It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.

My native language is a Slavic one but I can't fucking learn Polish because the language is just too fucking funny to me.

It's like how English speakers think Dutch is funny but turned up to 11.

For me personally, German is really easy as I have been born German. Have you tried that as well?

I live 30km from the French border, I had 10 years worth of French classes at school. I always hated it, but I did an extra-curriculum to acquire a diploma because a classmate and friend of mine didn't want to do it alone. My French is in a weird spot: I cannot form a proper sentence, but I understand listening exercises and written text well. I recently started to go through some French lessons on Duolingo and I'm already struggling with the sentences it expects me to form in unit 8...

I'm also Dutch and honestly I think part of it is the amount of subtitled English tv I watched when I was young. I tried the same with German struggled finding things to watch.

If you look at Germany or France they often dub over stuff while we subtitle everything.

I know what you mean. When I learned Dutch (as a German) I got close to this state quickly but after I finished uni I left the Netherlands and my Dutch has deteriorated a lot.

Besides “tho” for “though”, soundin’ hella native brah 😎

Have you tried french?

Qu'est-ce que c'est ? C'est un ver sur un mur, qui murmure des vers à côté d'un ver vert.

Then there are 98 conjugations of every verb, and 98 different groups of verbs.

Oiseau.

That reminds me of the word 'Frank,' which was used by the Byzantines to essentially mean 'all those non-Roman barbarians to the west of us' and which, after the Crusades, spread as a word across Asia meaning 'Europeans.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang

Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.

Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.

Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.

Add Finnish to the list, "kirpputori" = flea market.

thieves market

I've definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.

"Hippopotamus" is another one. It derives from the Greek words hippos (horse) and potamos (river) and this concept of river horse is present in many different languages:

• German: Flusspferd (lit. river horse)
• Dutch: Rivierpaard (lit. river horse)
• Finnish: Virtahepo (lit. stream horse)
• Danish: Flodhest (lit. flood horse)
• Chinese: 河马 (lit. river horse)
• Arabic: فرس النهر (lit. river horse)
• French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use variations of hippopotamus.

Tiny variations exist as well:

• Hungarian: Víziló (lit. water horse)
• Afrikaans: Seekoei (lit. sea cow)

Unimportant extra: it's not a calque in British English, because we don't use it (to the best of my knowledge). Like a potluck, we have the concept but not a word for it, and we don't use the American phrases either

We have a car boot sale, but that's literal

There's probably regional exceptions

Vlooienmarkt in Dutch, also literally flea market.

Edit: Nvm, I'm blind, I see you already mentioned it.

It’s almost like most of those languages you mentioned, had their speakers go everywhere around the world, approximately 500 years ago, and they colonized most of the world, causing many places around the world to use similar idioms…

Similar to this?

bro typing in calligraphy 💀

Your language is weird and fucked up in its own ways, but something like 1.5 billion people know English and most of them as a second language.

No, it was imported from German. Frisian and Dutch have "lienwurd" and "leenwoord" too (also calqued from German)

English is a Germanic language, with a lot of it's vocabulary imported from a Romance language (French). Hilarity ensues.

Loanword came into the language around 1860 so it is a claque. If it had been in the vocabulary since old-english then it would just be an evolved version of the German root.

What i found very difficult in english is the fact that there's no rule on how to pronounce words; you have to learn how to pronounce each word individually. which means that you might know how a word is written and what it means while not being able to recognize it when listening to someone speaking in english.

That's what I've heard in general from people, surprisingly

You must resent every single natural human language then, since all of them show the exact same kinds of irregularities, for the most part.

And, if we all did decide to use Esperanto because it's regular (and therefore artificial), irregularities would inevitably be introduced within a single generation, because the nature of human language is to change, and that change will always result in irregularity.

You're correct, but try to see it as permission to speak English your own way rather than getting frustrated attempting to speak "correct" English, a fiction which has never existed despite the efforts of generations of stuffy English teachers. There's been "English as spoken by the privileged class" but it's no more correct than any other version and breaks as many of its own rules as any other patois or dialect.

Also has millions of people ready to correct your pronunciation of a word that is written completely randomly compared to how it's spoken.

That has a lot to do with it being a Germanic language that borrows a huge amount of words from a Romance language (specifically French). So sometimes the rules resemble German, sometimes the rules resemble French, and the rest of the time is all about how it branched in a different direction than German did.

While that's likely true now, English has been "three languages in a trenchcoat" from the beginning and survived on theft ever since. Every word entry in the dictionary lists what other language it was taken from, or who invented it, usually as a joke. (For instance one of the possible sources of OK or Okay is a joke-misspelling of All Correct.)

Well yes, but you could say that about basically every science, not just linguistics. I can think of at least three such cases in German and more specifically German law.