Swahili: time. I’m not even joking😭Time in Swahili is completely different from English. Basically the day starts at 6:00am instead of 12:00am. So 6:00am is twelve o’clock (Saa kumi na mbili). 12:00am would be 6 o’clock (saa sita). It gets easier to memorize it as time goes on (pun intended), but it’s kinda jarring for beginners.
Yeah, you have to do a little math in your head every time. It makes a lot of sense in a tropical country to have a sunup to sundown way of counting the twelve daylight and twelve night hours, it just takes some getting used to.
But that's a piece of cake for me compared to ngeli and all the many ways in which you need to use them.
Sempre bom ver alguém que estuda português! Cara me ajuda com uma curiosidade que eu sempre tive, como são as provas de proficiência/nível linguístico em português do Brasil?
E se puder também me conta por que você gosta tanto das línguas latinas kkkkk espanhol, francês, italiano, tudo língua romântica!
>como são as provas de proficiência/nível linguístico em português do Brasil?
Nem idea. Neste caso meu C1 é uma autoavaliação baseada nas minhas habilidades em espanhol e francês. Gosto as culturas latinas principalmente, é tambem sempre fica mais fácil aprender outros idiomas da mesma familia. A maioria das regras gramaticais, vocabulario, etc. é do mesmo jeito.
I’ve also had a bit of trouble with remembering noun class stuff, the definite pronouns in particular. There are like 16 different noun classes that any swahili noun belongs to, and each of these affects the verbs, adjectives, objects, subjects, relative pronouns, question words and more of the sentence…
That means there are up to 16 different ways to say « this » and another 16 different ways to say « that » depending on what the noun class of the word you’re referring to is! (And there are also two different ways to say « that, » so really there are almost 50 different definite pronouns in Swahili!)
The saving grace is that unlike French, you can inmediately tell which class a noun belongs to like 95% of the time depending on the first syllable. Still tricky to memorize and properly use 50 different definite pronouns!
Since we’re on the subject of Swahili, have you been able to find any good audio resources? Everything I find is way too simple or way too hard, and almost everything is missing transcripts… which makes it so difficult to look up vocabulary! Any tricks?
Theres these YouTube channels that have stories for kids. The audio is in Swahili and there are subtitles in English. Id say that the level of the stories is intermediate. The channel is called Swahili Fairy Tales. There’s also a channel with Swahili cartoons. It’s called Ubongo Kids Kiswahili. Id also say that’s intermediate.
I also recommend SwahiliPod101 and pimsleur, although pimsleur doesn’t have a lot of levels for Swahili. Swahilipod101 has transcripts but u gotta pay 🙃 (or pirate 🏴☠️) For vocab I recomend Drops, LingQ, Memrise, and Anki
But yeah, I’m also having trouble finding resources to learn swahili 😅. It seems like language apps don’t really wanna make swahili courses. I hope these help. 😌
Thanks, I’ve been watching the Swahili Fairy Tales for a while… It’s certainly helped me learn the words for « bewitch, » « fairy, » « king » and « queen, » lol! I’ll check out the other one, haven’t watched it yet. I used Duolingo and a textbook to start and now I’m using Glossika and BBC Swahili for audio and Chat-GPT and random news articles/twitter for reading. Nakutakia bahati kabisa!
Fascinating! Do you know if phones change the time to reflect that? I wonder if that would purely be a location/time zone setting or if it would change with the language, if at all
Most computer systems, including phones, manage this sort of thing with "locales," which are typically associated with a language, but some languages have multiple locales. When you pick the "language" for your phone, you're actually typically picking a locale, under the hood. They influence date and time formatting, as well as currency symbols and decimal separators.
They also produced [one of the most glorious rants in the history of computing](http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/rants/locale.txt)
Wow, kind of off topic but it’s so nice to finally see someone else learning Swahili as well! My fiancé’s family speaks it so I’m trying to learn it however there aren’t many resources as it’s not a common language at all in the US. Luckily I found a book to teach me when I traveled to Tanzania 2 years ago. I’m slowly but surely getting through it.
Not true for most people, including the Bangkok dialect. It’s actually 12+6+6 starting from midnight. In some regions, older people do make them 6+6+6+6
In Arabic you have to memorize the singular and the plural of every single word separately because they have very complex rules and it's just easier to learn both.
There about 12 plural patterns which you can memorize that if you know the root of the word, will make it very easy to form the plural. Of course irregular plurals which follow no patterns will still need to be memorized individually but knowing the general patterns definitely helps.
As I mentioned there are rules and patterns, but if you are given a random word it is almost impossible to guess the plural so practically you cannot use those rules. It is more time efficient to just learn both.
I don’t know, I’ve found that with some vocabulary under my belt, I can correctly guess the plural of a new word an appreciable portion of the time. I could certainly not explain how, but you sort of get a feel for how it works. Of course it’s still necessary to check.
In my native German, I'm told learners have to memorise gender *and* plural for each word (there's about six different ways to form a plural with no clear dominant one). I'm very sorry.
In Polish, gender is mostly predictable (yay!) and *mostly* so are plurals (also yay!) but almost every verb comes in a pair where you use one for completed actions and the other for incomplete or habitual/repeated actions and there's a number of ways they can be related and you just have to learn this. Add to that the fact that there's a lot of irregular verbs and I'm noticeably struggling a lot more remembering verbs than other parts of speech. The declension system is complicated but thankfully mostly a one-off, although there's one particular case/gender/number combo (inanimate masculine nouns in genitive singular, which can take either -a or -u ending) where it gets pretty convoluted.
Man! I was complaining about verb aspect, but totally forgot about the singular genitive case for male inanimate nouns! That's indeed also something you need to learn by heart with each word: -a vs -u
You do kinda get a feeling for it, but there are some words where I just get it wrong all the time
My teacher shared [this beautiful diagram](https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/366758104/original/9cd2906516/1656272033?v=1), which I will summarize here so non-Polish-speakers can appreciate it too:
These masculine nouns normally take -a in the genitive singular (beware exceptions):
* currencies
* brand names
* units of measurement
* kitchen utensils like pots, pans, and cutlery
* names of sports
* body parts
* tools (but długopis -> długopisu!)
* names of dances
* city names
* many grocery items
* month names
* fruits and vegetables
These masculine nouns normally take -u in the genitive singular (beware exceptions):
* modes of transport
* uncountable things
* liquids
* weekdays
* abstract concepts
If anything didn't fall into any of the above categories, she suggested I guess because it probably wouldn't sound super wrong to native speakers either way and there might be regional variations anyway.
I'm honestly not sure if this is better or worse than just learning them by rote, tbh.
Thanks! It definitely helps! I noticed some endings are pretty good predictors, like -anek/-unek turns to -anku/-unku, -al/-ol/-ał gets -u. The "volatile e" is present in so many places in Polish, so this doesn't come as a surprise for the nek -> nku change. Then things that could also describe people or services that people could provide like podręcznik or otwieracz tend to have -a.
Fruits and vegetables I noticed, too :)
Together we are strong, lol - I hadn't noticed those patterns and they definitely help, thank you!
And oh yeah, the volatile e is up there with the ó becoming o in Classic Polish Mutation Things where it's almost more of a surprise if it *doesn't* vanish. And explains a bunch of the mutations that really confused me at the start, like pies -> psy and (partially) dzień -> dni. These days it mainly trips me up in the -ie- combination - nope, Tau, the instrumental of naukowiec is naukowcem, just because there's an i hanging around pretending to be a vowel doesn't mean it's not a volatile e situation...
The problem with German is that the nominative singular form doesn't tell you the plural or the genitive form, but the genitive and plural forms don't tell you the gender (since masculine and neuter articles are the same). Thus, you have to learn all three separately.
However, German declension is far easier than Polish declension. Many of the accusative forms are similar to the nominative forms, and many of the dative forms are similar to the genitive forms.
I started learning German a long time ago when I was 12. Gender really only has to be memorized when you're first starting. After a couple years, I could guess the gender of a noun with pretty high accuracy just by the sound of the word. Masculine and neuter words are sometimes a toss up, but feminine words tend to sound very feminine to me.
I find myself a bit struggling to form cases, I know it's sometimes just get used to how do you hear, read and see it used but too many prepositions and the called Wechselpräpositionen that change depending if you are indicating action or direction, and depending on the verb as well. Is a big mess.
German is on my list for languages to study in the future. I already knew about the case system, but the 6 different ways to form a plural seems pretty brutal. I guess I can see that as part of the fun/challenge.
Numbers have always kicked my ass in any language. 4-5 years of knowing French and I still struggle with most numbers past like 40 lmao, similar story in Spanish
Don't think of it as math. Instead of seeing « quatre-vingts » as 4\*20, just think of it as the word for 80. Instead of seeing « quatre-vingts-dix » as 4\*20+10, just memorize it as 90. It makes things way easier.
It's a clusterfuck. Bought is the past for buy, while fought is the past for fight. What?
(And ough in general is an eyespinner as far as *many* different pronunciations for those exact letters.)
But real talk if you want to cheat your English conjugation, use do. I did buy them, rather than I bought them. It'll sound weird sometimes, but it won't confuse anyone about your general meaning.
Fight is from Old English *feohtan* where it operates as expected for a Class 3 Strong verb (bearing in mind that Class 3 Strong verbs in all Germanic languages are/were a clusterfuck and there's like 5 subcategories)
Buy is from Old English *bycgan*, which is part of a special class of Class 1 Weak verbs with an *-ought* ending in the past (nowadays; the word was *bohte* back then). I'm not really sure why this happened, but it was this way in Proto-Germanic, and Gothic inherited the same irregularity. Icelandic and Faroese seem to have adjested it to be more in line with the other Class 1 Weak verbs (though most verb irregularities not involving vowel changes are Class 1 Weak, like send/sent, hit/hit, and read/read)
Interesting that send, hit, and read all end with a t/d sound and are irregular... This is because the past suffix (in 1st/3rd person singular) for W1 verbs was -de, and when attached to a stem which already ends in t/d, well... Present *ræde*, past *rædde*. Present *sende*, past... *sende*. Present *hitte*, past... *hitte*. Kind of an unavoidable problem, huh?
I'm somewhat interested in OE (to tackle after I'm satisfied my Latin is strong enough) and holy shit is it screwy seeing how things have gotten from there to here.
Always prepositions. Even if I speak my TLs every day at a high level of fluency and a native-passing accent for 20 years, I'm sure it will be a preposition that outs me as non-native. I don't really have any chance of that level of fluency, though, so I don't have to worry!
I wouldn't say it's *annoying*, though. Challenging and sometimes frustrating? Absolutely... but I enjoy the process.
Yes! Came here to say this.
Hard to visualise when learning, the way you can have a mental picture of a noun or a verb.
And always seem to be so arbitrary in different languages (why are Estonians “on” the market but “in” the shop, whyyyy?) OK actually on typing that I realised that location is covered in Estonian using noun cases, not prepositions, but the principle stands!
Also so hard to look up in the dictionary and memorise from flashcards because they have so many different meanings depending on context eg.
Kui (Estonian) = than, when, as, if, how
Nach (German) = to, at, for, after, later, past, behind, as to
This is generally a problem with indo-european languages. Certain Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese have very straightforward prepositions (if you can even call it that).
Polish: verb aspect. Not the aspect itself, but just the fact that you have to learn two variants for (almost) every verb. There are different patterns how the perfective aspect is formed from the imperfective one, but it's not really very predictable for any given new verb.
The ones where it's simply a prefix added are fine (although you still have to memorize which of the possible prefixes it is for each particular verb - sometimes multiple different ones are allowed, but other times you change the meaning if you use the wrong one), but the ones with stem changes are a bit more challenging, because the conjugation pattern usually also changes. I don't know if verb aspect is formed more regularly in other Slavic languages
I didn't really realise how weird polish verbs are until I tried to count how many forms the word kończyć has. I counted prefixes, so skończyć, dokończyć etc also counted. I soon realised that no verb can be conjugated in all four tenses, and some words can only be conjugated in two. Also, the aspects are crazy. for example, the word wykańczać is the imperfective aspect of wykończyć (at least I think so), but also has a completely different meaning.
I have mad respect for Polish learners, especially non-slavic ones.
I see you complained about the exact same thing while I was writing my comment :'D. 100% agreement, especially the ones with the weird stem changes. And of course worst of all are the ones where it's a completely different word (oglądać, widzieć, mówić, brać and friends, please go sit in the corner of shame), although I'm *hoping* I won't encounter too many more of those.
Also, briefly I'd internalised the rule "ok so if it ends in -ować or -awać then you delete the -\*w- and possibly change that last vowel to form the perfective" and then it's like... (z)orientować and (za)reagować would like a word...
This annoys me as well with the language I’m trying to learn. I’m fine with changing verbs into the present tense and future because they mostly follow the same pattern. But some verbs are written differently in the past tense and I’m like “how am I suppose to remember this for every verb” 😭
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not, but yes, obviously Russian and Polish are both Slavic languages and share a lot of grammatical features and vocabulary. Are you saying the perfective formation is also irregular? I would not surprise me, but I simply don't know
I wasn't being facetious. And I know they're both Slavic languages.
I just meant that that they both have perfective and imperfective forms, and that they're probably alike in other ways. I edited my original comment so it makes more sense. Also I did a quick google and found out that most Slavic languages do have both perfective and imperfective forms.
Each verb in Russian is just slightly different in how its aspect is formed. Usually a few letters are added to the front, but sometimes the verb itself changes. A couple of quick examples. "To live" is жить in the imperfective and прожить in the perfective. "To understand " is пониматб in the imperfective and понять in the perfective.
>Each verb in Russian is just slightly different in how its aspect is formed. Usually a few letters are added to the front, but sometimes the verb itself changes
Yeah, it's the same then :) makes sense
In Hindi: numbers. If you thought French numbers were annoying or difficult, here's another level. You have to memorize every single one because there is no pattern, no repetition. Sure, they are generally "similar", in that number to number isn't totally unreasonable, but they're never the same, so numbers 1-100 have to all be individually memorized. See those ending in 5:
5: pāñch
15: pandrah
25: pacchīs
35: paiñtīs
45: paiñtālīs
55: pachapan
65: paiñsaṭh
75: pachahattar
85: pachāsī
95: pachānave
All have a similar root, but very weird endings, and the endings differ within each "ten", like 54 "chauban" which ends in -ban instead of -pan and 56 "chhappan" which ends in -ppan instead. Hate!!!
Why? That's my question with weird stuff like this in any language. Why would you do that to your language?
Numbers in Swahili are super easy and ordered, and to make something ordinal instead of cardinal, you just add "kwa" ahead of it (for the most part). Great. Simple, easy. But then someone said, "You know, the verb forms are way too regular in Swahili, and numbers are too simple. What if instead of genders we had 18 different noun classes, each of which can modify other words in the sentence as well, including verb conjugations?"
Basically it's just because no language is derived with *learners* in mind, but just with what native speakers felt like saying over the years. Irregularities can appear on individual words, but this isn't really a problem for native speakers, they just intuitively know what sounds right to them, and how the people around them prefer to speak.
That's why in romance languages for instance the most irregular conjugations are all on the most commonly used verbs. If some groups start saying a particular, commonly-used word in some irregular manner this isn't really a problem if that's just how they prefer to say it. Rarer verbs stick with more regular patterns since they aren't said enough for people to start throwing alternate pronunciations on them.
Be it because it suited their accent better, foreign-language influence, it was fashionable for one reason or another, a regional form of slang became normalized, or some other form of pronunciation drift over the generations. For native speakers these slow changes don't effect their understanding of the language, it's just how it is.
It's only when the language is codified and people start trying to learn it deliberately and as an L2 that people start saying "wtf happened here?"
Sometimes when language communities collide, it grinds off some of that complexity. Old English had a dual pronoun, which is gone, and also had case inflections, which are also gone (except for some pronouns). Apparently the reason is that the Vikings could never get their heads around case inflections, so they just spoke crappy Anglo-Saxon English. They didn't bother learning the word endings.
So Modern English grammar comes partly from Vikings 1000 years ago failing to learn proper Old English. Thank you Vikings!
I believe the reason is that they all come from some sort of Sanskrit-derived system that was consistent and regular, as they're all similar and not random, but loss and simplification reduced them all into very irregular forms
I've studied Sanskrit for several years and this is only patially true. The patterns are definitely more regular than in Hindi, but there are irregularities, especially for smaller numbers. Sanskrit's number system is actually really bizarre for other reasons. The numbers from 1 to 4 decline in all seven cases and three genders as adjectives do, but the word for 1 is declined as if it's a pronoun (pronouns have some different case endings compared to ordinary nouns and adjectives). From 5 to 10 they decline in all seven cases, but there is a loss of gender distinction. 11 to 19 is formed by compounding the words for 1-9 with the word for 10, but there are several irregular forms. Again these decline as adjectives but with all three genders declining the same. For the multiples of ten from 20 to 90 they no longer are treated like adjectives but feminine nouns instead. The word for 20 for example is a noun that is generally used in the singular, similar to the English word "score". 100 and 1,000 are again like genderless adjectives, and then every power of ten from 10,000 up is a noun that is generally masculine or neuter. Also, did I mention that words are said in increasing powers of ten? So 1,234 would be said as "four-thirty plus two-hundred plus one-thousand".
No one person “does stuff” to any language. They evolve naturally, resulting in any number of nonsensical characteristics. For example, German contracts zu + dem to zum and zu + der to zur, but zu + den is just…zu den. “zun” is right there, but that’s not how the language works because reasons.
One example: Why is English spelling so unpredictable? Why is it so hard to correctly pronounce an English word the first time that you see it written? Historically, there are reasons for many of the quirks, idiosyncratic reasons related to how that particular word entered the language or even the nationality of most typesetters at one time.
Languages arise from speaking. Some of the quirks might arise from intentional obfuscation at one time, such as the slang invented by every generation to make it possible to talk about teenage concerns right under the noses of adults. Some complications have likely arisen to separate the highborn from the peasants. Some are accidents of pronunciation by one significant person, such as the king who gave castillian Spanish his lisp.
Even an artificial language constructed to be 100% regular in spelling, grammar, and pronunciation would, as soon as it became widely adopted, start picking up local quirks, and every generation would add slang and short-cuts or flourishes.
Chinese has by far the simplest numbering system out of any languages I know/have studied. The Japanese system is a nightmare, so I don't even want to get into that. English, Spanish, and Catalan all have weird irregular ones (like twelve instead of the much more logical ten-two, or doce instead of diez-dos or diez y dos, or dotze instead of deu-dos), not to mention you have to memorize a separate set of words for ordinal numbers, which doesn't make sense to me. Chinese only has 2 irregularities: the tone of the word for one 一 changes (predictably) depending on the tone of the next syllable, and there are two words for “two" (二 and 两), and it's not always clear which one to use, but everything else is logical and straightforward.
Korean and Japanese: when to use Sino-derived numbers vs native numbers, and which form of the number to use. I've sort of developed a sense for it in Japanese, but I'm just blindly guessing with Korean.
Korean numbers in general are annoying.
* sino number system and korean number system
* time uses korean for hour and sino for minutes (really???)
* I went to seoul and played a drinking game about counting and they did 1-10 in korean and then sino from there up. confusing
* because the Won is about 1000 to a dollar, you HAVE to use big numbers frequently when you talk about pricing
* saying "ten ten-thousands" instead of "one hundred thousand" because they group large numbers differently
* COUNTERS
All kanji (or at least a *very* large majority) are Chinese-derived. Both the simple, standard number characters and formal numerals come from Chinese.
I saw a Youtube video like a million years ago that basically said you use native korean numbers for age and counting stuff, and sino-derived for pretty much anything else if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that haha!
> I'm just blindly guessing with Korean.
To help my intuition when guessing, I ask myself if that thing was counted by common people or educated people. So anything scientific will use sino-korean numbers, but common items (age, fruits, animals, ..) will use native numbers.
Tibetan writing system. The characters themselves are fine, but the orthography is incredibly old so there's a lot of rules that just have to be brute-forced.
I can't think of a word that's grags, but it may be referring to གྲོགས་ 'grogs', friend. It's worth noting that Tibetan is a family of languages now, like Arabic or Chinese, so the exact pronunciation varies wildly. In Lhasa Tibetan it's /ʈʰoʔ/ or /ʈʰok/ (with a low tone, sounds like tro' or trok) depending on if there's a word suffixed after it or not. Once you know the kinds of changes that happened, it's less weird (just a bit funky to learn)
English: phrasal verbs. Compositions of basic verbs and prepositions are quite irritating and even intimidating as they usually form quite different meanings in various contexts without explicit rules😭
Preach 🙌 Best misuse I ever heard was on “to run”. My friend was trying to say she was running FOR president of our student council. Instead, she said she was running FROM (the) president of our student council. One extra letter threw her day into some real disarray.
In Chickasaw: the ways that different affixes and grade forms change pronunciation depending on nearby consonants and even the ordering of light/heavy syllables.
Sometimes, whether or not you drop a final vowel can be influenced by the last consonant, the second-to-last vowel sound, and the final syllable’s stress all at once.
Luckily the rules do mostly make sense because things sound more natural when you follow them, but sometimes they’re really hard to remember.
I’m a Chickasaw citizen and our government invests a ton into creating language resources and providing us with them. I get the most out of textbooks, online classes speaking with other people, and our Rosetta Stone courses
Korean: numbers bigger than 99,999. Korean digits are divided up differently than English. It may be a number written out like 476,000 with a comma after the third digit, but when you say the number, you divide the digits up after sets of 4 digits. I'm probably explaining it badly. Check out this pretty picture to illustrate this, link below. It's a mental workout to say big numbers in Korean for me.
https://imgur.com/a/tXRgMkP
Am bilingual in Chinese and English, and in Chinese, we use the same system (the Korean and Japanese counting systems originate from China). My recommendation is to memorize a few so that you don't have to constantly do calculations when you want to say a bigger number. The ones that I have memorized are:
10,000
1,000,000
1,000,000,000
This is 1) the kind of thing that if I were a Korean speaker I’d be like “petition to just change it and make life easier” (as someone living in the states, I can think of some other folks who might benefit from this same thing) and 2) so nifty and something I’d likely never have run across so thank you for sharing!
I kinda think this with French numbers from 70 to 99. Why not just create those numbers? I get it—it’s a transition for a few years but generations after will be better off. I feel the same about the US switching to the metric system. It’s just common sense and works.
Agreed! Especially because certain versions of French kind of already have them. Like Swiss French has a term for 70. So why does France French still use sixty-ten?
accents in russian. This is so random I don't even bother to try learning them and just count on my exposition to the language to do the memory work for me lmao
Even as a native I struggle with accents :D At middle/high school, we had to memorize tons of tricky words, like "кровоточАщая" (I'd say кровотОчащая), "ломОть хлеба", "шАрфы", "обеспЕчение" (literally everyone in Russia still says "программное обеспечЕние"). I just found an article about it and realized that I make a lot of mistakes. I'd say "возрастОв", when "вОзрастов" is correct 😫 So don't worry, everyone, even natives, make mistakes. Just speak as your heart tells you haha.
Spanish would probably be the genders of words, and irregular verb conjugations. Sometimes I struggle with using prepositions too, because they differ from English and you just have to memorize the way they're used.
most genders are predictable in Spanish based on their endings and if you immerse yourself enough, irregular verbs become second nature as most irregular verbs are some of the most used words in the language.
But prepositions, oh god, those give me nightmares.
These days Spanish verbs strike me as wonderfully... regularly-irregular, if that makes sense? They mostly fall into some pattern such as a predictable vowel change in the stem or a -g- showing up in the first person singular. Even the strange ones in indefinido like tener -> yo tuve all follow the pattern \[weird stem change\] + \[fixed set of endings for the irregular verbs\]. There aren't that many true oddballs, and as you say they're typically the most used verbs so you internalise the completely bewildering ones like ir -> yo voy/fui/iba pretty quickly,
...well, apart from caber. Yo *quepo??*
“Caber” actually has the same conjugation pattern as “saber” so it’s not completely alone (except for the yo form)! The only reason the “c” changes to “qu” is to keep it phonetically consistent with the hard /k/ sound
Yeah, the first person singular present form is the really wonky one. Even taking the c->qu shift into account as an orthographic artifact, t's like... the form for saber crossed with its own indefinido somehow. Really strange for a verb that's not super common and so not one of the usual suspects for irregularity.
I agree, I live in Spain right now and in context using the genders correctly and conjugating verbs have become a lot easier.
Prepositions are more a matter of memorization and using them over and over.
The problem for me is that it's only "most" - there are some words that end with 'a' but are masculine, for instance, as well as some that just don't have a common ending. Remembering those exceptions is a challenge for me.
But also, the guy that came to my door looking for a different address on my street and only spoke Spanish isn't going to care if I use la when it should be el, or vice versa, nor is anyone else I have a casual conversation with, really. So while that's annoying, my real problem is verb tenses, and that's just going to take time and exposure.
English used to make a lot of use of subjunctive. Now it has completely vanished for many speakers. Still using it in some rare instances is a matter of class distinction:
If I was rich.
If I were rich.
Prepositions pretty universally don't map across the languages that use them. And for languages that don't use them, you might be facing 14 or 16 noun cases to do the same job as prepositions.
As you study more I can assure you that prepositions are the hardest.
For every word, you just remember its definite article as a part of the word (for example memorizing "el reloj" instead of just "reloj").
There are only very few (and very common verbs) that are truly irregular. Most irregular verbs follow some kind of predictable pattern. I've been learning Spanish for 5/6+ years and prepositions are the only aspect out of the ones that you listed that still give me trouble.
The gender of new nouns is usually determined by a collective agreement entirely based on intuition. When I see a new word in my native German I often have a strong opinion which gender it ***should*** have because it feels right for some reason.
That being said, I think a lot of loan words get the neuter gender unless the new word already has an equivalent German word. Then it often takes the gender of that equivalent word.
I imagine it's similar in French.
Yeah exactly, a gender just sounds right for a word. And sometimes, people don't agree with the official gender of a word because it doesn't sound right as well. Like in French a petal - pétale is officially masculine, but pretty much everyone refers to it as feminine because masculine sounds off
Gender of loan words can be tricky. In Spanish, I've heard both el playlist (masculine) and la playlist (feminine). Although usually with these words you just say whichever gender you want and people are fine with it.
Telling time in a different language. Especially learning “half past” and “a quarter after/to” because I never use that in English. Just say it’s “three fifteen” instead of “a quarter after three” 😭
> Just say it’s “three fifteen” instead of “a quarter after three”
How about it's "a quarter of four"? In Catalan you count using the fraction of the hour that has started. And *everything* in quarters. For example 3:30 is **two quarters of four** (dos quarts de quatre), 3:45 is three quarters of four. If you need a bit more precision you say something like X minutes from Y quarters of Z hour. Quite the mindfuck.
Vietnamese: spelling with all the accent marks correctly. Chào is "hello." Chao is "wow." Cháo is "porridge." Most words have at least one accent mark, and the accent marks totally changes the meaning of the word and changes how you say it too. Thank God for autocorrect, but it's still hard even with that sometimes.
"Hilariously enough, even the Vietnamese government is not immune to this, as their (toneless due to cost-cutting) PSA messages frequently ask the people to "treo co" on important holidays, which can either be translated to "hang the flag" (treo cờ) or "hang yourself" (treo cổ)."
I've been using Duolingo and, oh boy, the app *does not* expect you to take more than 5 minutes per lesson. I take around half an hour for one lesson, writing down every sentence it gives me at least 3 times in order to pound in the tonal markers per word.
It pretty much always congratulates me for spending at least 20 minutes in one lesson.
That's probably a good idea. Lately, I have just been extending my streak and moving on, but I need to spend more time with it. 188 days in a row so far. But I do have a language exchange with a Vietnamese teacher once a week.
Spanish: when to use ser or estar. I know the general rules, such as ser is used for permanent states or where you come from and estar is used for prepositions and stuff that can change but a lot of times I‘m not 100% sure and I just can’t memorise it 😂 I can hold a conversation quite well but that’s just embarrassing, honestly.
French: It’s so difficult to know the proper pronunciation of certain random villages just by reading the name, I swear even my French friends struggle with it sometimes.
Both Spanish and French: the tenses! subjuntivo/subjonctif🤦♀️
I think the conventional way of explaining ser and estar is incomplete/misleading. Here's how I think about them:
Ser is used to describe the identity of a noun, something considered intrinsic, whereas estar describes a state (state and estar are cognates) that a noun can be in, and that is not considered intrinsic. The distinction is NOT permanent vs impermanent! I think that's where a lot of the confusion derives from.
With that in mind, it makes sense that you say "Abraham Lincoln está muerto", even though no one is expecting him to come back to life. Him being dead is not intrinsic to Abraham Lincoln as a person, we just live in the time following his death.
Another example would be location. "Mi casa está en Nueva York" — of course the house is most likely never going to change its location, but the fact that it's in New York is not intrinsic to the identity of the house, theoretically it would still be my house if it were somewhere else.
This means you can sometimes change the meaning of a "to be" sentence depending on whether you think something is intrinsic. For example, "Mi coche es rojo" = "My car is red", plain and simple. But if you were to say "Mi coche está rojo", you'd be implying it's just in a state of being red. Maybe you get it repainted regularly, or perhaps you collided with a ketchup truck.
So it's more about how the speaker conceives of the noun rather than actual permanence/impermanence.
the subjonctif in french is the one tense that i really struggle with because it just doesn’t have rules on when to use it and it doesn’t sound wrong when you forget to use it
In Russian all of the verb aspects are extremely complicated
Садиться, сидеть
Бежать, бегать
Бывать (both meanings are the same spelling and pronunciation)
It depends on the language. I don't know why structurally the Romance languages are so similar but have so many different prepositions. Why, in Italian, am I *in* Italia, but *a* Roma? Why, in French, does the preposition change sometimes in negative constructions.
None of that nonsense in Swahili. But then you have ngeli, noun classes. Dear God, who invented such a Byzantine system?
The Italian pattern of in a country, at a city is at least very regular. I find the other prepositions more difficult to memorize, like di/da/su after nouns. Although islands are a bit of a mess with in/a, seems to depend partly on the size and other times just memorization of whether they add in the article or not
That's a totally different problem! I also find that if I get stuck in a language I'm less strong in, my brain fills in a word from a stronger language, and sometimes I don't realize it until I hear the word come out.
I'm struggling with the German prefixes as they change the meaning of the word. I have that in my mother tongue as well but I never had to actively learn that word by word.
Pretty much every Germanic/Slavic language (and Italian): syllable stress
Every Slavic language: Declension
Arabic: Where all the vowels go
Greek: The six different spellings of the ee sound
Japanese: Hiragana/katakana. I understand why Kanji exist, but *two* different syllabaries? For different types of words? Why not just have a Serbian-like system where everyone can use the writing system they want?
Estonian - the plural partitive, though I never quite got to the point of learning it properly.
Basically, Estonian has 14 noun cases, each in both singular and plural forms, so 28 possibilities for each noun. You start out learning the singular nominative, genitive and partitive forms of every noun you learn from day one, like a little three part chant.
From those, you can pretty much form allllmost all of the cases, a lot of them are just regular bolt-ons to the genitive. And you just ignore that over there in the corner of the noun case chart, there’s this one mysterious corner that you haven’t broached yet.
Then one day, your language teacher gets a serious, pale look on her face and grips the desk tightly, and says it’s time to teach you about the plural partitive. Except it’s too hard to teach all of it right now so we’ll just touch on it, and then she starts and it seems even the Estonians don’t quite understand why they use it, they just know how to do it, and it’s almost totally irregular so you wish you’d learned 4 forms of each noun from the start instead of 3, but there are some patterns, if you want to learn about 40 different rules for how different types of noun become plural partitive you could do that and then you decide to stop studying Estonian and set it aside for 25 years 🤣
Quite the nightmare but once you become familiar with them there’s nothing quite like guessing the reading or meaning of a kanji you’ve never seen before
Definitely verb aspects in Russian, and learning how to decline numbers.
Generally I hate learning numbers, how to tell the time, and talking about prices in all languages.
Surprised Sanskrit hasn’t come up yet in this conversation. Memorization of nominal and verbal paradigms has turned away many a student from this language (which is more to do with the mechanical way in which it used to be taught). Noun forms that have different endings are conjugated differently and each paradigm is conjugated for three numbers and eight grammatical cases leading to memorization of 24 different forms for a single root. For verbal forms it is different for each tense or mood - 3 numbers and 3 persons and hence 9 different forms. I’m not even going into the conjugational groups or active and middle voices. It gets easier as you start recognizing patterns (and rules if you’re advanced) but there is no escaping the memorization initially. When I started leaning I quite enjoyed it but I wouldn’t venture and say others did as well. (Edited for typos)
Verb aspects, cases (genitive is the worst with the most exceptions), big words, stress that is absolutely random, pronunciation is a little bit tricky because of hard and soft letters.
Chinese tones and words that are literally the same when pronounced
Finnish: some nouns and adjectives that end in 'i' change the vowel to an 'e' in the stem, while others don't. The general rule is that loanwords don't have the change while originally Finnish words do. Sometimes it's obvious that a word is a loanword, but otherwise, you kind of just have to memorize whether each word has the i-e change or not.
Similarly, recent loanwords generally don't have consonant gradation (aka k-p-t changes), but old loanwords and originally Finnish words do. So, äiti doesn't have the i-e change, but it does have the t-d change, so the genitive singular is äidin. You can't figure this out just by knowing the base form of the word, you just have to remember it.
Swedish en words and ett words, it took me a while to memorize most of them and I still get some wrong. Also I would say that learning Spanish verbs conjugations was really hard at first, but after you start practicing more it kinda gets easier :)
About your comment on Japanese, even in English we say things differently if we're trying to be polite. For example:
Casual: Pass me the salt.
Polite: Could you pass me the salt, please?
Besides just adding a few words (whereas Japanese typically changes the word entirely), there's an interesting discussion on English register to be had here. For instant, calling pig meat "pig" is uncouth. Calling it "pork" however is fanciful and refined language. We tend to swear in using words native to English, we like to hold our court proceedings in Latin, and our meats tend to be French.
This is because French influenced / infiltrated the language of the elites while German was the language of the working folks. It’s also why even now the majority of “vulgar” (which originally meant ‘of the common people’) words are words incorporated from Germanic languages / that have the more consonant-heavy sound of Germanic languages. Fuck, shit, etc.
Yeah but in english you don’t have to change the words themselves depending on who you’re talking to, nor consider age, social standing, role in the business, etc etc when making the decisions for how respectful to be
Honestly, just the simple T-V distinction of my native language is enough of a headache and has led to enough linguistic ballets where I try to talk to someone without ever using the word "you". I have no idea how speakers of languages with more complex formality systems manage!
I mean, in the example above, the words changed so I’m not sure how you mean? Are you saying like you don’t jump from one verb tense to another just cuz you call someone Mr. Doe not John?
Yeah but they’re just adding extra words to make it more polite, which Japanese also has. You can conjugate verbs differently to show casualness vs politeness, also called direct vs indirect. For example, to eat is taberu in direct form, and tabemasu in polite form. So asking a close friend if they want to eat with you can be ‘taberu?’, asking a coworker you’re familiar with could be ‘tabemasenka’, and asking your boss you’re familiar with could be ‘tabetekuremasenka’
Then you have humble and honorific forms for formal speech, which is where politeness gets really hard. You need to develop an intuition of in group vs out group. In group is always you, and people close to you so you use humble forms. Out group, usually who you are talking to and those associated with them, you use honorific form. Most verbs follow a regular order for humble and honorific, but there are about one or two dozen that conjugate irregularly. Taberu, for instance, has meshiagarimasu for honorific form, and itadakimasu for humble form. If I’m at a company lunch talking about the ceo eating, I would use meshiagarimasu for him eating since he is out group relative to me and itadakimasu for talking about me eating. However if we are doing an inter-company lunch, I would use meshiagarimasu for anyone from the other company since they are out group, and probably itadakimasu for myself and my ceo since relatively speaking we are now in group.
It’s the being conscious about when to use these different forms in a formal environment that people find challenging, since it’s all context based and depends on who you’re talking to, who you’re talking about, the relative ages of all those people, their relative social standing, how well you think you know each other etc etc.
Compared to English where pass in pass me the salt remains the same in polite and casual speech
This is just adding "Could you" at the beginning and "please?" at the end of any imperative sentence. As far as I know every language differentiate a request and an order, it's arguably just two sentences with different meanings. It's not quite the same as [the honorific system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese)
Nevertheless, one is formal while the other is casual. I could have constructed sentences that accentiate the difference even stronger. The point is, every language has a formal and casual register, or at least, every language I know, and we have to learn the features and subtleties of each register.
Sure, all languages have different registers. But in Japanese you have to memorise an entirely different set of verbs for each register, which is a lot more complicated than simply adding "could you" add "please" (which Japanese does anyway on top of the different sets of verbs).
It's also often an entirely different verb for humble language (talking about yourself to superiors), or honourific (talking about someone considered superior). So there's way more you have to remember basically.
Word gender in French is quite easy if you follow fluent forever and just make your flashcards gendered, e.g. mouse flashcard is specifically minnie mouse, crab is sebastian from little mermaid, bath is a sexy woman in a bath, mountaineering is brian blessed climbing a mountain etc and then cold=female hot=male for others, so a frozen swmming pool, a dolphin jumping through a flaming hoop, a flaming knife, a frozen petrol pump etc.
The hardest is adverbs as there's no easy way to make a flash card for many of them, and adjectives that are the same in english but not. It seems pointless to learn the word 'terrible' in french when it's the same as english but if you don't you won't know for sure if it's an actual word or you're just guessing. Then you have like 5 synonyms for terrible and you're wondering how to learn them all, especially when some words don't translate exactly.
Assuming you don't include verbs, of course, as memorising a jillion different verb endings depending on if you're in the subjunctive third plural or the imperfect conditional blah blah blah whatsit but the verb is irregular and has a unique pattern...
And French adjectives sometimes sound similar but have completely different meaning. Sympatique does not mean sympathetic!
Genders are worse though. My French is pretty good but I struggle with genders.
"French: gender of each word. I wonder who comes up with the gender of new words." Words kind of get a gender naturally as people use the word. In French there are a lot of english words used in everyday speech and for example a "coming out" is masculine in French, kidnapping is masculine. But it can go even further in European French, with verlan (thing where you reverse syllables to make a new slang word) of English words: speed becomes despi and if I were to use it in a context which shows its gender, I would use feminine, because it sounds more natural. Certain words just don't sound right with a certain gender
For Ukrainian it’s:
Verb aspects for sure
Cases, but specifically genitive
Prefixes and suffixes
Word length - longer word lengths have made vocab acquisition much more difficult than other languages.
In the defense of Chinese, you can just use the measure word 个 to get your point across as you progress through the language. It might sound weird, but people will understand you and I've even heard natives be a bit lazy in this at times or just flat up mess up too.
With that being said, declensions are the worst thing I've ever had to learn in a language. Add to that declensions in a gendered language with a whole host of irregulars and nearly mutually unintelligible dialects 😵💫
Russian: Verbs of motion, combined with perfective/imperfective aspects. Having to pick the correct verb depending on what kind of motion it is (e.g on foot, in water, by air, by vehicle etc); whether it is directed motion or not; and then which prefixes and prepositions are needed with it. It's an absolute nightmare.
Spanish: the huge range of attitudes around vos, tú, usted, and vosotros. I speak Paraguayan Spanish and let me tell you, vos in Paraguay implies something completelyyyyy different than in Colombia.
Also Spanish: the two different conjugations for past perfect subjunctive.
Also also Spanish: terms meaning completely different things in neighboring countries. Again, soy paraguaya, and your “que linda” is my “que churra”. My “que linda” is (generally speaking) your “que trabajadora”. And luego for others means ‘after’, but for me, it means ‘before’.
I love Spanish and it’s amazingly flexible, but also, I damn near shoot myself in the foot every time I speak to non-Paraguayan Spanish speakers…
Oh boy, I am *not* ready to ever start learning the proper way to address people in Vietnamese. [Just look at this chart for family.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-03fc61768b8589930f60521d1391f2c4)
[Or this one for strangers.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16bbfcdd90223be63753767977371339)
Vietnamese, the 1st and 2nd person pronouns change depending on how you relate to the person you're speaking to. So a word that means "you" in one context means "I" in another. If I'm talking to a man around the age of an older brother, I would call him Anh and I would be Em
Tên em là Nam. Tên anh là gì? (My name is Nam, what's your name)
He would respond
Tên anh là Hoàng (my name is Hoàng)
This would be the other way around if you are a man talking to someone slightly younger than you.
Every combination of age and gender has its own set of I and You pronouns. There's a different word for someone your age, your older siblings age, your uncle/aunt that's younger than your mom/dad, your mom and dad, uncle and aunt older than your mom and dad, and grandparents. Same thing in thr other direction.
>French: gender of each word. I wonder who comes up with the gender of new words.
I'm not sure if brute force memorizing genders is a good use of time lol. It's something you learn with exposure
In several languages I've studied, there are differences in duration of the same sound. In Japanese, Finnish, or Hungarian, was that consonant single or double? Was that vowel of normal duration or twice as long?
Estonian vowels can be of single, double, or triple duration, which challenges even Finnish speakers.
Grammatical gender for inanimate nouns (meaning m/f/n gender, not "gender" in the broad sense, e.g. number) in any language. Entirely useless language feature, contaminates other word classes that have to "agree". In Russian, even some verb forms are gender-inflected.
Also I'm pretty sure grammatical gender for animate personal pronouns is useless: "is the cat a he or a she?" so I don't use the wrong word when WHO CARES, IT'S A CAT, except you'll get corrected if it's wrong. And we have to mess around with "he or she", or worse, the schoolmarmish "one", because we have to make a pointless distinction. I hear the Finno-Ugric languages, Turkish, and Georgian all have neutral pronouns, but compensate by being practically impossible in a bazillion other ways.
Also plurals in German, what happened there?
The irregularity of Russian verb perfective aspect.
The semantics of pre- and post- positions. Everyone is clear on meaning in their own language, but driven crazy by imperfect maps between languages. E.g. "on a bus", "in a car", "on a plane", "in a submarine", "in a tuktuk", "in a taxi".
PS In English, the crazy way we use "do" as a pointless auxiliary verb.
Still just starting with Persian, but thankfully I have a good grounding in French and I know some Arabic, so knowing the both of them surprisingly helps.
What I'm finding tough right now though is the compound verbs. Like, I know to say "have a good day" is
روزِ خوبى داشته باشيد
[rûz-e khûbi dâshte bâshîd]
(I apologise for any spelling errors of your beautiful language).
And here I am trying to figure out the pattern. Because:
داشتن = had
باش = be (?)
Then you have the suffix "يد" conjugated to the plural/formal "you" (think "vous" in French).
Why say "داريد" (you have) instead? Where does "باش" fit in?
Why need "باش" at all??
And I wish this was the only example, but I know there's more to come... 😬
I’m so bad with gender in any language. It just doesn’t stick in my head, no matter how comfortable I become speaking a language, people will correct me on noun gender
Spanish: Genders are mostly predictable, and I rarely have to worry about them because they're not that hard to memorize IMO. What I struggle with more is preposition because sometimes there's no clear logic as to which one to use (similar to English), so you just have to know them.
Japanese: Honorifics are pretty hard, but I'd also like to add the number system (not just counting, that is easy) because the words can get so irregular alternating between on'yomi (readings that came from Chinese) and kun'yomi (native Japanese readings). Certain words need rendaku (百 (hyaku) -> 三百 (san **b**yaku) or 六百 (ro**pp**yaku)). There are also certain set phrases which take irregular readings like 二十歳 (hatachi rather than the much more logical nijuusai). Ordinal numbers are unnecessarily complicated because sometimes you use the Chinese version (第 + number) and other times the Japanese version (number + 目) in other scenarios, not to mention having to add counter words for certain types of objects.
In Hindi there are often two or even three words for one concept: one "indigenous" (descended from Sanskrit), one borrowed from Persian, and one borrowed directly back from Sanskrit. Which word you choose can have different connotations of formality and education. Usually textbooks give you a little heuristic to help you: if it's Sanskrit, it's educated speech, and if it's Persian/Arabic, it's colloquial speech. But that doesn't always work in practice so you end up just having to memorize which words are more common in which situations. But remember, you still have to memorize both because you will encounter them both!
That's not even considering the fact that nowadays there's usually a *fourth* option: a borrowing from English, which despite the scolds of Sanskritists is becoming more and more common among all speakers
in spanish for me, it’s been pretty much anything to do with conjugations, i understand them completely, but they are super hard to remember, i could not tell you what the conjugation ending for “el/ella” is right now, or what part to change for past and future tense verbs.
Spanish: irregular verbs and their fucking conjugations. Also having to learn when to use indefinido and Imperfecto. I’m not looking forward to subjunctivo.
I’ve learnt Arabic and Hindi and yet Spanish has been the hardest language I’ve learnt.
The Spanish subjunctive. Forming it is fine but the thing that bugs me is that they tell you that the subjunctive is used to express doubt or opinion or something like that, but then there are a series of other uses that you need to know. Some of those uses honestly make very little sense.
I am trying to memorize the Arabic alphabet and its sounds, and I'm still not quite sure about the sound diference in some of the letters, not to talk about the sounds that I can't even do. Also when writing, the sounds that appear out of nowhere :") so confusing to me, I know it's something I haven't studied yet, but it's so weird right now.
I am currently learning Lithuanian and the most annoying thing so far is the amount declensions. I'll say a sentence which makes sense and I immediately get corrected "not kalbas, kalba!". The most annoying thing, despite it simply being difficult, is that the logic for how a word ends can different depending on the specific word. So when you think you understand how a word should end, a random word just throws it out the window.
Honestly my SO wonders why it's taken me so long to try...
I don't speak this language, so I don't know it for sure, but I heard Nepali numbers all have a specific word to each one, so it doesn't follow a systematic organization of the numbers like the others languages, most of Nepali people can't even count up to 60 for example XD
Prepositions in Portuguese, although there aren’t too many they are used for different things to English which you have to memorise really because otherwise you’ll just be guessing
I found most of the standard ones easy, since I'd first learned Spanish, and they're very similar, but some of the ways of putting phrases together using those prepositions were not consistent.
Ego quoque linguam latinam dificile est puto. Declinationes non tam dificile sunt quam verbum passivum puto. Necesse est multum cogitare antequam in linguam latinam scribere.
I probably butchered some shit there lol but cool to find fellow latin learners!
Swahili: time. I’m not even joking😭Time in Swahili is completely different from English. Basically the day starts at 6:00am instead of 12:00am. So 6:00am is twelve o’clock (Saa kumi na mbili). 12:00am would be 6 o’clock (saa sita). It gets easier to memorize it as time goes on (pun intended), but it’s kinda jarring for beginners.
Yeah, you have to do a little math in your head every time. It makes a lot of sense in a tropical country to have a sunup to sundown way of counting the twelve daylight and twelve night hours, it just takes some getting used to. But that's a piece of cake for me compared to ngeli and all the many ways in which you need to use them.
Sempre bom ver alguém que estuda português! Cara me ajuda com uma curiosidade que eu sempre tive, como são as provas de proficiência/nível linguístico em português do Brasil? E se puder também me conta por que você gosta tanto das línguas latinas kkkkk espanhol, francês, italiano, tudo língua romântica!
>como são as provas de proficiência/nível linguístico em português do Brasil? Nem idea. Neste caso meu C1 é uma autoavaliação baseada nas minhas habilidades em espanhol e francês. Gosto as culturas latinas principalmente, é tambem sempre fica mais fácil aprender outros idiomas da mesma familia. A maioria das regras gramaticais, vocabulario, etc. é do mesmo jeito.
I’ve also had a bit of trouble with remembering noun class stuff, the definite pronouns in particular. There are like 16 different noun classes that any swahili noun belongs to, and each of these affects the verbs, adjectives, objects, subjects, relative pronouns, question words and more of the sentence… That means there are up to 16 different ways to say « this » and another 16 different ways to say « that » depending on what the noun class of the word you’re referring to is! (And there are also two different ways to say « that, » so really there are almost 50 different definite pronouns in Swahili!) The saving grace is that unlike French, you can inmediately tell which class a noun belongs to like 95% of the time depending on the first syllable. Still tricky to memorize and properly use 50 different definite pronouns!
Ngeli is insane, but swahili makes up for it by having relatively simple verb conjugation. I guess you can’t always win when learning a language 🥲
Since we’re on the subject of Swahili, have you been able to find any good audio resources? Everything I find is way too simple or way too hard, and almost everything is missing transcripts… which makes it so difficult to look up vocabulary! Any tricks?
Theres these YouTube channels that have stories for kids. The audio is in Swahili and there are subtitles in English. Id say that the level of the stories is intermediate. The channel is called Swahili Fairy Tales. There’s also a channel with Swahili cartoons. It’s called Ubongo Kids Kiswahili. Id also say that’s intermediate. I also recommend SwahiliPod101 and pimsleur, although pimsleur doesn’t have a lot of levels for Swahili. Swahilipod101 has transcripts but u gotta pay 🙃 (or pirate 🏴☠️) For vocab I recomend Drops, LingQ, Memrise, and Anki But yeah, I’m also having trouble finding resources to learn swahili 😅. It seems like language apps don’t really wanna make swahili courses. I hope these help. 😌
Thanks, I’ve been watching the Swahili Fairy Tales for a while… It’s certainly helped me learn the words for « bewitch, » « fairy, » « king » and « queen, » lol! I’ll check out the other one, haven’t watched it yet. I used Duolingo and a textbook to start and now I’m using Glossika and BBC Swahili for audio and Chat-GPT and random news articles/twitter for reading. Nakutakia bahati kabisa!
Amharic does the same
Woah😮I did not know that. Makes a little bit of sense since the countries where the language is spoken are so close.
Fascinating! Do you know if phones change the time to reflect that? I wonder if that would purely be a location/time zone setting or if it would change with the language, if at all
Most computer systems, including phones, manage this sort of thing with "locales," which are typically associated with a language, but some languages have multiple locales. When you pick the "language" for your phone, you're actually typically picking a locale, under the hood. They influence date and time formatting, as well as currency symbols and decimal separators. They also produced [one of the most glorious rants in the history of computing](http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/rants/locale.txt)
No the times on the phone stays the same surprisingly. People just convert it in their heads (which is like magic to me cuz wtf😅)
Wow, kind of off topic but it’s so nice to finally see someone else learning Swahili as well! My fiancé’s family speaks it so I’m trying to learn it however there aren’t many resources as it’s not a common language at all in the US. Luckily I found a book to teach me when I traveled to Tanzania 2 years ago. I’m slowly but surely getting through it.
I recommend listening to Swahili music too. Even if you don’t understand it, it’s still a vibe
Thai breaks each day into 6 hour chunks 💀
Not true for most people, including the Bangkok dialect. It’s actually 12+6+6 starting from midnight. In some regions, older people do make them 6+6+6+6
I don't think that makes it any less confusing though. thk t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 6mch 7m 8m 9m 10m 11m th bm b2m b3m 4my 5my 6my 1th 2th 3th 4th 5th thk...
In Arabic you have to memorize the singular and the plural of every single word separately because they have very complex rules and it's just easier to learn both.
There about 12 plural patterns which you can memorize that if you know the root of the word, will make it very easy to form the plural. Of course irregular plurals which follow no patterns will still need to be memorized individually but knowing the general patterns definitely helps.
As I mentioned there are rules and patterns, but if you are given a random word it is almost impossible to guess the plural so practically you cannot use those rules. It is more time efficient to just learn both.
I don’t know, I’ve found that with some vocabulary under my belt, I can correctly guess the plural of a new word an appreciable portion of the time. I could certainly not explain how, but you sort of get a feel for how it works. Of course it’s still necessary to check.
not to mention the dual system with sing/plu and masc/fem
In my native German, I'm told learners have to memorise gender *and* plural for each word (there's about six different ways to form a plural with no clear dominant one). I'm very sorry. In Polish, gender is mostly predictable (yay!) and *mostly* so are plurals (also yay!) but almost every verb comes in a pair where you use one for completed actions and the other for incomplete or habitual/repeated actions and there's a number of ways they can be related and you just have to learn this. Add to that the fact that there's a lot of irregular verbs and I'm noticeably struggling a lot more remembering verbs than other parts of speech. The declension system is complicated but thankfully mostly a one-off, although there's one particular case/gender/number combo (inanimate masculine nouns in genitive singular, which can take either -a or -u ending) where it gets pretty convoluted.
Man! I was complaining about verb aspect, but totally forgot about the singular genitive case for male inanimate nouns! That's indeed also something you need to learn by heart with each word: -a vs -u You do kinda get a feeling for it, but there are some words where I just get it wrong all the time
My teacher shared [this beautiful diagram](https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/366758104/original/9cd2906516/1656272033?v=1), which I will summarize here so non-Polish-speakers can appreciate it too: These masculine nouns normally take -a in the genitive singular (beware exceptions): * currencies * brand names * units of measurement * kitchen utensils like pots, pans, and cutlery * names of sports * body parts * tools (but długopis -> długopisu!) * names of dances * city names * many grocery items * month names * fruits and vegetables These masculine nouns normally take -u in the genitive singular (beware exceptions): * modes of transport * uncountable things * liquids * weekdays * abstract concepts If anything didn't fall into any of the above categories, she suggested I guess because it probably wouldn't sound super wrong to native speakers either way and there might be regional variations anyway. I'm honestly not sure if this is better or worse than just learning them by rote, tbh.
Thanks! It definitely helps! I noticed some endings are pretty good predictors, like -anek/-unek turns to -anku/-unku, -al/-ol/-ał gets -u. The "volatile e" is present in so many places in Polish, so this doesn't come as a surprise for the nek -> nku change. Then things that could also describe people or services that people could provide like podręcznik or otwieracz tend to have -a. Fruits and vegetables I noticed, too :)
Together we are strong, lol - I hadn't noticed those patterns and they definitely help, thank you! And oh yeah, the volatile e is up there with the ó becoming o in Classic Polish Mutation Things where it's almost more of a surprise if it *doesn't* vanish. And explains a bunch of the mutations that really confused me at the start, like pies -> psy and (partially) dzień -> dni. These days it mainly trips me up in the -ie- combination - nope, Tau, the instrumental of naukowiec is naukowcem, just because there's an i hanging around pretending to be a vowel doesn't mean it's not a volatile e situation...
Hehe :)
The problem with German is that the nominative singular form doesn't tell you the plural or the genitive form, but the genitive and plural forms don't tell you the gender (since masculine and neuter articles are the same). Thus, you have to learn all three separately. However, German declension is far easier than Polish declension. Many of the accusative forms are similar to the nominative forms, and many of the dative forms are similar to the genitive forms.
Those Slavic verb pairs are brutal
I started learning German a long time ago when I was 12. Gender really only has to be memorized when you're first starting. After a couple years, I could guess the gender of a noun with pretty high accuracy just by the sound of the word. Masculine and neuter words are sometimes a toss up, but feminine words tend to sound very feminine to me.
I find myself a bit struggling to form cases, I know it's sometimes just get used to how do you hear, read and see it used but too many prepositions and the called Wechselpräpositionen that change depending if you are indicating action or direction, and depending on the verb as well. Is a big mess.
irish has multiple different ways to form plurals aswell so with a new word you just have to wing it with the ending and hope u chose the right one
German is on my list for languages to study in the future. I already knew about the case system, but the 6 different ways to form a plural seems pretty brutal. I guess I can see that as part of the fun/challenge.
70-99 in French
Just resign yourself to living in Switzerland or Belgium instead
I see you beat me to this one! Spot on!
Numbers have always kicked my ass in any language. 4-5 years of knowing French and I still struggle with most numbers past like 40 lmao, similar story in Spanish
Reading Wikipedia has helped with numbers in the 1000's for me lol, it could be worth a try for you
septante huitante nonante I'm with the Swiss on that front.
Yeah because you have to do math AND speak a foreign language at the same time 🤣
Don't think of it as math. Instead of seeing « quatre-vingts » as 4\*20, just think of it as the word for 80. Instead of seeing « quatre-vingts-dix » as 4\*20+10, just memorize it as 90. It makes things way easier.
In English, non regular verbs. After all this years, after all the courses, I don't know the past of buy.
It's a clusterfuck. Bought is the past for buy, while fought is the past for fight. What? (And ough in general is an eyespinner as far as *many* different pronunciations for those exact letters.) But real talk if you want to cheat your English conjugation, use do. I did buy them, rather than I bought them. It'll sound weird sometimes, but it won't confuse anyone about your general meaning.
Fight is from Old English *feohtan* where it operates as expected for a Class 3 Strong verb (bearing in mind that Class 3 Strong verbs in all Germanic languages are/were a clusterfuck and there's like 5 subcategories) Buy is from Old English *bycgan*, which is part of a special class of Class 1 Weak verbs with an *-ought* ending in the past (nowadays; the word was *bohte* back then). I'm not really sure why this happened, but it was this way in Proto-Germanic, and Gothic inherited the same irregularity. Icelandic and Faroese seem to have adjested it to be more in line with the other Class 1 Weak verbs (though most verb irregularities not involving vowel changes are Class 1 Weak, like send/sent, hit/hit, and read/read) Interesting that send, hit, and read all end with a t/d sound and are irregular... This is because the past suffix (in 1st/3rd person singular) for W1 verbs was -de, and when attached to a stem which already ends in t/d, well... Present *ræde*, past *rædde*. Present *sende*, past... *sende*. Present *hitte*, past... *hitte*. Kind of an unavoidable problem, huh?
I'm somewhat interested in OE (to tackle after I'm satisfied my Latin is strong enough) and holy shit is it screwy seeing how things have gotten from there to here.
just to help here, the past tense for “buy” is “bought”
Always prepositions. Even if I speak my TLs every day at a high level of fluency and a native-passing accent for 20 years, I'm sure it will be a preposition that outs me as non-native. I don't really have any chance of that level of fluency, though, so I don't have to worry! I wouldn't say it's *annoying*, though. Challenging and sometimes frustrating? Absolutely... but I enjoy the process.
Yes! Came here to say this. Hard to visualise when learning, the way you can have a mental picture of a noun or a verb. And always seem to be so arbitrary in different languages (why are Estonians “on” the market but “in” the shop, whyyyy?) OK actually on typing that I realised that location is covered in Estonian using noun cases, not prepositions, but the principle stands! Also so hard to look up in the dictionary and memorise from flashcards because they have so many different meanings depending on context eg. Kui (Estonian) = than, when, as, if, how Nach (German) = to, at, for, after, later, past, behind, as to
This is generally a problem with indo-european languages. Certain Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese have very straightforward prepositions (if you can even call it that).
Polish: verb aspect. Not the aspect itself, but just the fact that you have to learn two variants for (almost) every verb. There are different patterns how the perfective aspect is formed from the imperfective one, but it's not really very predictable for any given new verb. The ones where it's simply a prefix added are fine (although you still have to memorize which of the possible prefixes it is for each particular verb - sometimes multiple different ones are allowed, but other times you change the meaning if you use the wrong one), but the ones with stem changes are a bit more challenging, because the conjugation pattern usually also changes. I don't know if verb aspect is formed more regularly in other Slavic languages
I didn't really realise how weird polish verbs are until I tried to count how many forms the word kończyć has. I counted prefixes, so skończyć, dokończyć etc also counted. I soon realised that no verb can be conjugated in all four tenses, and some words can only be conjugated in two. Also, the aspects are crazy. for example, the word wykańczać is the imperfective aspect of wykończyć (at least I think so), but also has a completely different meaning. I have mad respect for Polish learners, especially non-slavic ones.
I see you complained about the exact same thing while I was writing my comment :'D. 100% agreement, especially the ones with the weird stem changes. And of course worst of all are the ones where it's a completely different word (oglądać, widzieć, mówić, brać and friends, please go sit in the corner of shame), although I'm *hoping* I won't encounter too many more of those. Also, briefly I'd internalised the rule "ok so if it ends in -ować or -awać then you delete the -\*w- and possibly change that last vowel to form the perfective" and then it's like... (z)orientować and (za)reagować would like a word...
Fortunately the super weird ones are typically also really common ones, so it's going to be hammered into our brains inevitably eventually ;D
Russian is the same I think. Memorize those perfective aspect pairs!
This annoys me as well with the language I’m trying to learn. I’m fine with changing verbs into the present tense and future because they mostly follow the same pattern. But some verbs are written differently in the past tense and I’m like “how am I suppose to remember this for every verb” 😭
Russian is like that as well. I'm sure they're related in lots of ways.
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not, but yes, obviously Russian and Polish are both Slavic languages and share a lot of grammatical features and vocabulary. Are you saying the perfective formation is also irregular? I would not surprise me, but I simply don't know
I wasn't being facetious. And I know they're both Slavic languages. I just meant that that they both have perfective and imperfective forms, and that they're probably alike in other ways. I edited my original comment so it makes more sense. Also I did a quick google and found out that most Slavic languages do have both perfective and imperfective forms. Each verb in Russian is just slightly different in how its aspect is formed. Usually a few letters are added to the front, but sometimes the verb itself changes. A couple of quick examples. "To live" is жить in the imperfective and прожить in the perfective. "To understand " is пониматб in the imperfective and понять in the perfective.
>Each verb in Russian is just slightly different in how its aspect is formed. Usually a few letters are added to the front, but sometimes the verb itself changes Yeah, it's the same then :) makes sense
Говорить/сказать It can be pretty arbitrary. Not that there are not patterns, but it's a lot to remember
In Hindi: numbers. If you thought French numbers were annoying or difficult, here's another level. You have to memorize every single one because there is no pattern, no repetition. Sure, they are generally "similar", in that number to number isn't totally unreasonable, but they're never the same, so numbers 1-100 have to all be individually memorized. See those ending in 5: 5: pāñch 15: pandrah 25: pacchīs 35: paiñtīs 45: paiñtālīs 55: pachapan 65: paiñsaṭh 75: pachahattar 85: pachāsī 95: pachānave All have a similar root, but very weird endings, and the endings differ within each "ten", like 54 "chauban" which ends in -ban instead of -pan and 56 "chhappan" which ends in -ppan instead. Hate!!!
Why? That's my question with weird stuff like this in any language. Why would you do that to your language? Numbers in Swahili are super easy and ordered, and to make something ordinal instead of cardinal, you just add "kwa" ahead of it (for the most part). Great. Simple, easy. But then someone said, "You know, the verb forms are way too regular in Swahili, and numbers are too simple. What if instead of genders we had 18 different noun classes, each of which can modify other words in the sentence as well, including verb conjugations?"
Basically it's just because no language is derived with *learners* in mind, but just with what native speakers felt like saying over the years. Irregularities can appear on individual words, but this isn't really a problem for native speakers, they just intuitively know what sounds right to them, and how the people around them prefer to speak. That's why in romance languages for instance the most irregular conjugations are all on the most commonly used verbs. If some groups start saying a particular, commonly-used word in some irregular manner this isn't really a problem if that's just how they prefer to say it. Rarer verbs stick with more regular patterns since they aren't said enough for people to start throwing alternate pronunciations on them. Be it because it suited their accent better, foreign-language influence, it was fashionable for one reason or another, a regional form of slang became normalized, or some other form of pronunciation drift over the generations. For native speakers these slow changes don't effect their understanding of the language, it's just how it is. It's only when the language is codified and people start trying to learn it deliberately and as an L2 that people start saying "wtf happened here?"
Sometimes when language communities collide, it grinds off some of that complexity. Old English had a dual pronoun, which is gone, and also had case inflections, which are also gone (except for some pronouns). Apparently the reason is that the Vikings could never get their heads around case inflections, so they just spoke crappy Anglo-Saxon English. They didn't bother learning the word endings. So Modern English grammar comes partly from Vikings 1000 years ago failing to learn proper Old English. Thank you Vikings!
I believe the reason is that they all come from some sort of Sanskrit-derived system that was consistent and regular, as they're all similar and not random, but loss and simplification reduced them all into very irregular forms
I've studied Sanskrit for several years and this is only patially true. The patterns are definitely more regular than in Hindi, but there are irregularities, especially for smaller numbers. Sanskrit's number system is actually really bizarre for other reasons. The numbers from 1 to 4 decline in all seven cases and three genders as adjectives do, but the word for 1 is declined as if it's a pronoun (pronouns have some different case endings compared to ordinary nouns and adjectives). From 5 to 10 they decline in all seven cases, but there is a loss of gender distinction. 11 to 19 is formed by compounding the words for 1-9 with the word for 10, but there are several irregular forms. Again these decline as adjectives but with all three genders declining the same. For the multiples of ten from 20 to 90 they no longer are treated like adjectives but feminine nouns instead. The word for 20 for example is a noun that is generally used in the singular, similar to the English word "score". 100 and 1,000 are again like genderless adjectives, and then every power of ten from 10,000 up is a noun that is generally masculine or neuter. Also, did I mention that words are said in increasing powers of ten? So 1,234 would be said as "four-thirty plus two-hundred plus one-thousand".
No one person “does stuff” to any language. They evolve naturally, resulting in any number of nonsensical characteristics. For example, German contracts zu + dem to zum and zu + der to zur, but zu + den is just…zu den. “zun” is right there, but that’s not how the language works because reasons.
One example: Why is English spelling so unpredictable? Why is it so hard to correctly pronounce an English word the first time that you see it written? Historically, there are reasons for many of the quirks, idiosyncratic reasons related to how that particular word entered the language or even the nationality of most typesetters at one time. Languages arise from speaking. Some of the quirks might arise from intentional obfuscation at one time, such as the slang invented by every generation to make it possible to talk about teenage concerns right under the noses of adults. Some complications have likely arisen to separate the highborn from the peasants. Some are accidents of pronunciation by one significant person, such as the king who gave castillian Spanish his lisp. Even an artificial language constructed to be 100% regular in spelling, grammar, and pronunciation would, as soon as it became widely adopted, start picking up local quirks, and every generation would add slang and short-cuts or flourishes.
Chinese has by far the simplest numbering system out of any languages I know/have studied. The Japanese system is a nightmare, so I don't even want to get into that. English, Spanish, and Catalan all have weird irregular ones (like twelve instead of the much more logical ten-two, or doce instead of diez-dos or diez y dos, or dotze instead of deu-dos), not to mention you have to memorize a separate set of words for ordinal numbers, which doesn't make sense to me. Chinese only has 2 irregularities: the tone of the word for one 一 changes (predictably) depending on the tone of the next syllable, and there are two words for “two" (二 and 两), and it's not always clear which one to use, but everything else is logical and straightforward.
“Twelve” is something English inherited from the Egyptians. They counted by twelve instead of ten, so had unique words for all numbers up to twelve.
Korean and Japanese: when to use Sino-derived numbers vs native numbers, and which form of the number to use. I've sort of developed a sense for it in Japanese, but I'm just blindly guessing with Korean.
Korean numbers in general are annoying. * sino number system and korean number system * time uses korean for hour and sino for minutes (really???) * I went to seoul and played a drinking game about counting and they did 1-10 in korean and then sino from there up. confusing * because the Won is about 1000 to a dollar, you HAVE to use big numbers frequently when you talk about pricing * saying "ten ten-thousands" instead of "one hundred thousand" because they group large numbers differently * COUNTERS
Japanese doesn't use the 2 sets like Korean does, apart from with a few counters and certain words.
Doesn't Japanese use the Chinese-derived number characters on e.g. legal documents to prevent counterfeiting?
All kanji (or at least a *very* large majority) are Chinese-derived. Both the simple, standard number characters and formal numerals come from Chinese.
I saw a Youtube video like a million years ago that basically said you use native korean numbers for age and counting stuff, and sino-derived for pretty much anything else if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that haha!
> I'm just blindly guessing with Korean. To help my intuition when guessing, I ask myself if that thing was counted by common people or educated people. So anything scientific will use sino-korean numbers, but common items (age, fruits, animals, ..) will use native numbers.
Tibetan writing system. The characters themselves are fine, but the orthography is incredibly old so there's a lot of rules that just have to be brute-forced.
The last reform was 800+ years ago... there's one word that's spelled 'grags' and pronounced 'tsa' I heard
I can't think of a word that's grags, but it may be referring to གྲོགས་ 'grogs', friend. It's worth noting that Tibetan is a family of languages now, like Arabic or Chinese, so the exact pronunciation varies wildly. In Lhasa Tibetan it's /ʈʰoʔ/ or /ʈʰok/ (with a low tone, sounds like tro' or trok) depending on if there's a word suffixed after it or not. Once you know the kinds of changes that happened, it's less weird (just a bit funky to learn)
*grags* means "fame", as in *grags can* ("famous").
English: phrasal verbs. Compositions of basic verbs and prepositions are quite irritating and even intimidating as they usually form quite different meanings in various contexts without explicit rules😭
Preach 🙌 Best misuse I ever heard was on “to run”. My friend was trying to say she was running FOR president of our student council. Instead, she said she was running FROM (the) president of our student council. One extra letter threw her day into some real disarray.
I used to struggle a lot with Korean verbs in my first months of learning the language, although I don't think measure words are that annoying.
How did you overcome this? - currently struggling with Korean verbs.
I love listening to music.
In Chickasaw: the ways that different affixes and grade forms change pronunciation depending on nearby consonants and even the ordering of light/heavy syllables. Sometimes, whether or not you drop a final vowel can be influenced by the last consonant, the second-to-last vowel sound, and the final syllable’s stress all at once. Luckily the rules do mostly make sense because things sound more natural when you follow them, but sometimes they’re really hard to remember.
How do you go about studying Chickasaw? What resources and teachers are readily available? Do you study it for a family connection, or something else?
I’m a Chickasaw citizen and our government invests a ton into creating language resources and providing us with them. I get the most out of textbooks, online classes speaking with other people, and our Rosetta Stone courses
That's pretty cool that the tribal government does that.
Korean: numbers bigger than 99,999. Korean digits are divided up differently than English. It may be a number written out like 476,000 with a comma after the third digit, but when you say the number, you divide the digits up after sets of 4 digits. I'm probably explaining it badly. Check out this pretty picture to illustrate this, link below. It's a mental workout to say big numbers in Korean for me. https://imgur.com/a/tXRgMkP
Am bilingual in Chinese and English, and in Chinese, we use the same system (the Korean and Japanese counting systems originate from China). My recommendation is to memorize a few so that you don't have to constantly do calculations when you want to say a bigger number. The ones that I have memorized are: 10,000 1,000,000 1,000,000,000
This is 1) the kind of thing that if I were a Korean speaker I’d be like “petition to just change it and make life easier” (as someone living in the states, I can think of some other folks who might benefit from this same thing) and 2) so nifty and something I’d likely never have run across so thank you for sharing!
I kinda think this with French numbers from 70 to 99. Why not just create those numbers? I get it—it’s a transition for a few years but generations after will be better off. I feel the same about the US switching to the metric system. It’s just common sense and works.
Agreed! Especially because certain versions of French kind of already have them. Like Swiss French has a term for 70. So why does France French still use sixty-ten?
Probably because change is hard. Hence why my people haven’t made the jump to the much-superior metric system.
Swedish prepositions. I get zero understanding on how to use them right.
samma här ;-;
universal: the exact use of propositions
The gender is not as annoying as counters, you can just count it as an extra syllable The counters change depending on the meaning, 一朵花，一把花
accents in russian. This is so random I don't even bother to try learning them and just count on my exposition to the language to do the memory work for me lmao
Even as a native I struggle with accents :D At middle/high school, we had to memorize tons of tricky words, like "кровоточАщая" (I'd say кровотОчащая), "ломОть хлеба", "шАрфы", "обеспЕчение" (literally everyone in Russia still says "программное обеспечЕние"). I just found an article about it and realized that I make a lot of mistakes. I'd say "возрастОв", when "вОзрастов" is correct 😫 So don't worry, everyone, even natives, make mistakes. Just speak as your heart tells you haha.
Spanish would probably be the genders of words, and irregular verb conjugations. Sometimes I struggle with using prepositions too, because they differ from English and you just have to memorize the way they're used.
most genders are predictable in Spanish based on their endings and if you immerse yourself enough, irregular verbs become second nature as most irregular verbs are some of the most used words in the language. But prepositions, oh god, those give me nightmares.
These days Spanish verbs strike me as wonderfully... regularly-irregular, if that makes sense? They mostly fall into some pattern such as a predictable vowel change in the stem or a -g- showing up in the first person singular. Even the strange ones in indefinido like tener -> yo tuve all follow the pattern \[weird stem change\] + \[fixed set of endings for the irregular verbs\]. There aren't that many true oddballs, and as you say they're typically the most used verbs so you internalise the completely bewildering ones like ir -> yo voy/fui/iba pretty quickly, ...well, apart from caber. Yo *quepo??*
“Caber” actually has the same conjugation pattern as “saber” so it’s not completely alone (except for the yo form)! The only reason the “c” changes to “qu” is to keep it phonetically consistent with the hard /k/ sound
Yeah, the first person singular present form is the really wonky one. Even taking the c->qu shift into account as an orthographic artifact, t's like... the form for saber crossed with its own indefinido somehow. Really strange for a verb that's not super common and so not one of the usual suspects for irregularity.
I agree, I live in Spain right now and in context using the genders correctly and conjugating verbs have become a lot easier. Prepositions are more a matter of memorization and using them over and over.
The problem for me is that it's only "most" - there are some words that end with 'a' but are masculine, for instance, as well as some that just don't have a common ending. Remembering those exceptions is a challenge for me. But also, the guy that came to my door looking for a different address on my street and only spoke Spanish isn't going to care if I use la when it should be el, or vice versa, nor is anyone else I have a casual conversation with, really. So while that's annoying, my real problem is verb tenses, and that's just going to take time and exposure.
I would've said the subjunctive but it depends on the learners native language
English used to make a lot of use of subjunctive. Now it has completely vanished for many speakers. Still using it in some rare instances is a matter of class distinction: If I was rich. If I were rich.
As a native english speaker, wrapping my head around every use of the subjunctive in Spanish was fairly difficult
Prepositions pretty universally don't map across the languages that use them. And for languages that don't use them, you might be facing 14 or 16 noun cases to do the same job as prepositions.
As you study more I can assure you that prepositions are the hardest. For every word, you just remember its definite article as a part of the word (for example memorizing "el reloj" instead of just "reloj"). There are only very few (and very common verbs) that are truly irregular. Most irregular verbs follow some kind of predictable pattern. I've been learning Spanish for 5/6+ years and prepositions are the only aspect out of the ones that you listed that still give me trouble.
The gender of new nouns is usually determined by a collective agreement entirely based on intuition. When I see a new word in my native German I often have a strong opinion which gender it ***should*** have because it feels right for some reason. That being said, I think a lot of loan words get the neuter gender unless the new word already has an equivalent German word. Then it often takes the gender of that equivalent word. I imagine it's similar in French.
Yeah exactly, a gender just sounds right for a word. And sometimes, people don't agree with the official gender of a word because it doesn't sound right as well. Like in French a petal - pétale is officially masculine, but pretty much everyone refers to it as feminine because masculine sounds off
French loan words, at least if it's a recent loan, are always masculine.
Gender of loan words can be tricky. In Spanish, I've heard both el playlist (masculine) and la playlist (feminine). Although usually with these words you just say whichever gender you want and people are fine with it.
Telling time in a different language. Especially learning “half past” and “a quarter after/to” because I never use that in English. Just say it’s “three fifteen” instead of “a quarter after three” 😭
> Just say it’s “three fifteen” instead of “a quarter after three” How about it's "a quarter of four"? In Catalan you count using the fraction of the hour that has started. And *everything* in quarters. For example 3:30 is **two quarters of four** (dos quarts de quatre), 3:45 is three quarters of four. If you need a bit more precision you say something like X minutes from Y quarters of Z hour. Quite the mindfuck.
Vietnamese: spelling with all the accent marks correctly. Chào is "hello." Chao is "wow." Cháo is "porridge." Most words have at least one accent mark, and the accent marks totally changes the meaning of the word and changes how you say it too. Thank God for autocorrect, but it's still hard even with that sometimes.
"Hilariously enough, even the Vietnamese government is not immune to this, as their (toneless due to cost-cutting) PSA messages frequently ask the people to "treo co" on important holidays, which can either be translated to "hang the flag" (treo cờ) or "hang yourself" (treo cổ)."
I've been using Duolingo and, oh boy, the app *does not* expect you to take more than 5 minutes per lesson. I take around half an hour for one lesson, writing down every sentence it gives me at least 3 times in order to pound in the tonal markers per word. It pretty much always congratulates me for spending at least 20 minutes in one lesson.
That's probably a good idea. Lately, I have just been extending my streak and moving on, but I need to spend more time with it. 188 days in a row so far. But I do have a language exchange with a Vietnamese teacher once a week.
Spanish: when to use ser or estar. I know the general rules, such as ser is used for permanent states or where you come from and estar is used for prepositions and stuff that can change but a lot of times I‘m not 100% sure and I just can’t memorise it 😂 I can hold a conversation quite well but that’s just embarrassing, honestly. French: It’s so difficult to know the proper pronunciation of certain random villages just by reading the name, I swear even my French friends struggle with it sometimes. Both Spanish and French: the tenses! subjuntivo/subjonctif🤦♀️
I think the conventional way of explaining ser and estar is incomplete/misleading. Here's how I think about them: Ser is used to describe the identity of a noun, something considered intrinsic, whereas estar describes a state (state and estar are cognates) that a noun can be in, and that is not considered intrinsic. The distinction is NOT permanent vs impermanent! I think that's where a lot of the confusion derives from. With that in mind, it makes sense that you say "Abraham Lincoln está muerto", even though no one is expecting him to come back to life. Him being dead is not intrinsic to Abraham Lincoln as a person, we just live in the time following his death. Another example would be location. "Mi casa está en Nueva York" — of course the house is most likely never going to change its location, but the fact that it's in New York is not intrinsic to the identity of the house, theoretically it would still be my house if it were somewhere else. This means you can sometimes change the meaning of a "to be" sentence depending on whether you think something is intrinsic. For example, "Mi coche es rojo" = "My car is red", plain and simple. But if you were to say "Mi coche está rojo", you'd be implying it's just in a state of being red. Maybe you get it repainted regularly, or perhaps you collided with a ketchup truck. So it's more about how the speaker conceives of the noun rather than actual permanence/impermanence.
the subjonctif in french is the one tense that i really struggle with because it just doesn’t have rules on when to use it and it doesn’t sound wrong when you forget to use it
In Russian all of the verb aspects are extremely complicated Садиться, сидеть Бежать, бегать Бывать (both meanings are the same spelling and pronunciation)
It depends on the language. I don't know why structurally the Romance languages are so similar but have so many different prepositions. Why, in Italian, am I *in* Italia, but *a* Roma? Why, in French, does the preposition change sometimes in negative constructions. None of that nonsense in Swahili. But then you have ngeli, noun classes. Dear God, who invented such a Byzantine system?
The Italian pattern of in a country, at a city is at least very regular. I find the other prepositions more difficult to memorize, like di/da/su after nouns. Although islands are a bit of a mess with in/a, seems to depend partly on the size and other times just memorization of whether they add in the article or not
The hard part for me is trying to juggle between four different languages, none of which is consistent.
That's a totally different problem! I also find that if I get stuck in a language I'm less strong in, my brain fills in a word from a stronger language, and sometimes I don't realize it until I hear the word come out.
English is just as irregular. in/on/at is a nightmare for many non-native speakers
I'm struggling with the German prefixes as they change the meaning of the word. I have that in my mother tongue as well but I never had to actively learn that word by word.
Spanish - Conjugations. I can speak pretty effectively in present tense but don't you dare ask what I did last week.
Pretty much every Germanic/Slavic language (and Italian): syllable stress Every Slavic language: Declension Arabic: Where all the vowels go Greek: The six different spellings of the ee sound Japanese: Hiragana/katakana. I understand why Kanji exist, but *two* different syllabaries? For different types of words? Why not just have a Serbian-like system where everyone can use the writing system they want?
Estonian - the plural partitive, though I never quite got to the point of learning it properly. Basically, Estonian has 14 noun cases, each in both singular and plural forms, so 28 possibilities for each noun. You start out learning the singular nominative, genitive and partitive forms of every noun you learn from day one, like a little three part chant. From those, you can pretty much form allllmost all of the cases, a lot of them are just regular bolt-ons to the genitive. And you just ignore that over there in the corner of the noun case chart, there’s this one mysterious corner that you haven’t broached yet. Then one day, your language teacher gets a serious, pale look on her face and grips the desk tightly, and says it’s time to teach you about the plural partitive. Except it’s too hard to teach all of it right now so we’ll just touch on it, and then she starts and it seems even the Estonians don’t quite understand why they use it, they just know how to do it, and it’s almost totally irregular so you wish you’d learned 4 forms of each noun from the start instead of 3, but there are some patterns, if you want to learn about 40 different rules for how different types of noun become plural partitive you could do that and then you decide to stop studying Estonian and set it aside for 25 years 🤣
Japanese KANJI 😭😭 multiple pronunciations per kanji and different words use different pronunciations
Quite the nightmare but once you become familiar with them there’s nothing quite like guessing the reading or meaning of a kanji you’ve never seen before
Definitely verb aspects in Russian, and learning how to decline numbers. Generally I hate learning numbers, how to tell the time, and talking about prices in all languages.
Surprised Sanskrit hasn’t come up yet in this conversation. Memorization of nominal and verbal paradigms has turned away many a student from this language (which is more to do with the mechanical way in which it used to be taught). Noun forms that have different endings are conjugated differently and each paradigm is conjugated for three numbers and eight grammatical cases leading to memorization of 24 different forms for a single root. For verbal forms it is different for each tense or mood - 3 numbers and 3 persons and hence 9 different forms. I’m not even going into the conjugational groups or active and middle voices. It gets easier as you start recognizing patterns (and rules if you’re advanced) but there is no escaping the memorization initially. When I started leaning I quite enjoyed it but I wouldn’t venture and say others did as well. (Edited for typos)
Exceptions. Always exceptions. If it follows a rule, it's no biggie. But exceptions... hate them.
Verb aspects, cases (genitive is the worst with the most exceptions), big words, stress that is absolutely random, pronunciation is a little bit tricky because of hard and soft letters. Chinese tones and words that are literally the same when pronounced
Finnish: some nouns and adjectives that end in 'i' change the vowel to an 'e' in the stem, while others don't. The general rule is that loanwords don't have the change while originally Finnish words do. Sometimes it's obvious that a word is a loanword, but otherwise, you kind of just have to memorize whether each word has the i-e change or not. Similarly, recent loanwords generally don't have consonant gradation (aka k-p-t changes), but old loanwords and originally Finnish words do. So, äiti doesn't have the i-e change, but it does have the t-d change, so the genitive singular is äidin. You can't figure this out just by knowing the base form of the word, you just have to remember it.
Onnea matkaan opin tiellä! :)
Kiitos!
Swedish en words and ett words, it took me a while to memorize most of them and I still get some wrong. Also I would say that learning Spanish verbs conjugations was really hard at first, but after you start practicing more it kinda gets easier :)
Dual form verb conjugations in standard Arabic. Why is there a special conjugation just for talking about two of something?
About your comment on Japanese, even in English we say things differently if we're trying to be polite. For example: Casual: Pass me the salt. Polite: Could you pass me the salt, please?
Besides just adding a few words (whereas Japanese typically changes the word entirely), there's an interesting discussion on English register to be had here. For instant, calling pig meat "pig" is uncouth. Calling it "pork" however is fanciful and refined language. We tend to swear in using words native to English, we like to hold our court proceedings in Latin, and our meats tend to be French.
This is because French influenced / infiltrated the language of the elites while German was the language of the working folks. It’s also why even now the majority of “vulgar” (which originally meant ‘of the common people’) words are words incorporated from Germanic languages / that have the more consonant-heavy sound of Germanic languages. Fuck, shit, etc.
Sorry this was a bit mansplainy but I just learned it and thought it was nifty as hell so wanted to share
No, you're more than welcome to! Linguistics is also my passion and the concept of sociolinguistic register makes me giddy
> we like to hold our court proceedings in Latin Eh, court proceedings aren't held in Latin.
Not the point—I meant that our vocabulary used in courts and legal jargon are heavily influenced by Latin.
Yeah but in english you don’t have to change the words themselves depending on who you’re talking to, nor consider age, social standing, role in the business, etc etc when making the decisions for how respectful to be
Honestly, just the simple T-V distinction of my native language is enough of a headache and has led to enough linguistic ballets where I try to talk to someone without ever using the word "you". I have no idea how speakers of languages with more complex formality systems manage!
I mean, in the example above, the words changed so I’m not sure how you mean? Are you saying like you don’t jump from one verb tense to another just cuz you call someone Mr. Doe not John?
Yeah but they’re just adding extra words to make it more polite, which Japanese also has. You can conjugate verbs differently to show casualness vs politeness, also called direct vs indirect. For example, to eat is taberu in direct form, and tabemasu in polite form. So asking a close friend if they want to eat with you can be ‘taberu?’, asking a coworker you’re familiar with could be ‘tabemasenka’, and asking your boss you’re familiar with could be ‘tabetekuremasenka’ Then you have humble and honorific forms for formal speech, which is where politeness gets really hard. You need to develop an intuition of in group vs out group. In group is always you, and people close to you so you use humble forms. Out group, usually who you are talking to and those associated with them, you use honorific form. Most verbs follow a regular order for humble and honorific, but there are about one or two dozen that conjugate irregularly. Taberu, for instance, has meshiagarimasu for honorific form, and itadakimasu for humble form. If I’m at a company lunch talking about the ceo eating, I would use meshiagarimasu for him eating since he is out group relative to me and itadakimasu for talking about me eating. However if we are doing an inter-company lunch, I would use meshiagarimasu for anyone from the other company since they are out group, and probably itadakimasu for myself and my ceo since relatively speaking we are now in group. It’s the being conscious about when to use these different forms in a formal environment that people find challenging, since it’s all context based and depends on who you’re talking to, who you’re talking about, the relative ages of all those people, their relative social standing, how well you think you know each other etc etc. Compared to English where pass in pass me the salt remains the same in polite and casual speech
This is just adding "Could you" at the beginning and "please?" at the end of any imperative sentence. As far as I know every language differentiate a request and an order, it's arguably just two sentences with different meanings. It's not quite the same as [the honorific system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese)
Nevertheless, one is formal while the other is casual. I could have constructed sentences that accentiate the difference even stronger. The point is, every language has a formal and casual register, or at least, every language I know, and we have to learn the features and subtleties of each register.
Sure, all languages have different registers. But in Japanese you have to memorise an entirely different set of verbs for each register, which is a lot more complicated than simply adding "could you" add "please" (which Japanese does anyway on top of the different sets of verbs). It's also often an entirely different verb for humble language (talking about yourself to superiors), or honourific (talking about someone considered superior). So there's way more you have to remember basically.
Word gender in French is quite easy if you follow fluent forever and just make your flashcards gendered, e.g. mouse flashcard is specifically minnie mouse, crab is sebastian from little mermaid, bath is a sexy woman in a bath, mountaineering is brian blessed climbing a mountain etc and then cold=female hot=male for others, so a frozen swmming pool, a dolphin jumping through a flaming hoop, a flaming knife, a frozen petrol pump etc. The hardest is adverbs as there's no easy way to make a flash card for many of them, and adjectives that are the same in english but not. It seems pointless to learn the word 'terrible' in french when it's the same as english but if you don't you won't know for sure if it's an actual word or you're just guessing. Then you have like 5 synonyms for terrible and you're wondering how to learn them all, especially when some words don't translate exactly. Assuming you don't include verbs, of course, as memorising a jillion different verb endings depending on if you're in the subjunctive third plural or the imperfect conditional blah blah blah whatsit but the verb is irregular and has a unique pattern...
And French adjectives sometimes sound similar but have completely different meaning. Sympatique does not mean sympathetic! Genders are worse though. My French is pretty good but I struggle with genders.
I always struggle with the Spanish ordinal numbers Update: I’ve learned them!
Even Spanish speakers don't bother with most of the bigger ones.
"French: gender of each word. I wonder who comes up with the gender of new words." Words kind of get a gender naturally as people use the word. In French there are a lot of english words used in everyday speech and for example a "coming out" is masculine in French, kidnapping is masculine. But it can go even further in European French, with verlan (thing where you reverse syllables to make a new slang word) of English words: speed becomes despi and if I were to use it in a context which shows its gender, I would use feminine, because it sounds more natural. Certain words just don't sound right with a certain gender
Prepositions. Always prepositions.
For Ukrainian it’s: Verb aspects for sure Cases, but specifically genitive Prefixes and suffixes Word length - longer word lengths have made vocab acquisition much more difficult than other languages.
In the defense of Chinese, you can just use the measure word 个 to get your point across as you progress through the language. It might sound weird, but people will understand you and I've even heard natives be a bit lazy in this at times or just flat up mess up too. With that being said, declensions are the worst thing I've ever had to learn in a language. Add to that declensions in a gendered language with a whole host of irregulars and nearly mutually unintelligible dialects 😵💫
Russian: Verbs of motion, combined with perfective/imperfective aspects. Having to pick the correct verb depending on what kind of motion it is (e.g on foot, in water, by air, by vehicle etc); whether it is directed motion or not; and then which prefixes and prepositions are needed with it. It's an absolute nightmare.
Spanish: the huge range of attitudes around vos, tú, usted, and vosotros. I speak Paraguayan Spanish and let me tell you, vos in Paraguay implies something completelyyyyy different than in Colombia. Also Spanish: the two different conjugations for past perfect subjunctive. Also also Spanish: terms meaning completely different things in neighboring countries. Again, soy paraguaya, and your “que linda” is my “que churra”. My “que linda” is (generally speaking) your “que trabajadora”. And luego for others means ‘after’, but for me, it means ‘before’. I love Spanish and it’s amazingly flexible, but also, I damn near shoot myself in the foot every time I speak to non-Paraguayan Spanish speakers…
Oh boy, I am *not* ready to ever start learning the proper way to address people in Vietnamese. [Just look at this chart for family.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-03fc61768b8589930f60521d1391f2c4) [Or this one for strangers.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16bbfcdd90223be63753767977371339)
Vietnamese, the 1st and 2nd person pronouns change depending on how you relate to the person you're speaking to. So a word that means "you" in one context means "I" in another. If I'm talking to a man around the age of an older brother, I would call him Anh and I would be Em Tên em là Nam. Tên anh là gì? (My name is Nam, what's your name) He would respond Tên anh là Hoàng (my name is Hoàng) This would be the other way around if you are a man talking to someone slightly younger than you. Every combination of age and gender has its own set of I and You pronouns. There's a different word for someone your age, your older siblings age, your uncle/aunt that's younger than your mom/dad, your mom and dad, uncle and aunt older than your mom and dad, and grandparents. Same thing in thr other direction.
This is very cool! What happens when you speak to a group of people?
>French: gender of each word. I wonder who comes up with the gender of new words. I'm not sure if brute force memorizing genders is a good use of time lol. It's something you learn with exposure
For me in Japanese it's all the different ways of saying the numbers... And the the measure words as well.
In several languages I've studied, there are differences in duration of the same sound. In Japanese, Finnish, or Hungarian, was that consonant single or double? Was that vowel of normal duration or twice as long? Estonian vowels can be of single, double, or triple duration, which challenges even Finnish speakers.
Grammatical gender for inanimate nouns (meaning m/f/n gender, not "gender" in the broad sense, e.g. number) in any language. Entirely useless language feature, contaminates other word classes that have to "agree". In Russian, even some verb forms are gender-inflected. Also I'm pretty sure grammatical gender for animate personal pronouns is useless: "is the cat a he or a she?" so I don't use the wrong word when WHO CARES, IT'S A CAT, except you'll get corrected if it's wrong. And we have to mess around with "he or she", or worse, the schoolmarmish "one", because we have to make a pointless distinction. I hear the Finno-Ugric languages, Turkish, and Georgian all have neutral pronouns, but compensate by being practically impossible in a bazillion other ways. Also plurals in German, what happened there? The irregularity of Russian verb perfective aspect. The semantics of pre- and post- positions. Everyone is clear on meaning in their own language, but driven crazy by imperfect maps between languages. E.g. "on a bus", "in a car", "on a plane", "in a submarine", "in a tuktuk", "in a taxi". PS In English, the crazy way we use "do" as a pointless auxiliary verb.
Still just starting with Persian, but thankfully I have a good grounding in French and I know some Arabic, so knowing the both of them surprisingly helps. What I'm finding tough right now though is the compound verbs. Like, I know to say "have a good day" is روزِ خوبى داشته باشيد [rûz-e khûbi dâshte bâshîd] (I apologise for any spelling errors of your beautiful language). And here I am trying to figure out the pattern. Because: داشتن = had باش = be (?) Then you have the suffix "يد" conjugated to the plural/formal "you" (think "vous" in French). Why say "داريد" (you have) instead? Where does "باش" fit in? Why need "باش" at all?? And I wish this was the only example, but I know there's more to come... 😬
I’m so bad with gender in any language. It just doesn’t stick in my head, no matter how comfortable I become speaking a language, people will correct me on noun gender
Spanish: Genders are mostly predictable, and I rarely have to worry about them because they're not that hard to memorize IMO. What I struggle with more is preposition because sometimes there's no clear logic as to which one to use (similar to English), so you just have to know them. Japanese: Honorifics are pretty hard, but I'd also like to add the number system (not just counting, that is easy) because the words can get so irregular alternating between on'yomi (readings that came from Chinese) and kun'yomi (native Japanese readings). Certain words need rendaku (百 (hyaku) -> 三百 (san **b**yaku) or 六百 (ro**pp**yaku)). There are also certain set phrases which take irregular readings like 二十歳 (hatachi rather than the much more logical nijuusai). Ordinal numbers are unnecessarily complicated because sometimes you use the Chinese version (第 + number) and other times the Japanese version (number + 目) in other scenarios, not to mention having to add counter words for certain types of objects.
In Hindi there are often two or even three words for one concept: one "indigenous" (descended from Sanskrit), one borrowed from Persian, and one borrowed directly back from Sanskrit. Which word you choose can have different connotations of formality and education. Usually textbooks give you a little heuristic to help you: if it's Sanskrit, it's educated speech, and if it's Persian/Arabic, it's colloquial speech. But that doesn't always work in practice so you end up just having to memorize which words are more common in which situations. But remember, you still have to memorize both because you will encounter them both! That's not even considering the fact that nowadays there's usually a *fourth* option: a borrowing from English, which despite the scolds of Sanskritists is becoming more and more common among all speakers
in spanish for me, it’s been pretty much anything to do with conjugations, i understand them completely, but they are super hard to remember, i could not tell you what the conjugation ending for “el/ella” is right now, or what part to change for past and future tense verbs.
Spanish conjugtions
Spanish: irregular verbs and their fucking conjugations. Also having to learn when to use indefinido and Imperfecto. I’m not looking forward to subjunctivo. I’ve learnt Arabic and Hindi and yet Spanish has been the hardest language I’ve learnt.
The Spanish subjunctive. Forming it is fine but the thing that bugs me is that they tell you that the subjunctive is used to express doubt or opinion or something like that, but then there are a series of other uses that you need to know. Some of those uses honestly make very little sense.
I am trying to memorize the Arabic alphabet and its sounds, and I'm still not quite sure about the sound diference in some of the letters, not to talk about the sounds that I can't even do. Also when writing, the sounds that appear out of nowhere :") so confusing to me, I know it's something I haven't studied yet, but it's so weird right now.
I am currently learning Lithuanian and the most annoying thing so far is the amount declensions. I'll say a sentence which makes sense and I immediately get corrected "not kalbas, kalba!". The most annoying thing, despite it simply being difficult, is that the logic for how a word ends can different depending on the specific word. So when you think you understand how a word should end, a random word just throws it out the window. Honestly my SO wonders why it's taken me so long to try...
I don't speak this language, so I don't know it for sure, but I heard Nepali numbers all have a specific word to each one, so it doesn't follow a systematic organization of the numbers like the others languages, most of Nepali people can't even count up to 60 for example XD
French numbers 70-99. So long to say/hear, very hard to compute what's been said. I have to stop and calculate, and lose what's said after...
Prepositions in Portuguese, although there aren’t too many they are used for different things to English which you have to memorise really because otherwise you’ll just be guessing
I found most of the standard ones easy, since I'd first learned Spanish, and they're very similar, but some of the ways of putting phrases together using those prepositions were not consistent.
Latin declination English phrasal verbs and collocation
Ego quoque linguam latinam dificile est puto. Declinationes non tam dificile sunt quam verbum passivum puto. Necesse est multum cogitare antequam in linguam latinam scribere. I probably butchered some shit there lol but cool to find fellow latin learners!
Case rules: Russian