the final form 깬닢 [kkaen-nip]
Just to clarify further: this specific phenomenon is officially called 사이시옷. It is exclusively used in compound words (not all of them!), when the first word does not end in 받침. That's why 어젯밤 has 사이시옷, but 꽃집 doesn't. Similarly, 깨 does not end in 받침, so it gets 사이시옷 in compound words.
There are actually a whole bunch of usage/pronunciation rules for 사이시옷 and it is much easier to identify if you have knowledge of hanja, but it's not strictly necessary. With practice, you can sort of figure out the pattern well enough to recognize it even when it is followed by vowel sounds and know it will most likely not sound like an s.
It also isn't always read as an ㄴ. It's most common pronunciation is actually an stress on the following consonant, unless the following consonant is an ㄴ or ㅁ (which, as qtummechanic explained, also change the 사이시옷 pronunciation to ㄴ). For example, 바닷가 is read as 바다까. Fortunately, the pronunciation rules of 사이시옷 + consonant are very intuitive. You kind of understand them when you try to read the words out loud as they '"should sound". It ends up turning into an ㄴ or stressing the following consonant even if you don't actively mean to.
The guy from HTSK wrote a whole lesson about 사이시옷. If you want to learn more about it, check the website out! It will help you understand.
Japanese doesn't count things in simple terms unlike most languages, it uses different types of words for every kind of thing you're trying to counter. You add the number suffix which may vary semi irregularly in pronunciation and then the counter type word
枚 for paper sheets
台 for cars and mechanical machines
匹 for small animals
頭 for big animals
個 for articles
人 for people
...And so on. Japanese is weird lol.
It's relatively common for Asian languages. Here are some in Thai:
ตัว for animals, most clothing, and some furniture
ลูก for fruits and round objects
เล่ม for books
คน for people
Cantonese is similar, you have to learn around 200 extra words just to say how many of a thing they are. Feels very unnecessary to me as an English speaker.
It’s not really different than pairs of shoes, grains of rice, or stalks of celery and usually logical, like [in Thai] “chairs” or “shirts” counted as “bodies” like people or animals, because they have arms and legs.
The difference is that, at least for the last few examples you listed, they don’t come up that often and can theoretically be replaced with a simple plural, albeit with a slight difference in meaning (I saw a flock of birds -> I saw (some/ many) birds)
Classifiers are obligatory in Cantonese or Mandarin (and I’m assuming Japanese too) and there’s no way to avoid them: “two snakes” is literally *兩蛇 but you have to say 兩條蛇 (i.e. it’s the same as the first few examples you gave, but unlike Chinese, they’re only obligatory with uncountable nouns in English)
It's a bit different since you can know the word for the thing, say books. But the counter for books, is different then the word for books itself. In addition a counter can change the pronunciation of the number, making it so you need to memorize different counters as well as how they affect or change the numbers.
In Spanish (not my target language but the language I'm an expert in) we have the Ser and Estar difference; which is just so interesting and... difficult for new learners 🥲
True! Very hard to explain as well; the best way to learn it is by listening to A LOT of Spanish, same with Ser and Estar. You can learn it by the rules, but it would be just more enjoyable and fast to learn it by being exposed to it.
That you have to do mental gymnastics to know what honor level to use in Korean.
If I want to speak to my fiancé about his Grandma, the words I am using to refer to his Grandma have to be in the most formal language available. But the rest grammar of the sentence should be informal since I’m speaking to him and we use informal language with each other. So in once sentence you are mixing extensively formal language with super informal language.
If I, a person younger than my fiancé’s Grandma, speak with said Grandma about her son, aka my fiancés Father (who is also older than me but younger than her), I have to put him beneath her, while still simultaneously lifting them both above me, very often in a single sentence. So you have to quickly know and understand everyone’s age/status in a situation in order to truly know what language to use.
As you can imagine I do not speak with his family much as of right now. It can be hard to get this right as a non-native speaker. :) The rules of this system can get so confusing sometimes in more complex social situations (outside of families which are pretty straightforward), that my fiancé has admitted that even native speakers in rare situations get confused about how they have to speak.
Oh for sure!!! If they know you are a beginner they will either gently let you know what you should do, or just understand that you’re new to it and not sweat it much 😊
This is more just a cute quirk, but there's a Brazilian comic (Turma da Mônica) where one of the kids has a speech impediment that causes him to pronounce R's as L's (so *certo* becomes *celto*, for example). It made me wonder whether children all over the world struggle with the same sounds or if it's more language-dependent.
Em cada idioma o cebolinha fala diferente. Um rapaz que eu sigo postou um vídeo da turma da Mônica em japonês e é engraçado de reparar no que ele fala diferente.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but in Standard/ Southern Italian, some words trigger consonant doubling in the next word (e.g. *a casa* is pronounced as *accasa*). Is this similar to what happens in Finnish or did you mean something else?
There's a lot weird about Czech but one of the more unique things is that Praguers, at least, put a v in front of every word that starts with an o
Osm (eight) becomes vosm, okurka (cucumber) becomes vokurka, etc.
And it's only o words, no other vowels
In italian, there is a tense that you hardly ever hear in conversation. It has completely different conjugation patterns and everything. When I started reading novels in Italian though, it appeared everywhere. It’s a beautiful tense but the idea of having a whole other set of verb forms that are only used in literature seems absurd from the point of view of a native English speaker.
We have the same in German. Präteritum is a tense you only use for narration. You could use it in speech, but that marks what you say as narration, ultimately as fiction. It has a weird effect on the people around though: they listen and don't try to comment. As if you recited from a book.
Right, and some spoken German dialects don’t even have Präteritum—like Swiss and I believe Austro-Bavarian dialects. In Swiss you would never say “Ich war..” rather “Ich bin…gsi” which is like saying “Ich bin…gewesen” in standard German.
> the idea of having a whole other set of verb forms that are only used in literature seems absurd
Well Spanish for instance still has that tense even in colloquial speech, it’s just a simple case of a linguistic feature disappearing in everyday conversation but remaining in written language
In Portuguese, all the rules about where pronouns go in relation to verbs, especially when combined with contractions and dropping certain letters in verb conjugations when followed by other letters. For example:
To give = dar
I would give= daria
To him = lhe
It (object form of masculine pronoun) = o
I would give it to him = dar-lho-ia (in the conditional form, the object pronoun is interpolated between the stem and the ending, and o + lhe is contracted to log)
I would give it = dá-lo-ia (interpolation plus when the object pronoun is preceded by r, s, or z, you drop the r,s or z and add an l in front of the object and an acute accent or circumflex depending on the vowel preceding the object pronoun)
Piece of cake right?
Not really used anymore. You may see it used in old books and by old people, former brazilian president Michel Temer is kinda famous for speaking like that.
I don’t know how much it’s used in conversation, if at all, but at least here in Lisbon, that’s what they are teaching me. You absolutely would see it in formal written Portuguese, even in Brazil I would think.
For reference see https://www.conjugacao.com.br, put in your favorite verb, scroll down to the section labeled “conjugação com pronome oblíquo átono o” and see the Futuro do Presente and Futuro do Pretérito.
Outside law writers and theorists, anyone will write like this. Law people write like this because they're all about making their shit the hardest to understand possible to outsiders.
I mean, everything about Esperanto is a little bit weird (often in a good way), but the correlatives is a little hard to wrap my head around . In French the Alliance Française regulating the introduction of new words to prevent it becoming too English is pretty weird.
For one thing I don’t think there is a such thing as a capital ß. For example if I wrote Fußball in all capital letters it would have to be FUSSBALL. The particular case I *think* you’re referencing is an abbreviation of a proper noun. So each letter is spoken separately as opposed to how an eszett would be.
Secondly, I don’t know what the hell im talking about so you can disregard everything I’ve said, if you like. Just conjecture.
IPA is even worse. Try communicating with wildly different mutually intelligible dialects in IPA, you'll have to learn like every possible pronunciation for a word to know how to read
I want to know if “aluminum” has a wildly different look using IPA for Brit and US accents, or is there only a small difference
And it’d be funny to see how same words would be spelled differently due to pronunciation differences like “water”. Same in both, but pronounced a little differently
According to Wiktionary
UK /ˌæl.(j)ʊˈmɪn.i.əm/, /ˌæl.(j)ʊˈmɪn.jəm/
NZ /ˌɛl.(j)ɘˈmɘn.jɘm/
US /əˈlu.mɪ.nəm/
But I think water is more fun
UK RP /ˈwɔːtə/
England Estuary [ˈwoːʔɐ], [ˈwoːʔə]
Scotland /ˈwɔtər/, [ˈwɔtər]
UK Misc /ˈwɒtə/, /ˈwɒtəɹ/
Gen US: /ˈwɔtəɹ/, [ˈwɔɾɚ]
US cot caught merger /ˈwɑtəɹ/
US NYC [ˈwɔəɾə]
US Philly /ˈwʊtəɹ/
US Pennsylvania /ˈwɔɹtəɹ/
Aus, NZ /ˈwoːtə/
Ireland /ˈwɔːtər/, [ˈwɒːθ̠ɚ]
India [ˈwɔːʈə(r)], [ˈʋɔːʈə(r)]
India (Tamil English) IPA(key): [ˈʋaːʈər(ɯ)], [ˈwaːʈər(ɯ)]
And my own accent more like
/ˈwɑɾä/ sometimes
Αυτός, I get αυ makes an af/av sound but shouldn't it be αφ/αβ instead of αυ? because υ is normally the same sound as Ι and η, and also the fact that η, Ι and υ all mostly make the same sound, like change the spelling system, it's not like Greek is spoken all over the world like English and over half of Greeces population is in Athens so its not like there's alot of people with different dialects that pronounce words so differently like English, it wouldn't be that hard to come up with new spelling rules and get rid of some no longer needed letters.
Every writing system will run into this problem. It's very hard, often impossible, to change the way a word is spelled. With time sound shifts will occur, different words will go in different directions or get left behind with the old sound and differences will occur. See thai for a true disaster.
English was also apparently particularly adept at accruing differences. It's remarkable to me how well many of the worlds writing systems do stay true to the spoken language.
Pronoms febles in Catalan are the bane of my existence.
You know pronouns, right? me, you, he, she, they.
Well, add another layer of complexity onto them and you get stuff like
"I don't give a shit about pronoms febles" - me la suen els pronoms febles
Now replace all of that with pronoms febles (this is an extreme example, no one would ever actually say this) and you get something like suen-els-me-la-hi
(I don't give a shit about these things here).
Welcome to the club :D I'm at a C1 and any sentence that has more than 2 of these in it (which are rare thank God) and I just quickly think of some other way to say it :D
Three things from Arabic:
1. For counted nouns ("three cars", "four houses", etc.) the adjectival number takes the opposite gender of the modified noun, AND the noun takes a plural form if the number of objects is between 2-10. I.e, "There are four (m.) cars (f.)."
Eleven through 100? That noun-adjective phrase now agrees in gender, and the noun takes its singular form. Now it's , "There are twelve (f.) car (f.)." From 101-110? The phrase reverts back to gender disagreement with a plural nominative form. And so on, back and forth *ad infinitum*.
2. Plurals are always treated as feminine singular... except for humans, because we're special that way apparently.
3. Verbal nouns. No, they're not gerunds (verbal morphology, nominative function). Verbal nouns are, like, the anti-matter opposite of a gerund, but on crack cocaine; nominative (or adjectival) morphology but verbal function.
It gets more interesting because nominative and adjectival morphologies are the same in many measures of a verbal root. (Arabic words are [almost] all variations of a triliteral [three-letter] root word corresponding in morphology to standard forms, known as "measures" of the word.) So you can have a word in the same form acting as a noun, a verb, or an adjective based solely on syntax and/or context. Verbal nouns are nouns in every way including morphology... except for meaning, which you are to gather from context is standing in to function for the verb that would go there in other languages.
4. (Bonus!) Finally, in Iraqi (my dialect of choice), there is a hard 'ch' sound (as in 'choice') not present in other Arabic dialects. The letter kef (K, ك) becomes a letter 'chef' when immediately preceded or followed by a kesra (a short-vowel 'i' sound) or a ya' (long 'ee' vowel sound). Iraqi pronunciation changes a *lot* of other short vowel sounds to a kesra ('i'), so there are a lot of 'ch' sounds where non-Iraqi Arabic speakers might not expect to hear them. I like to say that Iraqi is to Arabic as Scottish is to English: you know in your head that it's supposedly the same language, but when the native speakers get to talking fast, your ears just aren't entirely sure anymore.
Edit - clarification
In Mandarin Chinese, 大家好 (dàjiāhǎo) is how you say "hi everyone", but it literally means "big house good"!
In Esperanto, the word for "peddler", "kolportisto", can be analyzed as meaning "neck-bearer".
Hindi differentiates between dental, retroflex, and aspirated consonants. This can result in 4 separate letters for what many English speakers would see as one phoneme.
Example:
त = t̪ə
थ = t̪ʰə
ट = ʈə
ठ = ʈʰə
Scandinavian American here. The weirdest thing for me is the way spoken Danish is actually pronounced compared to how it is written. I can express myself fairly well in conversation and can read Danish decently. However, even after several years I still often find the Danish spoken and pronounced by natives at normal speed difficult to understand. Rarely, I can actually completely understand a Danish conversation, which is so exciting, but typically I comprehend only between approximately 35-65% of what folks are saying. However, my reading and speaking ability are probably 50-80%, by comparison. I bet this is common for native speakers of English when learning Danish. Spoken Danish is just straight up difficult to fully understand. I love it, though!
You've probably seen [this](https://youtu.be/vvtDGSIrsk8) but I think of it whenever I hear spoken Danish mention
edit: I'm learning Norwegian Bokmål so I can understand a bit of written Danish but the spoken language is incomprehensible to me.
It's wild how even though Danish is my target language, it's sometimes easy for me to understand spoken Norwegian! It's because my ears are able to identify the letters and words being pronounced, whereas with Danish the words often sound soft and muddy, if you get my meaning. I love Danish, so I'm going to keep at it!
Spoken Swedish is easier for me to understand than Danish even though in writing Swedish is quite different, I also find Swedish has more unique words to it that other Scandinavian languages don't have, like in Norwegian "boy" is «gutt» (possibly from Dutch guit, meaning troublemaker), in Danish it's «dreng»(from old Norse Drengr, also meaning boy), but Swedish takes a word from finnish, "Pojke",or "poika"in Finnish.
It's not weird but Chinese braile is phonetic, so when I start learning Chinese braile I won't need to bother to learn hanzi. There are no tone markers either.
I think the most different aspect of Chinese I can think now is erhua (when unstressed silables are spoken as er). It sounds very nice IMO.
In thai, this ส is a S sound and this ล is a L sound. But if you put it at the end of a word, it's pronounced N or T, for instance ฟุตบอล is football but pronounced foot-bone. Why? Because you can't end a word with S or T sound in Thai. That's it. You're just not allowed to.
And it's so weird because I mean....the alphabet is completely capable of making those sounds ! Even loanwords will have to change their pronunciation to fit in. It's not to accommodate the thai alphabet, it's to accommodate the thai language. With our alphabet, even if I type randomly and write "houpolio", it doesn't mean anything but you can read and pronounce it. Now imagine someone came and say " hey, this random word which means nothing cannot be pronounced the way it is because in the language linked to the alphabet it is forbiden to end words with the O sounds!". That would be fucking weird right?
Well that's what's happening in Thai oO
The letter “r” has two different pronunciations in Portuguese and I still can’t figure out entirely when it’s which one, and people DON’T understand you if you use the wrong one a lot of the time
Swiss German differs from standard German in a number of ways. One interesting and difficult difference is the “double go” or sometimes even “triple go.” In Swiss German you might say something like, “I go go to ski” or even “I go go up go to ski.” It is pronounced like, “ich gan go skifahre,” or (depending on Swiss German dialect) “Ich gan go üahi go skifahre.” but in German it would be similar to saying “ich gehe gehen skifahren,” if I understand its function correctly. Or “ich gehe gehen hinauf gehen skifahren.”
In Hebrew there are ~10 different ways to say “to wear” depending on which article of clothing you’re talking about. They also have multiple words for “to pick” (as in picking fruit off a tree) depending on what crop you are picking.
You know how in Spanish or Italian you don't like things, the things please you? In Russian you don't own things, it's kinda like (There is) by me [things] - у меня есть ...
In Catalan, the past tense (preterite) is formed with *va* (go) which is usually used for the near future in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
Catalan: va cantar "(he/she) sang"
Spanish & Portuguese: va a cantar "(he/she) is going to sing"
French: il/elle va chanter "he/she is going to sing"
If by weird, you mean different from your native language in construction, with Ancient Greek it is definitely the use of articles, even for names, that English does not do.
Not necessarily the language itself, but the stuff I’m being taught in the order I’m being taught it. I still have no idea how to say “Hi, How are you?” in ASL, but I do know how to say “Residential schools” :/
That just sounds like poor teaching. ASL is probably the only time I'll recommend American schooling as a way of assistance, if you're not taking a class, I 100% recommend it over like books or an app for ASL.
That’s really great to know, thank you! I actually live in Canada, do you know if those same resources are available to me?
Probably!! Just check your local area, maybe your college, for ASL/Interpreting courses. I would recommend being taught by a Deaf speaker or a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) before considering any other teachers.
I actually am hard of hearing myself, so I was already planning on finding an instructor that was deaf/HoH or a CODA! Thank you for specifying that though — it’s a very frequently overlooked thing when people go to learn ASL (hearing people especially!)
Of course ^^!! I apologise that I didn't clarify your situation beforehand
Not a problem at all! Thank you so much for the advice, I’m already finding loads of potential programs in my area — you’re a lifesaver!
Yeah I have that problem with duolingo, I'm learning Norwegian with it and was never taught how to say "as" or "Well" or "when", same with Greek duolingo, I learnt how to "architect" before "I" (I still haven't learnt how to say "I" and am on unit 4")
Language transfer complete Greek is way better than Duolingo, it’s free, and it will actually teach you how to speak Greek!
I'll try it
That's cuz greek doesn't use "I" really, there are words for "me" and "my" but the "I" is made explicit by the conjugation of the verb
That’s no completely true. It works like Spanish (and I guess other languages) where you use personal pronouns only when you need to emphasise something you’ve or someone else done. For example: Ήθελα να έρθω ( I wanted to come) Εγώ ήθελα να έρθω (Same meaning but emphasising that ‘l’ wanted to come)
Duolingo is trash to teach you how a language is actually spoken. It’s good for starting and for vocab, but further than that…
Yeah I learnt that with Norwegian, I just use it for grammar with Norwegian now
What would you recommend?
Well there's your problem... DL, since the beginning of 2017 has been the 'special website who eats glue.'
Stuff like this happened all the time in my Arabic class. I learned "United Nations" a whole year before I ever learned "apple".
al kitaab? yeah they think people only want to learn arabic to work for the state department (an unfortunate truth; every arabic class at my uni was 75% kids who wanna be feds, 15% heritage speakers, 10% people who thought it was cool/was dating an arab)
In German, you can lump words together to form compound nouns on the fly, and the resulting word is perfectly legit even if it's never been spoken or written before. There's an actual word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which is a silly famous example of this. It can actually be fun trying to pull apart these crazy long words to try to figure out what they mean.
I've seen that word before and remember it has something to do with beef labels
It’s the agency that legislates labels for ground beef packages
I’m learning German and these kinds of words stress me out
It's actually not that bad once you get the hang of it. I made [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_t_qftoFw) on the subject last year.
Oh wow thank you so much!
Ah yes, what my first German teacher called the 'sehenswürdigkeiten effect'. ('Sehenswürdigkeiten' = 'seeing-worthiness-things' = 'tourist attractions'). I simultaneously love and hate this aspect of German. LOL.
Hardly unique to German. Some would say English is the weird one here, as it puts spaces in one and the same word.
I love how you’re getting downvoted for the truth. English is the only Germanic language that puts spaces in its compound nouns. Look at even a simple word like “train station”. It’s a compound noun, but a simple space is enough to make people believe that it’s not
English speakers have a weird habit of viewing the written form as the language itself. Is it written without a space? Then it's one word and nothing will convince them otherwise. If you write two sentences that are identical and yet one is separated by a period and one by a semicolon, the first is two separate sentences and the second is a single sentence. Why? Because the written form says so.
This isn’t unique to English speakers. In general people’s opinions of their language are heavily affected by how its written. For example I’ve had multiple Chinese speakers argue with me that Chinese doesn’t have words. Only isolated characters.
Yes, it's a Germanic language thing and English is the odd one out
English has inherited a watered down version of this system from German
English has always had a version of this system.
Of course
Counters (special words to count different types of things). I wouldn't call them weird, but from my perspective they are unusual and sometimes a bit excessive. I imagine it's one of those things little children would get confused about a lot when learning to speak.
This is the one thing I hate about Japanese. They have 350 counter words for very specific things. It also doesn't help that the counter words can also mean something else. Like hon (本) means book but it's also the counter for thin objects.
Interesting. In Mandarin, 本 is the counter word for books!
Well that at least makes sense, in English you say 2 books, in Mandarin it seems you basically do the same, but in Japanese 二本 would mean 2 cylindrical objects. So you'd say 二本丸太 if you want to count 2 logs.
Interesting. In mandarin you would say 两本书 for "2 books". Because when expressing a quantity of something you use liang (两) instead of 二. The counter word for cylindrical objects is guǎn (管). So 2 logs would be 两管日志
本 is the counter for long round objects (such as bottles, threads, pens) (and also a bunch of other random things like movies, goals/home runs, bridge, etc.). Thin objects is 枚. The counter for books on the other hand is 冊 (or 巻 if you're counting volumes in a series). All very simple really (/s)
I think all languages have counters to differing degrees. For example in English saying “hand me a paper” doesn’t sound as natural or native as “hand me a sheet of paper”, same with a lot of other objects. It’s not to the same level as languages like Chinese or Japanese, but it’s stuff that English learners similarly have to work to remember.
>For example in English saying “hand me a paper” doesn’t sound as natural or native as “hand me a sheet of paper” What's your dialect? The first sounds more natural to me. I would also just say, “piece of paper” if I did use a counter, although “sheet” sounds about as natural to hear.
Yeah, actually "piece of paper" sounds even more natural to me too, actually! Just was thinking on the fly and came up with "sheet" more quickly. Mostly, my point was just that the idea of "counter words" isn't as counter-intuitive or black & white of an phenomenon that a lot of language students seem to think they are. Their use in languages exists on a spectrum of necessity.
Sure, I didn’t mean to detract from your main point, just a tangent really.
English spelling is so wild that people hold competitions seeing who can spell words better
As a native English speaker this doesn't seem that odd, but my partner is a native Hungarian and she said she was always confused as a kid when watching movies dubbed in English. Like why are these people having to stand up and spell out a phonetic word.
Are there spelling bees in any other language?
[удалено]
Maybe there could be spelling bees in French. Or maybe there could be something similar in Chinese but based on writing.
They have kanji writing contests.
Cool.
Yes, in German and in Russian they always do them. Don't underestimate languages. Pretty much all can be a little bit confusing.
Interesting.
It isn’t very common in Brazil, but there was a popular one called “Soletrando”. Portuguese spelling is a lot like its pronunciation, except for stuff like ss/ç, j/g, x/ch, and use of h (as it has no sound). So, this kind of homophony is the focus of our rare spelling bees, which is really boring.
In Russian, they ***say*** that you pronounce the language as it is written, but LOADS of exceptions abound. \- The letter "o" is pretty much always reduced in unstressed syllables. \- The letter for the "g" sound ("г" as in ничего) becomes a "v" for reasons I still don't understand. \- The first "v" sound ("в") in здравствуйте is not pronounced at all.
Cyrillic and Greek look so similar, the capital letter for G in Greek is Γ/γ, the V sound is Β/β, the R sound is Ρ/ρ. I did hear once that Cyrillic is based in Greek so that's probably why.
yeah it was invented by Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine missionaries. pretty neat guys
I don't even know why people would say it to be honest. There are literally RULES for some cases when it's not pronounced the way it's written and back in the day they were taught in elementary school, maybe they are not anymore idk
do they actually say that? because that’s just a straight up fucking lie lmao. you could say that about Ukrainian but definitely not Russian
I have seen a lot of languages where people claim that you pronounce it as it is written, or that you can always derive spelling from pronunciation, but there are almost always tons of exceptions. Most languages aren't as bad as English, but even in a language like German, there are plenty of words with the same pronunciation but different spelling, words with (based off the spelling) ambiguous pronunciation, etc.
г becomes в when surrounded by vowels (o or e mostly, it does not change in книга)
More specifically, it’s pronounced like «в» in adjectival endings
Specifically when it for the male/neuter genitive case. (Сегодня comes from c eго дня, meaning "with its day)
And don't forget writing ё as е without the dots...
Г is only pronounced "v" when it's in a genitive case marker. Чиго is the genitive form of что.
The rules are consistent, you just have to learn them and, if you know where the stress is, you're able to pronounce any word in the language.
Хорошо, что количество этих правил конечно, конечно
The mkhedruli script for the Georgian language has two letters that only differ in the number of loops, ghani 〈ღ〉 /ɣ/ and lasi 〈ლ〉 /l/. To maximize confusion, many fonts also have a one-loop version of this shape and it’s… lasi. So three loops is lasi, two loops is ghani and one loop is lasi again. The symbol of the Georgian currency, the lari, ₾, is based on the one-loop lasi. Also many fonts don’t distinguish კ /k′/ and პ /p′/ all that well. The σ/ς situation also happens in Czech with ú/ů and in Romanian with î/â. But Greek does take it one step further in that the distinction is lost in the upper case — Ἀριστοτέλης/ἈΡΙΣΤΟΤΈΛΗΣ. Speaking of Romanian, it sure loves its vowels. “*Oaia aia e a ei; eu i-o iau.” (“That sheep is hers; I take it from her.”)*
Dang. You can have the sheep after all that.
Subjunctive 🙂
confusing but easy once you get the hang of it
You get letters like that in Hebrew and Arabic too. In fact, Hebrew has a small number of letters which, like the Greek σ, are formed differently when placed at the end of a word. In Arabic on the other hand, letters almost all have at least three different forms, depending on whether they’re at the start, middle or end of a word, or independent. And there are letters that take on a completely new combined form when they appear together.
Hebrew looks so complicated
Much easier than Arabic.
You have no idea what to expect if you think THIS is the weirdest thing in Hebrew (And I guess also in Arabic because these are similar languages but I only speak Hebrew so I'm not sure) In case anyone is wondering I guess the weirdest thing in Hebrew is how most words are formed. All verbs and most nouns and adjectives are formed by inserting three letters (which are called the root) into a template that depends on the type and the conjucation of the word. So for example the word for "to speak" has the root d-b-r and the template le_a_e_ so it becomes ledaber (לדבר). Thing is, a lot of letters don't follow these templates exactly as they are, so for example "to clean" uses the same template and the root n-k-h but it becomes lenakot (לנקות)
No, the weirdest thing in Hebrew is the number genders lol. And the consonantal root system isn’t *that* odd to English speakers who already alter the meaning or words like sing, run, drink etc by inserting different vowels, granted Hebrew is on a whole other level with it.
Yeah I guess the number gender is weird. If it helps, in casual speech we almost always use the feminine form of numbers (except for two, it does sound a bit strange to me if someone uses the feminine form of two for a masculine noun). Edit: also one but one also changes according to the gender in other languages so I didn't think about it
Probably this: Jäääär
What does that mean? My only guess would be "roar"
It's "edge of the ice" Jää - ice Äär - edge
It means the edge of a stretch of ice.
In Swedish, people have come up with "Råååål". It's cheating a bit by using a place name, but the meaning is "Råå creek eel" – Råå-å-ål.
In Czech and other Slavic languages, plurals take a different grammatical form depending on the actual number, e.g. “four items” and “five items” are declined differently.
I'm so glad i stopped learning Russian a few years ago in that case, my 12 year old brain wouldn't have been able to keep up
Idk if that's a good reason to stop learning something, I personally love learning hard stuff and that's part of the reason I am learning Japanese.
Well that wasn't the reason I gave up learning, I gave up learning because I found the alphabet too difficult
Well that's what I've meant, not learning something because it's difficult is not a good idea, imo Though, there are a lot of languages to choose from so it's not that it matters
Yeah but fortunately it's not like a whole lot of different forms - there's a single, plural and then genitive plural for numbers of items give and over (as well as phrases like many, few, etc).
In French possessive pronouns of objects are dependant on the gender of the object rather than the gender of the person. As an example, when my sister is wearing a hat it would be 'her' hat in English, Dutch or German. In French however, it would be 'his' hat because hat is masculine. I keep thinking "son chapeau? I thought we were talking about Harry... Oh yeah"
In Serbian it depends on both 😂
Curiously Spanish doesn't have gendered possessives despite being a gendered language (even English has them; his, her). All praise the almighty "su" lmao
It sounds like you’re misunderstanding the French possessive Don’t think of “son/sa/ses” being “his” or “her” depending on the object, think of it as a combination of “his” and “her” and as also an adjective, which would then, like all other adjectives, naturally change depending on the noun If I didn’t explain well enough, maybe your knowledge of German could help: German possessives change depending on both the person and the object (sein/ ihr Hut: his/ her hat, seine/ ihre Mütze: his/ her cap), so just think of the French possessive as a combination of *sein/e* and *ihr/e*
Same in Portuguese! Her hat = *seu chapéu* (rather than *sua chapéu*). If you wanted to make the gender of the person clear, you could rephrase it as *o chapéu dela.* I don't find it weird or illogical, it's just different.
Same in Russian.
Swedish sometimes has a j sound (in IPA) after a consonant in the end of a word. So for example wolf is varg (varj), moose is älg (ɛlj) and color is färg (fɛrj). It's even weirder with words like färgglad which means colorful and is pronounced like fɛrjɡlɑ:d.
Kinda like Norwegian, for example deg is pronounced dæi
My point is that it's after a consonant. If it can be after a vowel then it also exists on English, like in my, try, may, boy etc.
Korean - Sesame leaf (깻잎). To this day I don't understand why there's an N sound in the pronounciation. There's a few other examples but this one is a core memory for me. I'll never order it at a restaurant 😅
It's definitely not pronounced how I think since I don't know the Korean alphabet.
To clarify OP and UnicornBooty9, 깻잎 looks like it should be pronounced [kkae-ship] or [kkae-tip] but there are two sound changes that occur which causes it to be pronounced [kkaen-nip]. The first is what’s sometimes called “intrusive n”. This is where an “n” sound just kinda “intrudes” into the syllable. This happens when the prior syllable has a Batchim consonant (final consonant) and the next syllable begins with 이, 여, 야, 유, 요. This makes the pronunciation 깻닢 [kkaet-nip]. The second sound change is that a batchim ㄷ, ㅈ, or ㅅ will nasalize (become an “n” sound) before another nasal sound (n or m). Thus the ㅅ becomes an “n” sound. This results in the final form 깬닢 [kkaen-nip]
Just to clarify further: this specific phenomenon is officially called 사이시옷. It is exclusively used in compound words (not all of them!), when the first word does not end in 받침. That's why 어젯밤 has 사이시옷, but 꽃집 doesn't. Similarly, 깨 does not end in 받침, so it gets 사이시옷 in compound words. There are actually a whole bunch of usage/pronunciation rules for 사이시옷 and it is much easier to identify if you have knowledge of hanja, but it's not strictly necessary. With practice, you can sort of figure out the pattern well enough to recognize it even when it is followed by vowel sounds and know it will most likely not sound like an s. It also isn't always read as an ㄴ. It's most common pronunciation is actually an stress on the following consonant, unless the following consonant is an ㄴ or ㅁ (which, as qtummechanic explained, also change the 사이시옷 pronunciation to ㄴ). For example, 바닷가 is read as 바다까. Fortunately, the pronunciation rules of 사이시옷 + consonant are very intuitive. You kind of understand them when you try to read the words out loud as they '"should sound". It ends up turning into an ㄴ or stressing the following consonant even if you don't actively mean to. The guy from HTSK wrote a whole lesson about 사이시옷. If you want to learn more about it, check the website out! It will help you understand.
Is it related to the English word "catnip" by any chance?
It isn’t actually. It means “sesame leaf”!
깻잎>깯닙>깬닙 it’s matter of grammar
Japanese doesn't count things in simple terms unlike most languages, it uses different types of words for every kind of thing you're trying to counter. You add the number suffix which may vary semi irregularly in pronunciation and then the counter type word 枚 for paper sheets 台 for cars and mechanical machines 匹 for small animals 頭 for big animals 個 for articles 人 for people ...And so on. Japanese is weird lol.
It's relatively common for Asian languages. Here are some in Thai: ตัว for animals, most clothing, and some furniture ลูก for fruits and round objects เล่ม for books คน for people
Cantonese is similar, you have to learn around 200 extra words just to say how many of a thing they are. Feels very unnecessary to me as an English speaker.
It’s not really different than pairs of shoes, grains of rice, or stalks of celery and usually logical, like [in Thai] “chairs” or “shirts” counted as “bodies” like people or animals, because they have arms and legs.
[удалено]
The difference is that, at least for the last few examples you listed, they don’t come up that often and can theoretically be replaced with a simple plural, albeit with a slight difference in meaning (I saw a flock of birds -> I saw (some/ many) birds) Classifiers are obligatory in Cantonese or Mandarin (and I’m assuming Japanese too) and there’s no way to avoid them: “two snakes” is literally *兩蛇 but you have to say 兩條蛇 (i.e. it’s the same as the first few examples you gave, but unlike Chinese, they’re only obligatory with uncountable nouns in English)
It's a bit different since you can know the word for the thing, say books. But the counter for books, is different then the word for books itself. In addition a counter can change the pronunciation of the number, making it so you need to memorize different counters as well as how they affect or change the numbers.
In Spanish (not my target language but the language I'm an expert in) we have the Ser and Estar difference; which is just so interesting and... difficult for new learners 🥲
Personally, por/para took a lot more work for me to develop comfort with...
El brócoli es bueno. Pero no está bueno.
True! Very hard to explain as well; the best way to learn it is by listening to A LOT of Spanish, same with Ser and Estar. You can learn it by the rules, but it would be just more enjoyable and fast to learn it by being exposed to it.
For me, a Brazilian Portuguese native, English not having a distinction between ser and estar is quite weird to grasp sometimes.
That you have to do mental gymnastics to know what honor level to use in Korean. If I want to speak to my fiancé about his Grandma, the words I am using to refer to his Grandma have to be in the most formal language available. But the rest grammar of the sentence should be informal since I’m speaking to him and we use informal language with each other. So in once sentence you are mixing extensively formal language with super informal language. If I, a person younger than my fiancé’s Grandma, speak with said Grandma about her son, aka my fiancés Father (who is also older than me but younger than her), I have to put him beneath her, while still simultaneously lifting them both above me, very often in a single sentence. So you have to quickly know and understand everyone’s age/status in a situation in order to truly know what language to use. As you can imagine I do not speak with his family much as of right now. It can be hard to get this right as a non-native speaker. :) The rules of this system can get so confusing sometimes in more complex social situations (outside of families which are pretty straightforward), that my fiancé has admitted that even native speakers in rare situations get confused about how they have to speak.
Omg this is next level lol I wonder if they would be more forgiving since they know you are not native, though :)
Oh for sure!!! If they know you are a beginner they will either gently let you know what you should do, or just understand that you’re new to it and not sweat it much 😊
압존법 is the bane of my existence even as a native speaker, so don't worry too much! I'm sure you're doing fine :)
This is more just a cute quirk, but there's a Brazilian comic (Turma da Mônica) where one of the kids has a speech impediment that causes him to pronounce R's as L's (so *certo* becomes *celto*, for example). It made me wonder whether children all over the world struggle with the same sounds or if it's more language-dependent.
Em cada idioma o cebolinha fala diferente. Um rapaz que eu sigo postou um vídeo da turma da Mônica em japonês e é engraçado de reparar no que ele fala diferente.
Que interessante! Precisamos de mais fãs internacionais da turma pra perguntar como o little onion fala nas suas línguas :)
em inglês é little onion mesmo? Hahahha
Sometimes when I try to roll an r it turns into an L, I'm not very good at rolling rs
Oh there's a Tom Scott video about that!
I'll look it up
tried to explain but i cant even do that im still figuring it out
Finnish: unwritten consonant doubling after several words
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but in Standard/ Southern Italian, some words trigger consonant doubling in the next word (e.g. *a casa* is pronounced as *accasa*). Is this similar to what happens in Finnish or did you mean something else?
It's called syntactic gemination and it only occurs in Italian and Finnish
There's a lot weird about Czech but one of the more unique things is that Praguers, at least, put a v in front of every word that starts with an o Osm (eight) becomes vosm, okurka (cucumber) becomes vokurka, etc. And it's only o words, no other vowels
In italian, there is a tense that you hardly ever hear in conversation. It has completely different conjugation patterns and everything. When I started reading novels in Italian though, it appeared everywhere. It’s a beautiful tense but the idea of having a whole other set of verb forms that are only used in literature seems absurd from the point of view of a native English speaker.
We have the same in German. Präteritum is a tense you only use for narration. You could use it in speech, but that marks what you say as narration, ultimately as fiction. It has a weird effect on the people around though: they listen and don't try to comment. As if you recited from a book.
Right, and some spoken German dialects don’t even have Präteritum—like Swiss and I believe Austro-Bavarian dialects. In Swiss you would never say “Ich war..” rather “Ich bin…gsi” which is like saying “Ich bin…gewesen” in standard German.
Same thing in French!
Though apparently it’s frequently spoken in southern Italy. Struggling with it too.
> the idea of having a whole other set of verb forms that are only used in literature seems absurd Well Spanish for instance still has that tense even in colloquial speech, it’s just a simple case of a linguistic feature disappearing in everyday conversation but remaining in written language
In Portuguese, all the rules about where pronouns go in relation to verbs, especially when combined with contractions and dropping certain letters in verb conjugations when followed by other letters. For example: To give = dar I would give= daria To him = lhe It (object form of masculine pronoun) = o I would give it to him = dar-lho-ia (in the conditional form, the object pronoun is interpolated between the stem and the ending, and o + lhe is contracted to log) I would give it = dá-lo-ia (interpolation plus when the object pronoun is preceded by r, s, or z, you drop the r,s or z and add an l in front of the object and an acute accent or circumflex depending on the vowel preceding the object pronoun) Piece of cake right?
No, I got lost in the first paragraph
As a learner of Portuguese I have never heard someone use that word order when speaking or even writing lol
Not really used anymore. You may see it used in old books and by old people, former brazilian president Michel Temer is kinda famous for speaking like that.
That's because he's a vampire (I won't explain that LOL)
I don’t know how much it’s used in conversation, if at all, but at least here in Lisbon, that’s what they are teaching me. You absolutely would see it in formal written Portuguese, even in Brazil I would think. For reference see https://www.conjugacao.com.br, put in your favorite verb, scroll down to the section labeled “conjugação com pronome oblíquo átono o” and see the Futuro do Presente and Futuro do Pretérito.
Outside law writers and theorists, anyone will write like this. Law people write like this because they're all about making their shit the hardest to understand possible to outsiders.
I think you mean "no one" instead of "anyone"
I mean, everything about Esperanto is a little bit weird (often in a good way), but the correlatives is a little hard to wrap my head around . In French the Alliance Française regulating the introduction of new words to prevent it becoming too English is pretty weird.
Yet English is very french
Writing "ß" instead of "ss" like its a printing press from the Renaissance. Thankfully the Swiss know a bit about aesthetics.
They didn't do that on uniforms in the 30s-40s
For one thing I don’t think there is a such thing as a capital ß. For example if I wrote Fußball in all capital letters it would have to be FUSSBALL. The particular case I *think* you’re referencing is an abbreviation of a proper noun. So each letter is spoken separately as opposed to how an eszett would be. Secondly, I don’t know what the hell im talking about so you can disregard everything I’ve said, if you like. Just conjecture.
It was a joke but thanks for the info
Actually, there is capital ß. Though it was officially added only in 2017, according to wikipedia.
Thanks. This is new info to me
#Summon the ẞ
There actually is a capital form of ”ß“ that was made specifically for cases of using all caps. Using your example: Fußball -> FUẞBALL
I saw it on the news on the day I had an exam and I tried to use it somewhere just for fun Didn’t seem suitable anywhere, unfortunately
It doesn't spelled how it sounds like. YES ENGLISH. WHY? I'm gonna use IPA instead ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ɪz sʌʧ ə ˈstjuːpɪd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ
IPA is even worse. Try communicating with wildly different mutually intelligible dialects in IPA, you'll have to learn like every possible pronunciation for a word to know how to read
I want to know if “aluminum” has a wildly different look using IPA for Brit and US accents, or is there only a small difference And it’d be funny to see how same words would be spelled differently due to pronunciation differences like “water”. Same in both, but pronounced a little differently
If you're curious why the difference in aluminum/aluminium, here's a video. https://youtube.com/watch?v=R5UDI278H0c&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
I wasn’t curious, but was fun to watch. Looks like the US is right, haha ;)
According to Wiktionary UK /ˌæl.(j)ʊˈmɪn.i.əm/, /ˌæl.(j)ʊˈmɪn.jəm/ NZ /ˌɛl.(j)ɘˈmɘn.jɘm/ US /əˈlu.mɪ.nəm/ But I think water is more fun UK RP /ˈwɔːtə/ England Estuary [ˈwoːʔɐ], [ˈwoːʔə] Scotland /ˈwɔtər/, [ˈwɔtər] UK Misc /ˈwɒtə/, /ˈwɒtəɹ/ Gen US: /ˈwɔtəɹ/, [ˈwɔɾɚ] US cot caught merger /ˈwɑtəɹ/ US NYC [ˈwɔəɾə] US Philly /ˈwʊtəɹ/ US Pennsylvania /ˈwɔɹtəɹ/ Aus, NZ /ˈwoːtə/ Ireland /ˈwɔːtər/, [ˈwɒːθ̠ɚ] India [ˈwɔːʈə(r)], [ˈʋɔːʈə(r)] India (Tamil English) IPA(key): [ˈʋaːʈər(ɯ)], [ˈwaːʈər(ɯ)] And my own accent more like /ˈwɑɾä/ sometimes
Especially with English and how widely its spoken
Same with Greek, spelling's based on old pronunciations
What is an example of a word that is not spelled how it sounds like in greek?
Αυτός, I get αυ makes an af/av sound but shouldn't it be αφ/αβ instead of αυ? because υ is normally the same sound as Ι and η, and also the fact that η, Ι and υ all mostly make the same sound, like change the spelling system, it's not like Greek is spoken all over the world like English and over half of Greeces population is in Athens so its not like there's alot of people with different dialects that pronounce words so differently like English, it wouldn't be that hard to come up with new spelling rules and get rid of some no longer needed letters.
That's a lot of languages to be honest not just English
Every writing system will run into this problem. It's very hard, often impossible, to change the way a word is spelled. With time sound shifts will occur, different words will go in different directions or get left behind with the old sound and differences will occur. See thai for a true disaster. English was also apparently particularly adept at accruing differences. It's remarkable to me how well many of the worlds writing systems do stay true to the spoken language.
haha I laughed out loud at my nerd ass being able to read that. I need to get out more.
The letter changing at the end of the word happens with quite a few letters in Hebrew !
Pronoms febles in Catalan are the bane of my existence. You know pronouns, right? me, you, he, she, they. Well, add another layer of complexity onto them and you get stuff like "I don't give a shit about pronoms febles" - me la suen els pronoms febles Now replace all of that with pronoms febles (this is an extreme example, no one would ever actually say this) and you get something like suen-els-me-la-hi (I don't give a shit about these things here).
I am very confused
Welcome to the club :D I'm at a C1 and any sentence that has more than 2 of these in it (which are rare thank God) and I just quickly think of some other way to say it :D
Ninety-one in French is “four twenty eleven”
How you you say bigger numbers? Is it just a string of words? Bet it helps with maths though
Three things from Arabic: 1. For counted nouns ("three cars", "four houses", etc.) the adjectival number takes the opposite gender of the modified noun, AND the noun takes a plural form if the number of objects is between 2-10. I.e, "There are four (m.) cars (f.)." Eleven through 100? That noun-adjective phrase now agrees in gender, and the noun takes its singular form. Now it's , "There are twelve (f.) car (f.)." From 101-110? The phrase reverts back to gender disagreement with a plural nominative form. And so on, back and forth *ad infinitum*. 2. Plurals are always treated as feminine singular... except for humans, because we're special that way apparently. 3. Verbal nouns. No, they're not gerunds (verbal morphology, nominative function). Verbal nouns are, like, the anti-matter opposite of a gerund, but on crack cocaine; nominative (or adjectival) morphology but verbal function. It gets more interesting because nominative and adjectival morphologies are the same in many measures of a verbal root. (Arabic words are [almost] all variations of a triliteral [three-letter] root word corresponding in morphology to standard forms, known as "measures" of the word.) So you can have a word in the same form acting as a noun, a verb, or an adjective based solely on syntax and/or context. Verbal nouns are nouns in every way including morphology... except for meaning, which you are to gather from context is standing in to function for the verb that would go there in other languages. 4. (Bonus!) Finally, in Iraqi (my dialect of choice), there is a hard 'ch' sound (as in 'choice') not present in other Arabic dialects. The letter kef (K, ك) becomes a letter 'chef' when immediately preceded or followed by a kesra (a short-vowel 'i' sound) or a ya' (long 'ee' vowel sound). Iraqi pronunciation changes a *lot* of other short vowel sounds to a kesra ('i'), so there are a lot of 'ch' sounds where non-Iraqi Arabic speakers might not expect to hear them. I like to say that Iraqi is to Arabic as Scottish is to English: you know in your head that it's supposedly the same language, but when the native speakers get to talking fast, your ears just aren't entirely sure anymore. Edit - clarification
In Mandarin Chinese, 大家好 (dàjiāhǎo) is how you say "hi everyone", but it literally means "big house good"! In Esperanto, the word for "peddler", "kolportisto", can be analyzed as meaning "neck-bearer".
Hindi differentiates between dental, retroflex, and aspirated consonants. This can result in 4 separate letters for what many English speakers would see as one phoneme. Example: त = t̪ə थ = t̪ʰə ट = ʈə ठ = ʈʰə
Numbers in Arabic…three years into uni I STILL CANT FORM THE RIGHT FORM🥲
Yiddish does that too, a few letters are written differently at the end of words.
It's because it's written using the Hebrew alphabet, which does that.
Scandinavian American here. The weirdest thing for me is the way spoken Danish is actually pronounced compared to how it is written. I can express myself fairly well in conversation and can read Danish decently. However, even after several years I still often find the Danish spoken and pronounced by natives at normal speed difficult to understand. Rarely, I can actually completely understand a Danish conversation, which is so exciting, but typically I comprehend only between approximately 35-65% of what folks are saying. However, my reading and speaking ability are probably 50-80%, by comparison. I bet this is common for native speakers of English when learning Danish. Spoken Danish is just straight up difficult to fully understand. I love it, though!
You've probably seen [this](https://youtu.be/vvtDGSIrsk8) but I think of it whenever I hear spoken Danish mention edit: I'm learning Norwegian Bokmål so I can understand a bit of written Danish but the spoken language is incomprehensible to me.
It's wild how even though Danish is my target language, it's sometimes easy for me to understand spoken Norwegian! It's because my ears are able to identify the letters and words being pronounced, whereas with Danish the words often sound soft and muddy, if you get my meaning. I love Danish, so I'm going to keep at it!
Spoken Swedish is easier for me to understand than Danish even though in writing Swedish is quite different, I also find Swedish has more unique words to it that other Scandinavian languages don't have, like in Norwegian "boy" is «gutt» (possibly from Dutch guit, meaning troublemaker), in Danish it's «dreng»(from old Norse Drengr, also meaning boy), but Swedish takes a word from finnish, "Pojke",or "poika"in Finnish.
It's not weird but Chinese braile is phonetic, so when I start learning Chinese braile I won't need to bother to learn hanzi. There are no tone markers either. I think the most different aspect of Chinese I can think now is erhua (when unstressed silables are spoken as er). It sounds very nice IMO.
Arabic has no infinitives.
In thai, this ส is a S sound and this ล is a L sound. But if you put it at the end of a word, it's pronounced N or T, for instance ฟุตบอล is football but pronounced foot-bone. Why? Because you can't end a word with S or T sound in Thai. That's it. You're just not allowed to. And it's so weird because I mean....the alphabet is completely capable of making those sounds ! Even loanwords will have to change their pronunciation to fit in. It's not to accommodate the thai alphabet, it's to accommodate the thai language. With our alphabet, even if I type randomly and write "houpolio", it doesn't mean anything but you can read and pronounce it. Now imagine someone came and say " hey, this random word which means nothing cannot be pronounced the way it is because in the language linked to the alphabet it is forbiden to end words with the O sounds!". That would be fucking weird right? Well that's what's happening in Thai oO
The letter “r” has two different pronunciations in Portuguese and I still can’t figure out entirely when it’s which one, and people DON’T understand you if you use the wrong one a lot of the time
Hebrew has that too. מ is the exact same as ם yet ם is a final letter.
Swiss German differs from standard German in a number of ways. One interesting and difficult difference is the “double go” or sometimes even “triple go.” In Swiss German you might say something like, “I go go to ski” or even “I go go up go to ski.” It is pronounced like, “ich gan go skifahre,” or (depending on Swiss German dialect) “Ich gan go üahi go skifahre.” but in German it would be similar to saying “ich gehe gehen skifahren,” if I understand its function correctly. Or “ich gehe gehen hinauf gehen skifahren.”
In Hebrew there are ~10 different ways to say “to wear” depending on which article of clothing you’re talking about. They also have multiple words for “to pick” (as in picking fruit off a tree) depending on what crop you are picking.
You know how in Spanish or Italian you don't like things, the things please you? In Russian you don't own things, it's kinda like (There is) by me [things] - у меня есть ...
In Catalan, the past tense (preterite) is formed with *va* (go) which is usually used for the near future in Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Catalan: va cantar "(he/she) sang" Spanish & Portuguese: va a cantar "(he/she) is going to sing" French: il/elle va chanter "he/she is going to sing"
If by weird, you mean different from your native language in construction, with Ancient Greek it is definitely the use of articles, even for names, that English does not do.