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in reply to @0xabad1dea's post:

pronunciation[^1] , it's almost like learning two languages at the same time, that are vaguely related

[^1] i'm so depended on spellchecker, i sometimes have to write how i remember the word is spoken and let computer figure it out. i wrote "pronounciation" at first

it's almost like learning two languages at the same time, that are vaguely related

This is so true, for the longest time I didn't realize that the written and spoken versions of "schedule" were the same word??

Like I knew what it meant when I read it and when I heard it, I just never connected the two in my head lmao

also, people decided to just not pronounce certain letters, like 'k' in "knife", "knight" (it makes some things ambiguous, even in other languages, e.g. ナイト・オブ・ナイツ).

try saying it - "k-nife".

That's how it was pronounced, once! A lot of words in English were pronounced the way they were spelled, and changed that happened after the French invasion of England altered things.

So, yes, the Holy Grail sketch is actually correct, a person in armor running around was originally a cniht -- and that's a hard C, and an unvoiced hiss, so you hear the H.

Knee? Two syllables, kuh-nay Knife? Two syllables, kuh-neef

I used to do this every semester for my students when we actually met in person lol, it was always a fun day.

Essentially, English is a Germanic language written with Latin orthography and then that orthography was changed by an influx of literate French writers who just didn't learn to speak English, and the local nobles who sort of had to keep up with both languages and also some Latin. And then the Great Vowel Shift happened in the early modern period, which means all the vowels were changing but they got recorded by printing presses just as the change happened -- so the reason English vowels are different from both German and French vowels is that they got trapped in amber during a huge change in how they were approached (they essentially all rotated one position in the circle of vowels).

It's late I may have sort of dropped my bankai on your comment, sorry about that 😅

the big one is how inconsistent pronunciation is in relationship to spelling (there's a reason spelling bees are not a thing in other countries 😭)

a second one for me is "countable" vs "uncountable" nouns?? Who divides their nouns by whether you can count them?? "less people" is perfectly understandable, come on.

Stress on individual words being a thing that matters: coming from French, which doesn't stress words, i'm being told that "envelope" the verb and "envelope" the noun are pronounced differently (likewise with "concrete" the material vs "concrete" the opposite of abstract), but... i barely hear any difference, and i sure as hell can't replicate it.

ohh that's interesting. coming from european portuguese, which is also a stress-based language, this is a very natural feature of english to me. the main difference here is that we use the acute accent to distinguish where the stress is, unlike english where you have to just kinda know from context... (e.g. "esta" = "this", "está" = "is currently")

everyone already said spelling so I'm gonna say the amount of vowels. you don't need that many. get rid of some please.

oh and also the way English speakers write out the pronunciations of words when they need to explain how to pronounce a word. it's absolute nonsense. they should just teach IPA at schools (joke about the American, Canadian or British school systems being bad)

like why spell it out like "li·tr·uh·chr" when you can lɪ́trəʧə

too many vowels and also they can all me spelled in a thousand ways.

Seriously "stylus" is written with a "u" for etymological reasons only, if you used an "a", "e". "i", or "o" you could pronounce it the same

We're working on it! Some local accents do in fact have fewer vowels than "standard" English. For example, I was raised in in a part of California that has no phonetic difference between "caught" and "cot."

This brings to total number of distinct vowels down to... nineteen.

Some parts of the US merge a few other vowel sounds and get the total as low as seventeen.

The best thing about English is it's fractally insane. First of all you have lots of different versions of English to choose from (especially the two main factions on each side of the Atlantic), and then each of those has loan words from 23 different other languages (except with the pronunciations and meanings mangled beyond recognition), and then sure there's language "rules" but they're all oddly inherited from other languages, and they fight like crazy, and then get eggcorn'd and Mondegreen'd.

For big picture stuff the whole spelling/pronunciation minefield and letter names that don't correspond to even the most common sound that the letter represents (e.g. a isn't /a:/, it's /ei/). I learned to read* by realizing the connection between letter names and the sounds they make, and I can't see that happening with English.

For smaller things, pudding. You've got your custards, and some baked sweet stuff (bread pudding, sticky toffee pudding) gets called pudding... and then there's Yorkshire pudding, black pudding, rice pudding, even haggis is pudding!

*Or at least I have a distinct memory of looking at the alphabet on the wall at the kindergarten and having it click, more or less in one go.

Others have already mentioned plenty of gripes about pronunciation and spelling, but let me offer another one: English spells /z/ as ⟨s⟩ way too often, so you never know which words are supposed to be pronounced with /s/ or /z/

Because my native language has /s/ but not /z/, and because the way I was taught English pronunciation was basically "mimic what the teacher is saying" (learning the correspondence between English spelling and pronunciation in a systematic way is too complicated for 9-year-olds, I assume), I didn't realize that English had a /z/ sound and just pronounced it all as /s/

After some number of years I learned the correct pronunciations of ⟨th⟩, and then the correct pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩... But it wasn't until I learned katakana and started reading English loanwords in it that I truly realized to what extent English uses /z/. Because English spelling doesn't reflect it in many cases!

Nowadays I can distinguish between /s/ and /z/ in other people's speech most of the time (though not all of the time), and I like to think I pronounce it correctly more often than not, but I still keep running into words that I hadn't realized the correct pronunciation of

not directly about English but non-ESL speakers don't learn grammar??! especially given the batshit rules english has. the amount of people who have never learned at school about:

  • adjective category order (big red vs red big)
  • onomatopeia vowel order (tick tock vs tock tick)
  • verbs having tense, aspect, and mood
  • compound subjects being singular or plural depending on the conjunction (and vs or)
  • a vs an esp for words that start with h