Heroes

You don't have to blur fucking on Lemmy.
- Unblur the fucking! Unblur the fucking!
  
  Me to the Japanese every day.
  
  Someone beat you to it but they deleted their comment :(
- ^fucking!
- This is almost certainly copied from Facebook, not blurred especially for Lemmy.
  
  They should unblur it before posting it here.
  
  No doubt mate.
- I'll say fudge-diddly-darn if I want to and you can't stop me.
  
  Lookout guys, we got a badbutt over here.
- I love that it's blurred like a Japanese adult comic, enough to say technically, but not enough that you can't literally see everything.
- Difference in kind. Tag that shit mate.

The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl. jachten), which means "hunt", and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
- We also use the word for hunting in fighter jets (jachtvliegtuig = hunt airplane, straaljager = jet hunter), imagine Dutch being as influential now as is was then; we'd have yacht airplanes.
- Yes, and a Polish person tells me this is the correct way to make the Yah sound at the start of the English word, yacht.
  I imagine it's the same for the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Though perhaps not for the French or Spanish.
  
  fun fact: the word "Yacht" derives from old german "Jagd", which means hunt, it was used by the dutch as "Yacht" and the fast sailing boats got their names from there. But basically, all germanic, slavic and romantic languages pronounce the vowels the same way EXCEPT english, where they fuck up literally every single vowel
- Yacht is also feminine in german (instead of the more pleasing das Yacht...) for the same reason as you say:
  https://lemmy.ml/post/31227837/19058439
  (thanks to @ephera@lemmy.ml and @barsoap@lemmy.ee for the explanations)
  
  Das Yacht sounds pleasing to you? I can understand why, given das Schiff, das Boot, etc.*, but I much prefer die Yacht, because of die Macht. Can I ask if you’re a native speaker/like native (for example if you learned German from age three in school) or a nonnative speaker?
  I ask because I’m a nonnative German teacher and there are certain geni that bother basically all nonnative speakers (das Lob should clearly be der Lob, for example) but don’t stand out to native speakers and I’m very interested in the language sense that people develop as native vs nonnative speakers.
  die Fregatte, die Trireme, und die Galeone unter anderen sind aber auch weiblich und sind auch Fremdwörter für bestimmte Arten Schiffe.
  
  As in English.
  Why are Yachts called she
  
  TIL that Jägermeister and Yacht have the same root.
  Linguistics is fun and weird.

Monolinugal people thinking that the pronounciation of some rare words is the big issue when learning languages...
Dude, try memorizing the correct grammatical gender for every single noun or every single exception to regular declinations. And that's just for a medium-difficulty language like German.
You know how there's simple English versions of news articles? The same thing exists with German. And the language in these Simple German articles is more difficult than the regular English version.
English is THE easy mode language of the world, which is why e.g. pretty much anyone in Europe defaults to it if they are speaking to anyone who speaks a different native language. Like, if someone from Austria speaks with someone from Ukraine, they will use English.
- i mean, no, the reason english is the default language of the world is due to (british, and then american) imperialism
  french and latin were once the default languages of europe for the same reason
  and how hard a language is to learn is kinda irrelevant, because it will always depend on what language(s) you already know. for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
  
  "for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem"
  Not necessarily. I'm German and I still have to learn French grammatical genders by heart, because they don't necessarily match ours. Familiarity with the concept doesn't make it any easier, just less weird.
  Example: The tower. LA tour, feminine. DER Turm, masculine.
  
  but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem
  Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.
  The problem is not wrapping your mind around the concept of grammatical genders, but that you have to memorize them for every word. And they are different in any language with grammatical gender.
  For example:
  Italian: La luna (female), il sole (male)
  German: Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)
  or
  German: Das Huhn (neuter)
  Italian: il pollo (male)
  Spanish: la gallina (female)
  Knowing the grammatical gender of something in one language won't help you one bit when learning another language. In fact, it might be even detrimental, because it's different in every language.
  
  The ideia of gramatical gender is kept, but the specific genders may be different, so it's still pretty hard
  At least that's how I felt when learning spanish or french
  
  lol that's just so blatantly wrong
- try memorizing the correct grammatical gender
  Americans don't memorize all that shit for English either. We just start using words. German is the same. Don't try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
  And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
  
  Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either.
  ... because it doesn't exist in English. Of course you don't remember things that don't exist.
  Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.
  Yep. That's why you can pick out every American stumbling through German even after they spent 20 years in the country, because they can't get any of the things that you have to memorize right.
  And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.
  If you think that what they teach in American schools in German, then maybe. But seriously, pronunciation is so not the hardest part about learning languages.
  And as I said, German isn't even a hard language either. That goes to e.g. Finnish or Hungarian (at least for western languages). But English is an easy mode language.
  
  What the fuck do you think learning vocabulary by reading is, if not memorization? You're just doing it subconsciously rather than intentionally.
- English is THE easy mode language of the world
  English isn't easy at all. It's an obnoxiously difficult, confusing, and contradictory mash up of half a dozen Mediterranean languages.
  If you want an easy language, learn Esperanto. If you want a business language learn English.
  
  Tell me you are an English Monolingual without telling me you are an English Monolingual.
- Well, they all speak it in western Europe because it is the language of the victors of WWII, and is since taught in schools.
  We have English from class 5 (mandatory), French or Latin from class 7 (mandatory), then, optional, Latin or French (whatever you did not take) from class 9, and something like Italian or Spanish from class 11. Some schools offer wider selection like Polish or Russian, or even Greek like they did in my nephews school.
- I don’t get why people keep saying German is harder to learn than english. I struggled much more learning english as a second language than German.
- English is THE easy mode language of the world
  hahahaha, no, it is not. A significant amount of words are ambiguous if isolated from their context (take "fire": as in fire a shot, a flame, fire a worker, "this is fire"?), pronunciation is all over the place, it feels like there are more exceptions than rules when it comes to past-present-future verbs
  
  Only someone who has never learned a second language thinks that this is difficult or somehow special to English.
  
  Šovė į kažką = shot someone, šovė į orkaitę = put in oven. This is pretty common for all languages words can have multiple meanings.
  
  The old man the boat.
  Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
  Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
  
  Lol the english monolinguals. Hungarian "Lóg"=to hang, "lóg az iskolából"=to skip school. Extremely common thing in every language. Also most languages are irregular just to different extents. English irregularity is mainly in some of the past tense forms and spelling. I would count gender as an irregularity(depending on how it works in the language) which english doesnt have for example. English doesnt have cases which are another struggle for a lot of people learning languages. Then there are languages that are not as irregular, but they have extremely complicated internal logic which is just harder to learn than just learning by a case by case basis. Id put hungarian here where there are usually reasons for why things happen but it just got lost in an older version of hungarian or its so complex theres no point to learning it. Also there are things that do actually seem to be completely fucking random and are even annoying as a native speaker.
  
  That is how all languages works.

I'm so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn't.
Imagine bad language on the internet.
- Capitalism is ruining our greatest gift, language.
  We have a whole ass generation growing up having to learn to use weird euphemisms for everything and anything remotely controversial and it's totally normal to them. If I were really conspiracy-minded I would be screaming how "They" are doing this on purpose so they can better control us... but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we're not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it's just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
  
  but my sad, matured understanding of the world has taught me that nobody is in charge, we’re not a smart enough species to create that kind of functional hierarchy, it’s just consequence of systems we collectively refuse to change.
  This is absolutely correct. It's so tiring to hear people constantly misattribute the fundamental consequences of the machine itself to some mysterious cabal of operators.
  But for the rest, eh. Always has been. Kids have always been censored by parents and authority figures. They find their way around it and evolve the language with each new generation.
  For example, the youths have taken to the words "raw dog" in the funniest way. It's some kind of reverse euphemism for "without the help of drugs" - the most offensive way possible to say something innocuous and wholesome.
  Like, "I raw dogged my date last night" means "I decided to stay sober despite my insecurities"
  I'm terrified of the impact the onset of LLM's will have on our already failing education systems and willfully ignorant culture, but not because of the censors.
- It's to prevent an algorithm from deranking the content, not to prevent humans from seeing it. Obviously pointless on the Fediverse, but many people do it on other social media platforms.
  
  And the algorithm is programmed to follow particularly American puritanical values, as they are aimed at the American consumer market, but of course on account of the universal nature of the internet, we all get to enjoy the results of it now.
  
  No shit!

This sound like something someone who only speaks English would say.
- Yeah, it is an extremely typical native English speaking monolinguist take. They always manage to find examples that are common in basically all languages and assuming it is some esoteric English language quirp.

As someone who learned English in school, I can assure you that the word "yacht" is rather at the bottom of the list of troubles.
See: "The Chaos" (poem)
- https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
  It's way longer than I remember. I think I only ever saw an abridged version or something.
  
  Wow. That is a beast. Definitely showcases some of the finer points of our weird language.
  
  I think there are at least three versions from the original author, IIRC.

Hm the word yacht is easy, it means Jacht :-)
- Now pronounce it
  
  Like yogurt without the 'ur'
  
  Just like it's spelled if you omit the "ch" because English people are unable to fathom unusual digraphs.
  
  It is pronounced pretty much the same way in a number of different languages.
  
  https://voca.ro/1j3aWaVZBOPo

removed please:
Skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse
Welcome to Danish.
- Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän. Actual word for an actual job that existed until 1991. Welcome to German.
  
  German is wild! I never managed to get I to stick.
  
  eh people always point to German but they just use compound words more often. if you know the parts that make up the word it shouldn't be hard to parse.
  
  What does that mean
- Hottentottententententoonstelling in Dutch. It means hottentot tent exhibition
  
  Elektriciteitsproductiemaatschappij or basically electricity producing company.
  
  I prefer "angstschreeuw" as word to annoy foreigners with. 7 consonants in a row!
- I mean I have no idea what that means but I bet it breaks down into something resembling a good descriptor. English causes issues with four letter words with two O's in the middle.
  
  It's a medical term or word or whatever. But it is not easy to pronounce at all. That's the thing with Danish. We have a lot of letters that are silent or changes sound depending on what letters they are next to and sometimes just because.
  Even if you have skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse broken down for you, I doubt you'd be able to pronounce it correctly because several repeat letters in that word are pronounced differently and some of them are silent.
  Words like: ord, ost, mos, mos and orden all have vastly different ways of pronouncing the o and mos and mos are completely different words with completely different pronunciations where you can literally only tell which one it is based on context in the text. By themselves, you will not know.
  Every language has their little quirks like that, but everybody knows how to pronounce yacht as yacht is the word for fancy boat in many languages. The post above is basically like being impressed that a foreigner knows how to pronounce "okay".
- "Sentinel lymph node examination." Probably not a word that comes up much day-to-day.
  
  Nope, but it does come up if you get tested for breast cancer.
  Point is, that yacht isn't a difficult word at all. Especially not if you're European, since the word for yacht in many European languages is... yacht.
- Fascinating- I don’t speak Danish but I can _almost_read that. Enough to assume it has to do with thyroids and lymph nodes.
  
  It is a medical word for getting tested for breast cancer. I didn't bring it up because it is a difficult word to understand, but because it is difficult to pronounce correctly without stumbling over it. Yacht is not difficult in any way since our word for yacht is also yacht and because the spellings and sounds are pretty common in for example German, which is another language we are being taught from an early age.
  Of course, all languages and their difficulties are relative depending on where in the world you live, but if you're European, especially western European, then it is pretty silly to be impressed that people can pronounce yacht.
  Having a long word like skildvagtslymfeknudeundersøgelse is a lot more tricky since it's a bit of a tongue twister to pronounce and if you aren't well versed in Danish, you will also not know when or how to pronounce each letter, as several of them have different sounds or no sounds at all at different places in the word. That is why I brought it up.
- I see your Danish and raise you a German bureaucracy:
  Rindfleischettikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
  It means: Law for the transfer of the task of the monitoring of the labelling of beef.
- I googled. I understand none of the results but it looks like that's an actual word 🤯

When I learned that the proper pronunciation of the word queue is basically a letter q followed by a bunch of silent letters, I had to take a break for a while. I enjoy the sound of English language, so that kept me going afterwards, but I am still salty.
- I once heard a native English speaker pronounce it as "the printer kweeyee."
- You can thank the French for that one.
- Keu.

- k
- Think I found the version Lemmy really wants

In a sick way I'm glad it's the language I was raised with. On the other hand, maybe the British should have conquered less.
- I feel the same just for German. English is the simpleton language of the world. Nothing complicated about learning it.
  
  Meanwhile I learned this weekend how to pronounce "dandelion" from watching a Beavis and Butthead clip. And I haven been speaking English for decades, in both professional and social settings.
- A friend, originally Hungarian but speaks numerous languages describes English as "easy to speak, hard to write".
  We really need a do-over with a better alphabet that allows a reader to know exactly how a word is said - one letter, one sound. Of course, I realise that it's far too late to work - even on our tiny island we can't agree on how words are pronounced.
  
  LOL, do you have any idea how many times that's been tried?
- On the other hand, maybe the British should have conquered less.
  If the Brits didn't, the French would have. Or the Germans. Or the Spaniards. Etc. I'm not going to shame the British for being especially good at conquering when conquering was in vogue.
  
  Right?
  What do people think the French and Spanish were doing?
  It's like they forget that Spain financed Columbus, and it was Spain that rampaged through what is now Central America, and destroyed all the works (who knows how much of history was lost?) of the Mayans and Aztecs.
  Spain then went on to install Maximillion as king of Mexico.
  There's a lot more in between there that I've forgotten, but holy hell the Conquistadors put the English to shame when it comes to outright brutality and destruction.

Uncensored.
Just do a search for a bit of the text before posting this stuff. It's super easy to find the uncensored version.
POST THAT. Let's kill off this censored trash.
- The generation growing up right now have no idea that this is abnormal and their eyes just glide over this corporate-pandering censorship and euphemisms that we oldies see and know are utterly idiotic like "unalive" and "sewer slide" and "PDF file."
  Seriously, this is setting in, in a few generations the English language will be unrecognizable. The words will be the same, but the way they're used will be incomprehensible.
  Language changes, this is normal, it's just weird seeing it deliberately altered by forces of capital.
  
  Yeah, I have no issue with newer generations mangling language - but doing it because capitalism? Gross. Don't stand for that shit.

Though he aught to have picked a tougher word.
- *ought (whoosh?)
  
  Lol I can't even spell my own language
- So you thought.

So.... No one in here has tried to learn Mandarin in here huh?
Let's talk about Hanji, heck worse let's talk about:
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十；
\ 谁把十四说“十适”，就打他十四；
\ 谁把四十说“适十”，就打他四十
Which is pronounced like:
sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí;
\ shéi bǎ shísì shuō “shíshì”, jiù dǎ tā shísì,
\ shéi bǎ sìshí shuō “shìshí”, jiù dǎ tā sìshí.
- This is China-nese. Original Chinese, its
  四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十；誰把十四說“十適”，就打他十四；誰把四十說“適十”，就打他四十
  
  Thank you for helping my point. Also.... Aaaaaa... Why is the so many characters?!
- Oh this is the lion rock pasta cave thing?
  
  I don't know all the words in this, but I doubt it; it's a classic Chinese tongue twister.
  The first line translates to "four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty. On the second & third line it's something along the lines of "whoever says 40/14 says X>, sth> 40/14", as far as I can tell.

To be fair, most of the weirdly spelled words come from other languages. Especially French.
- Yup, in this case: Yacht comes from the Dutch word "jacht" (hunt). Named after fast sailing vessels to hunt down pirates and enemies.
  
  And "yacht" or variations of it are used in the exact same way in a lot of other languages. It is really an exceptionally unfortunate example the monolinguistic OOP chose to be their point.
  
  hear here. and now we're building the largest yacht for bazos
- Sure we did that. But look at how you spell and pronounce them ! What a slaughter.
  
  French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this
- Brings back a fun memory. On a business trip in France, I was driving and with my coworker (French national).
  I had the GPS set to English pronunciation of the signs etc. My coworker spent most of the two hour drive a complaining about the pronunciation and begging to change the settings. I spent the trip laughing my ass off at him and refusing to change it.

Instant downvote, you know why...
- I genuinely don't, can you elaborate?
  
  The half-assed censoring of "fucking". (People have just been getting annoyed of how silly and prevalent the attempts are)
- Ironic.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

I can hear a word in Spanish and immediately know how to spell it. I can read a word in Spanish and know how to pronounce it. We can only dream of doing that in English.
- Yeah but in English you can be self-satisfyingly smug about changing your spelling whether the original post is British, Canadian, American, Australian, or New Zealand English, even though nobody will notice or give a shit.
  
  I hadn't thought of the artistic license angle.

Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。
- I mean, that's just because Europeans (and places Europeans colonized) are not used to tonal languages. I started leaning mandarin recently, and while the tones take some getting used to, they are quite clear to differentiate
- They are not all the same sound. And that is very important in Mandarin.

As a person who learned English as an adult, u can tell you that the word that gave me the most trouble early on was "weather". I mean these sounds are impossible!!
- oh you mean whether
  
  both weather and whether. I mean they sound the same. also "w" and "th" sounds are hard to pronounce.

My favorite has to be "read" (to read a book) and "read" (previously read a book)
- What about the fact that 'set' has several hundred different definitions?

It's what it's
- I dislike you

I was gonna mention the silent k, h, e but then I remember french. They have like 50% silent letters at random. I remember how flabbergasted I was to see millefeuille written the first time.
- the pastry?

Fuck censorship.

Relevant "Raymond Luxury Yacht" Monty Python sketch https://youtu.be/tyQvjKqXA0Y

I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it's easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
- As a Hungarian I can confirm. We mostly read words letter-by-letter. No weird shit like "rebel" and "rebel" sounding different because one is a noun, other is a verb 🤡
  Or "queue", are you drunk, English? And the native speakers' favourite mixups, "there" and "their", "it's" and "its".
  
  You can blame the French for "queue", it was like that when we got it.

We have a park here...
Champoeg state park.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champoeg,_Oregon
Sham-pooie.
Because in Old Dutch, the letter g is pronounced like a y when it's at the end of a word.
- Old English you mean? I'm Dutch and I've never heard of a word where g is pronounced like y in Dutch
  
  Nope, Old Dutch. Same for names like Solveig.
- I'd have assumed that was a native name tbh
  
  Stemmed from Native, but the spelling is Old Dutch. :)

That's because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question "when you boat go water?" is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.
Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn't incentivise you to learn. It's something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.
- Very true. I was born in Brazil and thus learned Portuguese as my first language. Then moved to the US when I was five. My parents sat me down in my grandparent's basement and taught me English, it had to be done quick as school was starting very soon. Many years later I would return to Brazil and spent three months there. Starting with crude vocabulary and building it up as I went, over hundreds of interactions. The best way to learn a language, is out of necessity. Whether it really does hinge on you being able to communicate with others or if self-imposed. I wish more people saw it as something that must be done. Unfortunately, Google Translate enables laziness.

The word for yacht is jacht in Dutch, so that one's easy.
What makes it slightly harder is that jacht can also mean hunt.
However, the hardest part of learning English when you're Dutch is trying not to sound like Mark Rutte.
- Louis van Gaal has entered the chat.

English is just Esperanto with no rules.

As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"
- As a native English speaker I can pronounce English words I've never seen before pretty easily. I'd say that there is a general system to it, but it just has a metric fuckton of exceptions. Though to be honest, it's not really all that different from having to learn the genders for every single noun in gendered languages coming from a non-gendered language. At least pronunciation in English follows a certain kind of logic (albeit one heavily influenced by loanwords). Gendering of nouns has always seemed completely arbitrary and is just straight memorization.
  
  Yeeeah maaaybe still I would think that at least in my language is easier in english seems to be more crazy maybe I'm biased IDK.
  See gendering in spanish has a general rule with few exceptions
  Ends with -N, -O, -R, -S, -L, -U -I 99% chance of Male gendering
  Ends with A, -DAD, -TAD, -ED, -SION, -CIÓN, -DEZ, -TIS, -IZ 95% female gendering. Some words that end with -MA, -PA and -TA can be male many exceptions there watch out. Now you would be asking there should be many more endings to words... And I'd say male gender for everything unless the subject is established to be female. Now yes there are tricky ones that change the meaning with the gender
  El cura - the priest
  La cura - the cure
  El papá - the dad (note it also has a tilde)
  La papa - the potato
  I believe anyway the ambiguos ones are not many really if they are more than a hundred I'd be surprised more than 2 hundred nearly impossible but I'm no linguist.
  Now I think this would be a summed up version of the rule but I'd say is pretty close to the thing and fits a paragraph, personally for what I've seen I think the hard thing is getting used to handle gendering without thinking in gender. That's confusing for many English speakers and some Japanese complaint bout the same.
- I have advice below if you’re interested, but if you’re just ranting, that’s totally fair and feel free to ignore the rest.
  Honestly, just treat English as a pictographic language. The pronunciation rules have so many exceptions, that you can either get well informed about the history of English spelling and the etymology of new vocabulary, or you can just assume the spelling is decoupled from the pronunciation. Spelling is probably less important than pronunciation generally (though it depends on how you use English) because spellcheck is pretty good nowadays.
  
  or you can just assume the spelling is decoupled from the pronunciation.
  Yeah that's what I did basically. It's a good advice at the end of the day.

What about thought, through, tough, though... wtf?! It took me many many years to finally understand this crazyness lol
- you forgot thorough and trough
  
  of course lol

Mandarin
50 000 characters used to live here

Lol in Polish

I remember when I was a kid and we started learning foreign languages in school. My class got divided into two halves, ones that study English and other that study German. Few month later I was walking down the street with my classmate and he went like:
Oh, so you're studying English, huh? What does DUHR mean?
What?
DUHRR
Oh, you mean door? It's spelled do-o.
Bro, there's an R in there and two O's. DUHR. Even I know that, and I'm not even the one studying English. If door was do-o, then would you spell TOH DOH as "to do"?
Little did the bro know... I hope he at least got German well enough, AFAIK there's little bullshit like that

Also, how do you pronounce 'stingy'... 'Raphael'...
- "Raphael" is of Hebrew origin. Can't fault English for that one.
  
  Can't really fault English for nearly all of it.
  Much of the difficulty comes from the fucked-up French language, courtesy of the Norman Invasion in 1066.
  So we're talking about a nearly 1000-year old thing here.

It's easier than Dutch at least
- Lol absolutely not
  Dutch is a normal, sane language like any other
  English is a clusterfuck. Simple on the surface but a complete mess underneath
  
  I think English native speakers are heavily overestimating the weirdness of their own language and severely underestimating the weirdness of other languages.
  Sincerely, a German.
  
  Dutch is also a complete clusterfuck with no ryme or reason half the time

Tough, though and thorough were a major step for me back in the days...I never knew which one was which nor how to spell them, I felt so frustrated!

It's the same word in my native language.

I think "Eunuch" might be a worse offender of this
- Not really, the only thing that is harder to pronounce is the 'ch'

Oiseau
- Oiuwotm8
- Oh hi Mark
- its funny how people hold that word as a super complicated and incomprehensible word even tho it’s perfectly regular and follows basic rules

Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of "Simone Giertz" from Sweeden whose name's pronunciation sounded like 'yecht' to me.

Shit like this is why I doubt it when people say you can learn English by learning the spelling of sounds, because no you can’t.

I did that unintentionally. Cmon.

Yacht
All Yakked Up

Try looking up "colloquially". That's going to be a rabbit hole. Oh, speaking of. Idioms. English is one of the hardest languages to learn.