Why English Is So Hard

A duck may paddle and waddle, but it may not poddle or woddle.

 

That's fun
I had to save it

 

This is not to be serious but since English was the medium of instruction since the first grade, you can imagine the horrors that we had gone through with that language. I remember our science teacher in grade 6 from whom we learned the word decibel as de-sigh-bell. Another teacher taught us tweh-let that was actually toilet. There are so many more examples of wrong pronunciation that we only discovered when we were in college.

By the way, I just heard that news the there are 31 Filipino words that entered the Oxford English Dicitionary this year. One of which is carnap to mean stealing the car or vehicle. Another is pulutan to mean finger food in the drinking session so if you are not drinking, that pulutan is just a simple snack.

 

I've worked in a few countries in Africa and it was always possible to tell how people had learned English, by which I mean whether it was "British" or "American" English. You'd get some people writing "centre" and others "center", etc. Just another thing to add to the complexity.

One of the problems with English is that words have arrived from so many different sources. Greek, Latin, French and Germanic languages all do battle with each other.

 

I spent this Sunday reading old books, and found an "extended" version of the original rhyme Ken posted above, that concludes with the author saying being in age to belong to SENIORSonly Club, read on

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.

I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
If I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

If the singular is this and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be named kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose;

We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!

So our English, I think, you all will agree,
Is the craziest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat;
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,
Or dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose,
Just look them up, and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five,
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

 

Haha, cool poem I've learned English in about 2 years, for me it's an easy language.
In my opinion German is very hard though.

 

I tried for years to learn Spanish, I tried for thirty minutes to learn German, I'm still trying to learn English.

 

I have always loved how German sounds and have a crush for the German culture, but since Germany standardized the language grammar and spelling rules by the turn of the century with the goal to unify different dialects in the German speaking countries, now the language seems harder than ever and look less appealing.

As in example, I loved to write this character ß equivalent for actual double ss or those words using dieresis such as schön, rather than two vocals (schoen.) However the hardest part for me are words that string together in order to make a new one.

It's said that the longer is this Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungs, meaning ""law delegating beef label monitoring" is simply unpronounceable to me and hard to remember how to write it from memory. Here is brought to you via copy&paste, LOL

 

This poem is so true about how confusing the English language can be. I use to not give it much thought, after all I grew up speaking it and learning to read it. But there are words that sound exactly alike that have entriely different meaning as stated in the poem. Then there are words like cough and though, both have the ough ending to them but the pronounciation is totally different. Then there is silent E it can change the pronouciation of a word and its meaning. These are just some examples of some confusing aspects of the english language. This poem truly reflects how much confusion is in this language that's for sure. I don't envy a person who has to learn to understand english because its not easy to understand when you are someone raised speaking it.

 

It would be a lot simpler if we used accents in the way that Slavic languages do. I remember being greeted at a hotel in a country in the Balkans as "Mr Lotch-ka". It was an entirely understandable way of pronouncing my name. They would have assumed that the "c" was soft. When I received a visa to visit Russia, my name was spelt as "Lok" (albeit in Cyrillic). Very sensible and completely phonetic.

 

We do not speak proper English in the US.Myself included. We speak American Slang...and is a bit confusing from state to state

 

Yep, should be peech and not peach then.