Thread: English.... worst language.... ever!

i am an american, english is my mother tounge of course, i would have to say the trick to learning to speak everyday english is informality, unless we americans are doing business we pretty much don't use any formalities. we are lazy speakers, that's why we have slang, we're lazy people when it comes to language, or at least most of us are. There aren't very many gendered words besides him, his, her, she, stuff like that, we usually don't differenciate between male and female with most of our words. English is a pretty straight forward lang., all the words go in order example: i don't speak french(easy,all words follow eachother) now in french: je ne parle pas francais( more difficult than english because the 'ne' and the 'pas' change parle/speak into a negative. And a lot of laguages are like that, i think english is quite simple, the laziest people in the world speak it...

actually, in normal french you'd say : "je ne sais pas parler fran

English is a pretty straight forward lang., all the words go in order

They go in order to you, because you are a native speaker of English. What if, however, my native language is one where the object comes first, then the verb, then the subject? To me, it would seem that English word order was completely out of whack.

Try to explain to a foreign learner the difference between:
If you had had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you would have had some money, we could go to the movies.

If you had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you were to have some money, we could go to the movies.

That's just Possibilty, and lost opportunity. Nothing too hard about that.

If i were to move to russia, i could join spetsnaz!

Kinda drifting off topic, but to me, Arabic has the hardest spelling system. There aren't any vowels marked when text is written, only in dictionaries and kid books. For example, "Salam" which means hello, is written as "Slm". All consonants have a vowel added after them, but it isn't marked. Sa, la, ma. The a on the end of the m isn't pronunced, but it isn't marked either. You just need to know that it isn't there. Personally, if I was ever to learn arabic, that would be hell to try and memorize the vowels in every word but never writing/reading them.

Not necessarily. Imagine two guys sitting around. "If you had some money, we could go to the movies." No lost opportunity there. If they get the money, they can go.

Originally Posted by Pravit

Try to explain to a foreign learner the difference between:
If you had had some money, we could go to the movies.
If you would have had some money, we could go to the movies.

The latter is just blatantly incorrect to my mind.
Conditionals are an area where semi-literate people often trip up
Sadly I've heard constructions like that in speech fairly often.

And the former would usually be "If you had had some money, we could have gone to the movies", although I suppose it's acceptable as a mixed conditional.

"If you were to have some money, we could go to the movies."
That's very weird ... I've never looked into the "were to" construction. I mean obviously it's pretty rare in usage nowadays. In this case it looks very unnatural, I think it's because "were to" should be followed by an action (i.e. not a stative verb)

Cougar asked me the "were to" one, the other one is just me trying to come up with something awkward but possible

i am an american, english is my mother tounge of course, i would have to say the trick to learning to speak everyday english is informality, unless we americans are doing business we pretty much don't use any formalities. we are lazy speakers, that's why we have slang, we're lazy people when it comes to language, or at least most of us are.

Why is it that I always read the same question and the same answers. How can you say English it's the trickiest language, or the easiest one? or is that lazyness is the cause for slang in English?

Everyone thinks that his/her own language is the trickiest, the most difficult , the one with more slang... What happens is that as an English speaker, you know a lot more than non native speakers about its nuances, its slang, its tricky features. But you don't know so deeply other languages, and then you think others are more simple. Or maybe, as you know yours since childhood, you think others are more difficult.
But all in all, more or less all languages have the same complexity, otherwise there would be cultures in which children would acquire their spoken languages before others, or after others. And that's not the case. Writing is another question.

Maybe, instead of comparing English to German, Russian, Arabic, Japanese and Spanish (5 out of 5000 languages, 0.001 > 0.1% of all languages, that's nothing), we could compare English to some 500 languages (10%) and then take some conclusions, don't you think?

Have you heard about Ergativity in Basque or Caucasian languages? Have you heard about click languages, such as Xhosa, to talk about difficult pronounciations? And what about those consonant clusters of Georgian?
Or the 9 (are they really 9?) tones of Cantonese?

One last thing, if lazyness causes slang, then all language speakers are lazy. Do you think Spanish, for example, has no slang? And yet, we have dozens of verbal forms.

Excellent post, Jca.

Jca, I wholeheartedly agree with you.

You can find books in nearly every language (if it is written at all) where the author "proves" that his language is the most versatile, enables its users to express subtleties which can't be expressed in any other language, and is therfore the highest developed one in the world.
This is regularily done by taking phrases or even single words which don't have an exact equivalent in any other language (which the author believes to know).
Umberto Eco wrote about this subject (I think it was in "Foucault's Pendulum") listing nearly each of the European languages which somebody hat declared sometime as superior to any other known language.

To be honest i dont really have a "native language" ounless you count just being from a perticuler country.Spoke dutch first 11 or so years of my life,litle bit of bangla/bengali with pasing relatives and my dad and my mom (forcfully)taught me some english.

Yadering aside, I for one found english to be a fairly hard language to learn.True it's easy to get an emergency message acros but all the little tid-bits can be rather confusing(or maybe it's just me).on german though, I can speak dutch(though VERY rusty at the moment) and learned german seperatly.Sounds similer and you can get the gist of whats being said but it's got it's diffuculties from this perspective(again could be just me lol).

BTW, learned some hindi recently and all(to my knowledge) indian/sub-continet region languages have 3 forms of addressing.One for sub-ordinates/close friends, one for normal occasions and one formaly(though generly the formal is used with strangers allways, but thats just amnners and opinion).

I can only speak for bengali(litrey, cant read or get the numbers down well yet). but you can see the evolution quite clearly.In bangladesh it's somewhat like amarican english and british english.Has some arabic and now quite a few english words and the grammer system is much simpler.Technically we all speak incorectly but it's the norm now outide of formal documents.

Cпасибо Pravit, старик.

Kстати, старик Умберто Эко написал об этом в "La b

[quote=Jca]Kстати, старик Умберто Эко написал об этом в "La b

Originally Posted by Jca

But when I started Hungarian, I had to learn the vocabulary from scratch, the grammar from scratch... because there's no other language more or less similar to that.

Finnish and Estonian. Although they are aren't that similar are they.


English speaking countries do have a higher proportion of dyslexics, but that's just due to the horrible spelling.
And as for tenses, the same exist in Romance languages like French and Spanish.

talking about starting from scratch; i'm going to University to learn Chinese, all them wicked signs etc

How do you get pictures under your name?

Originally Posted by Tate

How do you get pictures under your name?

Go to the top of the page and click on profile then scroll down to the bottom of your profile where it says show gallery and just click on it and choose one. Or you can click browse and upload one of your own.

Not bad for a leather massager, eh what!

I know this is from an old post but:

Why is it that I always read the same question and the same answers. How can you say English it's the trickiest language, or the easiest one? or is that lazyness is the cause for slang in English?

Everyone thinks that his/her own language is the trickiest, the most difficult , the one with more slang... What happens is that as an English speaker, you know a lot more than non native speakers about its nuances, its slang, its tricky features. But you don't know so deeply other languages, and then you think others are more simple. Or maybe, as you know yours since childhood, you think others are more difficult.
But all in all, more or less all languages have the same complexity, otherwise there would be cultures in which children would acquire their spoken languages before others, or after others. And that's not the case. Writing is another question.

Well, I read, write, and speak in both Russian and English-My mother is totally rusian, and my dad is totally english, but I think that even though english is a totally screwed up and whacked language, it is a tiny bit easier that the russian language. Both are my native tounge, 50%-50% each. Split. Even check out my name. Partly Russian. Hows that for a comparison?
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Sry that this is off topic--------V
Oh, and by the way, if anyone has like a cool pic for under my name of like sumthin stupid like an evil penguin or a killer squirrel for an avatar, it would be greatly appreciated. Ive been looking for one ever since i saw this site.(not when i signed up but like about four months ago)

THX AGAIn

Well, I read, write, and speak in both Russian and English-My mother is totally rusian, and my dad is totally english, but I think that even though english is a totally screwed up and whacked language, it is a tiny bit easier that the russian language. Both are my native tounge, 50%-50% each. Split. Even check out my name. Partly Russian. Hows that for a comparison?

I had to learn both Russian and Engsh ?cos my mother tongue is none of them. While I find Russian harder as regards to morphology for all the endings I have to remember, and for the perfective-non perfective verbal forms and uses, ... for example, listening and understanding what I heard is more difficult in English.
But of course, English is easier to me as there are more common words between Spanish and English than between Spanish and Russian. Maybe we should ask a Vietnamese what is more difficult (not a Vietcong guy educated in Moscow, of course, nor a traitor US friend).