• 0 Posts
  • 3 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 16th, 2023
  • ioen@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.ml•Keep it simple
    81·
    11 months ago

    What makes a language easy is its similarity to a learner’s native language, or other languages they’ve already learned.

    Don’t believe this at all. English is far more different to Chinese than any to any European language, yet I was able to communicate in Chinese much better after a few weeks of learning than after months or years of French and Spanish, because the grammar is simpler.

    Familiarity with cognates, word order and grammar rules can’t beat simply never having to use an article, agree gender or conjugate a verb for the subject or tense. Tell me a Chinese verb and I can talk about anybody doing it at any point in time. Tell me a French verb and I’ll have to study declension tables all week.

  • ioen@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.ml•Keep it simple
    1·
    11 months ago

    However, if you learn english words through text and then try to use them vocally, nobody will understand you. (looking at you “beard”, who isn’t pronounced at all like “bear” for some reason)

    If someone pronounced beard like bear with a d on the end I’d understand them fine. Particularly since the rest of the sentence would probably be perfectly grammatical since the grammar is so simple.

    People might understand “Le baguette sont fraîche”, they might not. How do they know which words you got right and which you got wrong? They just know nothing agrees. Either way you will sound like a total moron. And you need to learn 3 different grammar rules to fix it, not just one pronunciation.

    There is absolutely no correlation between spoken and written english

    Come on, this is silly. I’m looking at your comment and almost every word has regular pronunciation. Any incorrect pronunciations would be easily understood. The specific examples you give are just regional differences.

  • ioen@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.ml•Keep it simple
    4914·
    11 months ago

    English is easier. So the spelling is irregular, so what. You’ll be bad at spelling for a while. It’s just not comparable to having to memorize arbitrary gender for every noun in the language, learn complex verb conjugations, polite and impolite forms and make every verb and adjective agree with the nouns in gender and number.