Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
Hover tooltip text:
Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you’re good.
Bonus panel:
RSS Feed: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rss
Yes! I’ve made that comment a lot; French is easier to learn than English because you only need to learn how to pronounce syllables, while in English you have to learn every single word. It’s insane.
Lol. Spoken and written French are so different they’re basically two different languages…
French is still pretty consistent once you know the syllables. If you give me a word I don’t know, I’ll still be able to pronounce it correctly. You can’t expect that with English.
Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of … English, but omfg did it not gel with me.
It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.
When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.
It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.
You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.
Yeah. It’s funny because I am learning Danish eight now and it makes infinitely more sense than French ever did but I think it’s because, at least to me, it’s much closer to English and a lot of it is “well we do it just cause?” and my brain is like “oh cool great! I know how to cope with that”.
Whereas learning something that is so structured like German/French it feels very overwhelming I guess in that sense. I don’t feel like I have to think about Danish because it feels very ‘normal’.
english is my second language and i feel it has wasted a lot of brain memory, because i have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of each word separately and the link them together, when i could just learn one of those and know the other
Same and in most situations I can pass as an English first speaker.
I was at IKEA buying a bed frame and asked the person at the counter if she had put the slats on the bill… But I pronounced it like slates because I was sure I had seen an “e” at the end of the word and there went the illusion 🤷
This reminds me of a poem called “The Chaos” which highlights how dumb English can be as a language
How many native speakers actually use proper grammar when speaking? The common spoken and written language have many differences.
Also 15-20% percent of the population has reading reading disorders. So around 1 in 5 or 6 people struggle with the archaic billshit grammar.
BTW “Proper Grammar” as a concept only exists from classism and racism mostly from the late 19th century and early 20th. It has been used to suppress undersirables from climbing the social ladder. Before then spelling and grammar was more fluid. Spelling was more random and differences were accepted.
Or I could just be dumb…
There’s also “English is a stupid language” which focuses on word constructions instead of pronunciation
Is “hiccough” pronounced the same as “hiccup?” Because if it is, I’m gonna have to put that in the same category as “colonel.”
There’s an interesting history behind why colonel is spelled and pronounced how it is…
https://www.deseret.com/1996/8/4/19258272/french-italian-roots-explain-why-colonel-has-an-r-sound
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word’s history. The French word “coronel” is derived from the Italian word “colonnello.” When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first “l” sound to an “r” sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two “l” sounds or two “r” sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration “dissimilation.”
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter “r” was changed back to an “l,” making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
There’s an I Love Lucy scene where Ricky is trying to prove he is capable of reading to their baby, and the book is filled with -ough words.
My heart goes out to anyone trying to learn this language as a second (or third or…) language.
