English is Harder Than You Think 

I swear I thought I was going insane

Geniuses tend to think the same way, yk

@@Kimo_uwu Kind, thank you.

?

He doesn't. He just made up "what you think."

Until the end

I'm an English teacher and I've been teaching about this.

Then there is the difference between the spoken and written English. Not counting spelling, which is a whole different beast.

@@Delgen1951 purely in regional variations. Generally, text reflects speech.

@@crystalmuffyn The comment says “ not JUST the spelling” as in, not exclusively spelling. You can’t talk about how weird English is without including the spelling lol. But we’re glad he included some of the other weirdness as well.

in the words of Tom Scott: if you stress the wrong syLLAble, you'll sound ridiCULous

Stress is actually phonemic in English with words liek "incite" and "insight" being differentiated in speech exclusively by which syllable gets stressed. Of course this also doesn't cover cases where stress changes the actual vowel itself (usually into a schwa).

@@angeldude101 Stress is even used for derivation in English! There's "initial stress-derived nouns", where you have a noun-verb pair that's only distinguished by the stress moving to the initial syllable for the noun: You suspéct a súspect, reprínt a réprint, invíte somebody with an ínvite... That one catches non-native speakers out a lot because you can't see it in writing and it's also just weird.

@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs "invite" is one of those weird words like "like" and "friend" what happened to "invitation", "appreciation", and "make friends"

@@notwithouttext appreciate has a different vibe to like. The language is increasing the nuance of emotional expression.

Have you ever heard of the flying purple people eater? lmao

At least you have an excuse, I still can't speak English properly and it's my only language. I can do Algebra, geometry, history and basic physics with little effort and still get between 87 and 92% correct. Even with my best effort one year in high school I failed English class with 69%. But because I tried and I completed 79 out of my 80 homework assignments for the year my teacher was kind enough to pass me with a 70%. So although it might not be saying much I bet you're English is better than a lot of Americans. Have a nice day.

I'm also native Russian speaker, and when I was a kid I've called Empire State Building "Employee State Building". I didn't understand why my teacher was laughing her ass off, but in retrospect, yes, I think that was funny

You just solved racism with that second one

Ok, but imagining as you a little kid messing up "purple" and "people" sounds cute hehe.

As a former English teacher who taught a good many students in Korea (mostly adults), I feel obligated to tell you that your English is very good.

But every one take that as gospel , even the Chinese will claim Chinese is the more difficult language to learn.

Don't feel bad about not being grammatically perfect and don't worry about not knowing how to pronounce a word correctly. having traveled all over the English speaking world I've come to realize the best rule of thumb to go by when speaking English is If you say whatever you're thinking with confidence, people will understand what you mean and won't really realize your "mistakes" 👍

Dude i'm literate in portuguese, english, and spanish (even doe i don't quite remember spanish quite well). Fucking hell i hate kanji, fuck that bro, fuck that. I tried learning japanese but i can't wrap my head around kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are okay and makes sense in my head but what the hell man why everything has to be written in a different way (talking about kanji)? Just use goddam hiragana but noooooooooo, different kanji with same pronounciation means different things, by rule you just can't infer meaning from context cause you need the kanji. I have to learn a new word and learn how to write it's fucking ideogram. Whyyyyyyyyy? 😭😭😭😭😭 Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg and my arm... even my fingers... the body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting. It's like they're all still there. (Ofcourse i'm being overly dramatic for comical reasons and i might just said things that are wrong, bear that in mind. I love category V languages but fuck ideograms, i guess i'm just too dumb for that.)

​@@NirousPlayers as a Chinese advanced student (almost C2) and having studied up to intermediate Japanese at University, a trick I use to remember Kanji/Hanzi is to think of them as pictures. I know it might look "useless", but remembering the meaning of the radicals (most of times, not always) can really help you remember words because they repeat themselves too often. For example, 穿 (chuán) in Chinese means "to wear", if you split its radicals or "parts" you've got: 穴 (xué, which means cave or hole), and 牙 (yá, tooth/teeth), so I picture a little mouse boring into a piece of clothes with its little teeth. So when I want to remember and write 穿 I don't think only about it's physical shape, but with the image of a mouse sticking its head out of a hole in a tiny piece of clothes. Indeed, 穴 (xué) is also used in other common words like "穷" (qióng, strong). for which I picture a strong caveman in a cave. Also, something that happens in Chinese but not so often in Japanese (only with Onyoumi readings), is that some Hanzi/Kanji radicals/"parts" can tell you the approximate pronunciation. As an example, continuing with 穴(xué, hole or cave), the word 空 (kong, air or space) is formed with radicals 穴 and 工 (gong, work or skill), so I just add a radical to a Hanzi I already know. These are my tricks for remembering Kanji and Hanzi, I hope they were useful!

As a learner of Polish, I would agree. But it's words like chrząszcz, źdźbło, wstrząsnąć, krnąbrny and bezwzględny that make Polish fun. 😁

as a speaker of spanish that knows english and is studying russian, yalls consonants are wack

Polish has a slightly higher than normal amount of consonant clusters for a Slavic language, but I feel some of Polish having too many of them is due to large amounts of digraphs involving "z" like "sz", "cz", and of course "szcz" (something we, your south-easternly neighbors, convey with the single letter щ). This is far from "worst", of course. Georgian is most obvious - "marjvniv", "martkshinv", "stsori", and many others. I also heard a bit about Salishian languages, but the Nuxalk word "clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts", meaning "he had had a bunchberry plant", is brought up often for its masses of obstruent consonants. English is by far not the most cluster-convoluted language - and some of them, like initial "pt" or "ts", get routinely simplified ("pterodactyl" having a silent "p" is part of a joke, even though "pt" is among most routine clusters for Slavic language speakers). But, there are indeed also languages that have even less clusters - Japanese and Polynesian languages included, but also many Semitic and Mon-Khmer languages, and Finnish.

@@TSBoncompte Bro you ain't bouta tell me you're not a native English speaker with a sentence like that

@@user-qd8yy9lc4g Georgian has worse consonant clusters, for example "gvprtskvni" and "gvprtkhlvni".

of good correct comment up agree laugh due funny

@@gregoryford2532 what is IPA? Oh, international phonetic alphabet

India pale ale 😂

The internet exists. This has been easy to find and do correctly in a prepared setting like a recorded video for well over a decade now.

​@@rogerwilco2 We are just not used to people doing that, because nobody gives an excrement. Not too long ago, RU-vid gave me a (german) ad in which that the English word "intimate" was one of just two words in the BRAND NAME ITSELF and they pronounced it "in-tea-mate" in the refridgerating ad that they spent thousands of Euroes on. That was when I learned that smaller content creators mispronouncing gömböc or kierteishäntäkarhu is really not that big of a deal.

@@rogerwilco2 Hey now, hold on, practice with the internet does not make pronunciation universally easy. If you've never encountered a sound that you need to pick away at for days or weeks to get right, you're an extreme exception. Most people will have certain sounds they just can't nail down in a reasonable amount of time, and I don't think a fair response to that would be, "well, spend an unreasonable amount of time."

I know, I honestly became more appreciative of English after this video

Tbh I don't really know the rules. All I do just listen. If it sounds right then it's probably correct.

@@sahasavadmangkhaseum5455 You don't need to know the rules to be fluent, you must understand them.

It just seems so rudimentary and obvious lol

I was born speaking English and I still get a lot of stuff wrong, or use things kinda vaguely when i don't really understand why certain things are used when. heh

One thing I will say for English speakers is that we’re generally very tolerant of accents. Not even/only in a conscious way, but in that part of what it means to speak English is to be able to navigate General American English, RP, AAVE, regional US and British+Irish accents, and then the accents of all the L2 speakers out there.

@@0xyd You're both right and wrong there 😅 you're right that you can totally get away with substituting standard English 'r' with Scottish 'r' (I guess depending on the situation? You'd obviously be most successful in Scotland haha) and as a linguist I wholeheartedly agree with speaking in whatever way is most natural for you. However, for a lot of English learners, they want to sound like speakers from England or America, and in those dialects, the "r" sound is quite tricky. We only really pronounce it one way that I know of, though some of us (hello England natives) drop it in certain contexts, like the end of a word. So it's challenging to learn!

Yeah, that sound is exceedingly rare in terms of how many languages it appears in, but 2 of said languages happen to be the 2 most widely spoken in the world. Living in France, I used to hear it as some kind of /w/ which also seems to be a stereotypical feature of how children speak in the English-speaking world.

As a native speaker who had to have speech therapy for years….English sounds are NOT easy 😭

@@FairyCRat Dat wascawy wabbit!

Well learning Spanish as a Mandarin speaker is rather painful

I laughed a lot when watching the video and wandering in random comments, and when reading your comment, as an native Chinese I smiled and later started thinking about the question. Then I realize, indeed, measure words are difficult - I took a while thinking about it (and hope it may help), yet even got myself confused. I'm so used to the system just like got used to heartbeats and blood flow, but how to explain it to other people? Well, I still got a key that works for me hours later and hope this may work for you too. When using measure words, Chinese people think about the item measuring and its related feelings, then categorize it to confirm which word to use. For example, "a bunny doll" may be "一个兔子玩偶" or “一只兔子玩偶”, the different is which category you put it in. The speaker may be slightly more focused on "兔子(bunny)" part and use the "small animal catagory" measuring word "只", or vice versa, slightly focusing on "玩偶(doll)" part and using 个, which is "general put-everything-in catagory" and also explains your question... It's all right to confusing about using it, just like I may have a pile of tense errors in this comment, nobody would laugh at you in China for it as most Chinese don't quite care about it either. The question "when to use 个" is hard, yet it would be easier to answer "when not to use 个", as most times Chinese use the most specified measure word. For example, in ”一台冰箱“ a fridge, "一台彩电" a TV, the measure word 台 indicates the item is heavy but still movable and probally electronic item, "一口锅" a pot, ”一口井“ a well, word 口 indicates it's big (usually more than half meter in diameter), round and hallow item. But when it comes to ”电饭锅“ a electric rice cooker, it's not quite big to fit "口", and it may fit ”台“ as it's electric and movable, so you may found that most Chinese say "一台电饭锅" or "一个电饭锅", and far less "一口电饭锅", which may means a huge one for diners and restaurants. And "个" most using with when comes to generally references like "一个原子" an atom, ”一个侦探“ a detective, something abstract like "一个说法" a saying, or rarely coming with demeaning someone like "一个笨侦探" a foolish detective (as contract, "一位好侦探" a good detective where ”位“ indicates praising and ”一名侦探“ a detective specified both ”一“ one and ”侦探“detective). Hope all these helps - and I also hope I did explained myself as I didn't write long in English for maybe 2 or 3 years and just found all "category" typed as "catagory" before clicking reply button *sigh*. Also I'd recommend ”汉典“ www.zdic.net/ , a huge and free online dictionary for Chinese users and learners.

A true mood lol. I don't care if I sound more like a kid, it's just easier lol.

@@kabakokawashiro2964 From what i interpret, what you said sounds kinda like grammatical gender, just more useful

"个" is a fine go-to. Measure word can make a difference in the meaning though: 一个面包 means one bread aka a loaf of bread, whereas 一片面包 means a slice of bread. Similarly 一个蛋糕 vs. 一块蛋糕 (a cake vs. a piece of cake). yì tiáo lù means a way, yì zhí lù means a deer. yí guàn jiàng means a jar of sauce, yí 点 jiàng means a bit of sauce, yí 位 jiàng means a general/commander.

I have switched to French, Spanish, German, Italian, even Greek on occasion, when people struggle and I know/figure out which language they might be more familiar with. And one case of Dutch when interacting with some people who spoke Afrikaans.

it does that because, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, Vikings, Normans, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Great Vowel shift, type setters form Belgium and the Holland. That is why, in a word history.

@@Delgen1951 English doesn’t have any borrowing from the celts or Romans tho

@@europeanenjoyer4904 *old French

@pippi2285 no borrowings from celtic languages or latin, lol, what a crazy thing to think

@@horsermchead2504 what Celtic borrowings are there.

Wait so did you watch everything in English with English subtitles or Portuguese subtitles? Just wondering since it’d be interesting to know how I can apply it to learning a language in general 🤔

It's not _completely_ random, but there are enough cases where sounds change based on what's around it (even syllables away) and where spelling is preserved from non-English languages despite using (partly) native pronunciation that it may as well be.

@@kuyaleinad4195 not OP but definitely use subtitles in the language you're trying to learn. Using subtitles in a language you don't know helps you map the spoken language to the written one, and it can make it easier to process difficult chunks of the language so you don't get lost. Subtitles in English makes it easier for your brain to skip all that nonsense and watch the movie, which is not helpful in the long run.

Yeah, the same experience. Thanks to a lot of useful content in English, it is easy to use it for "fun/work/study" and learn it by the way

Same here

Yep, the main difference with German/English is German doesn't use "do" the way English does, e.g. "do you want" is "willst du" or something, not "tun du willst". Also German puts verbs mostly on the end of a sentence, AFAIK. Plus it's even more fussy with articles (der/die/das/den/dem/des = the/of the).

@@JohnOstrowick verb goes second, and if there are two verbs, for example a helper verb like have, and another verb like seen, ie have you seen, then the verb second one is put at the end. Hast du den Hund gesehen? For ex

​@@JohnOstrowick In the main sentence, put the conjugated verb to the second position and, if existent, the unchanging verb at the end. In neighbouring sentences, put the conjugated verb at the end and, if existing, the unchanging verb right in front of it. Be aware that neighbouring sentences might substitute for a position, ergo placing the verb in the main sentence directly behind the comma. E. g.: "Dass Hunde gerne Wurst essen, haben wir alle gewusst" (We all knew that dogs like eating sausages)

Yeah but Dutch is really close to English and has similar grammar except for the "do" thing on verbs, which comes from Celtic, IIRC.

@@JohnOstrowick nah it's because all the media everyone watches is in English

@@tenzaemtade6146 It is propably both.

Weirdly, as a Swede who speaks only English and a tiny bit of Spanish I can't understand spoken Dutch at all, but I can actually sort of read it. About as "easily" as reading Danish at least, which I've never learned either but that's a very closely related language to Swedish. (Meaning I can usually get the rough meaning of half to three quarters of a text.) As a sidenote, Afrikaans is even easier to read, on the level of Norwegian. Couldn't understand a word of it spoken, but reading is pretty easy.

Unrelated, when I heard Dutch spoke at first I thought it was Queen's English with a thick German accent or German with and thick American accent, be fore i realized I didn't understand a word.

Portuguese is also quite similar, saying from experience

@@helloiamenergyman verdade, todas essas conjugações inúteis do português são pelo menos usadas mais comumente no inglês. Sério, quem usa "tu vás" em português? Such bullshit

same for portuguese

@@EggyB tambem tem verbo no futuro, tipo "Ele cantará amanha" ninguem usa verbo no futuro, é sempre "ele vai cantar amanha"

You're right. If you take enough steps back, all languages are similar. But if you're looking for something *really* similar to English, you're searching for Norwegian and Dutch. And if you want something similar to Spanish, take a gander at Latin or French.

Hear, hear! I have mentioned this in my comment. I have studied French and English as foreign languages. Rules are great. You learn a rule, internalize it and you can apply it to a thousand different times and words. English is not this way. There are a few grammar rules but most of the time, you have to memorize everything and this takes a lot of effort. In addition, this is why English learning plateau is harder than the French one. After you learn the few rules of the English language, you are an intermediate student and you need lots of learning to get to the advanced level.

Non t’as raison - l’anglais est évidement beaucoup plus facile que le français. Pour un français, la chose la plus difficile serait sans doute la prononciation.

Using French as an example of having an easier tense system is weird. French has an objectively harder tense system and the conjugations are much harder to remember.

@@shadowyzephyr Yes, but once you get the hang of it, it's easier. I mean apart from some irregular verbs (which English has many), verbs of the same group are conjugated the same way.

Back when I was in highschool, we learned a little bit of French since it is mandatory in canada, and the French accent is just something that I couldn't learn. Speaking French with a North American accent just doesn't sound right, and while the learning the conjugations and rules were hard for me, I can see how it makes more sense than in English. Like if you learned the rules it would be more applicable to the entire language as a whole, but as an English speaker, it was hard for me to learn it. That and the female and male noun stuff, but it seems English is the odd language for not doing that, my mothers tongue, Arabic, has gendered words like that. But I really don't remember much of it. I think languages are like muscles, you don't use it , you lose it. My French was never great but it is much worse now than it was back then since I've never had to use it in my life.

Yeah. As a native Russian speaker, I often find myself struggling a bit with those freaking articles. Like, how on earth should I know where to put my "the" or "a" next? I mean, yeah, sure, if we are talking not about some random butcher from street, but a specific one, widely known around the world, we will call him THE butcher. However, why did I just said "around the world"? Why is "the" there? I'm pretty sure it should be there, but why, exactly? Back in school my teacher told me that if you're writing or talking about something first time in the text/conversation you should use "a" next to it, like, "I had spotted a chicken at the back of the barn", but sometimes I see people just completely ignore that and it's really confusing, why this is the case. I consistently get C-1/C-2 ("Advanced") during tests but I still don't have a clue where it is correct to put articles and where it is not. Just kinda swinging it. Apparently, it just works. Well, most of the time, at least

@@VasiliyOgniov think of "world" as a planet. This becomes much easier then. When you talk about THE world you mean Earth world. When you say "a world" it might be some random planet or even just a concept. I never heard about using "a" when you introduce something to the dialogue. When you say "a chicken" it might be any chicken. But "the chicken" is that one specific chicken you saw somewhere or talked before or had in memory etc. You can think of it as a name when you use "the" and an object type when you use "a"

@@holesmak Oh. It does make sense, yeah. Okay, but isn't it kinda obvious that I'm talking about Earth in this context? We are yet to colonize any other planet, so when I'm saying "around the world", there is only one world to refer. However that logic ("this specific world") definitely checks up. So, "a" should be used when someone is referring to something non-specific opposed to something concrete? Is it a strict rule without exception or just a general one? Anyways, thank you for clarification

@@VasiliyOgniov you add context by adding an article. You might be talking about some fictional story or scientific discoveries and they are not limited to Earth. Also world may have different meaning. From "third world countries" to world as a solar system or even universe. So its better to clarify a bit using article. I don't know the rules myself its just something I figured out and got taught by my native English friend's. But generally yeah. I'm not aware of any exceptions but I'm sure there is

@@holesmak Thank you very much! At the very least it now kinda makes sense in my head

Yeah, might is will isi ini singli viwil littir it this piint

That’s how I feel too! To speak proper perfect textbook English is a feat most native speakers don’t even accomplish, but to speak “good enough” English is something anyone can do.

hard to master, but very easy to learn. As this video said, some ESL speakers will have a really hard time figuring out when to say "the" properly, (russians seem to just sprinkle it all over the place randomly) but it really doesn't matter at all. You can drop all "the" from the english language and it's perfectly comprehensible. And as you said, meanwhile, if you drop such a ubiquitous thing from other European languages, you may not be understood at all. It's a bit annoying when people say "english is hard", it just shows they have little foreign language experience.

I think this is what makes English make sense for the global language. Anyone who acts like they can’t understand a foreigner speaking broken english is lying.

@@moonasha i am a native russian speaker and i heard other russian speakers express the same sentiment about our own language - that we can still understand what someone means even if they get all the grammatical endings/cases/genders wrong... I dont know how true that is, just saying that as a native speaker one might have a bit of a bias there

@@jen_sa I believe it, after all English at one point had a case system and genders, and now it doesn't...я уверен если писать как этот вы ещё понять что я иметь в вид. по-мой много вещи в этот язык излишние. That should be broken enough, lol

I would agree with that. Consonants seem to be the most important thing.

My hovercraft is fooool of eels!

They tuk ma jerb!

It sucks when dealing with older people over the phones though. I used to work in call centers and people were like I wanna speak with an American when in fact I am one. 😭

Thut os trea O egrui wath yie

Honestly, I am glad that English became the lingua franca. It is not the easiest, but at least its grammar is simpler than most European language like German, french, Russian.

no, because you just learned English at a very young age. You can just do that with any language.

I learned Turkish, Russian, English at young age (plus my native language), learning German at the moment, and English feels like the easiest language in this list 😅 It has weird rules (“suggestions”), but for work and similar use cases it seems the easiest to use.

For German, you could speak without ANY declination and with SVO word order, and still be understood by native speakers. Like most languages, the hard part is learning the language fluently with perfect grammar, which i still sometimes struggle with in English after 10 years, especially pronouncing voiced consonants and using the correct past and future tenses.

@@EminMastizada English's relative easiness is also a product of its pervasiveness. There are simply far more instances where you'll be exposed to it passively and far more resources that are readily available (TV/Movies/Books etc)

Relatable

I'm sure you do a pretty good job, though it also works in reverse from a native English speaker ... the German simple past tense (does it sufficiently replace all the forms we use in English (imperfect 'was doing', etc. plus a 'once off happening' (... I did, ... did do, etc.)) ... plus the concept of a past conditional passive in a sub-clause (three or four verb bits at the end of the sentence, I've always found mind-blowing!! :) )

even if it was a small example

Had a debate last night with a guy. He said Hawaiian’s aren’t a form of Asian and I said yes they are because they are Polynesian. Hawaiians are considered a form of Asian right?

@@Checkmate777 Pacific Islander would be the term

@@eloquent_redneck3719 isn’t that Asian though? Or of Asian decent

@@Checkmate777 Pacific islander would be the term, but race is an arbitrary grouping anyway, so every category has wiggle room and overlap.

And they are all written with 5 letters

Just why, why the f***, and there arent rules to know what vowel is correct

We're taught AEIOU and sometimes Y. A: apple, agent, all E: ebony, evil I: igloo, ice, in O: otter, orange, ooze U: under, uvula Y: just copy e? I seem to be missing a lot.

8-14? My native language and the language I'm currently trying to learn (Serbian and Japanese, respectfully) have just 5 vowels total

@@AkaiAzul And how tf do they teach the other 15 sounds?

Same.

It doesn't help that spelling gives absolutely no clue as to where the stress is in a word, unlike other languages like say, Spanish which does take it into account for every single word.

@@Ramk0core Uh, no, plenty of words in Spanish have syllable stress but not all of them have the tilde where the stress is. The only ones that do have the tilde are the esdrujulas and the llanas and agudas that don't end in the correct. Llanas that don't end in n, s , or a vowel are written with an accent mark where the syllable stress is. And agudas tat don't end an consonant tat isn't n or s also have to be indicated were te stress s. It's only the exception to the rule that gets a tilde. Meaning you still need to have a grasp of the spoken language to tell where the sylable stress is or just memorize them from seeing them soi often.

@@ivetterodriguez1994 Tilde for stress? The tilde is what they use on the n letter. I think you mean acute accent like as á é í ó ú.

And it even worse for those whose native have a fixed stress. Like as always on the 1st syllable, for example.

@@ivetterodriguez1994 It's not marked for every word, but the writing system does tell you where to put the stress if you know the rules. Why don't we just mark stress for every word? I guess they wanted to save up on ink during medieval times and then it just stuck.

I'm an American, but I've talked too and listened to foreigners speak on the internet. They often say our biggest export is our culture (which includes the English language), like they say when you're watching a movie it's either from your home country, or American.

@@fasteddy9312 Exactly! I've been to more than a dozen countries and the amount of American influence is quite surprising. The last country I visited was the Philippines, and I was staying at this modern district called BGC. You can find almost all the American food chains you can think of, like Denny's, Fridays, Chili's, Krispy Kreme, Shake Shack, Buffalo Wild Wings, etc, in the Metro area. People listen to American music, watch American films, American brands is ubiquitous. Even when I studied in France back in college(2015), the movies that I've watched with my host family were American films with French subtitles. All my host brother listened to were music from American artists. And many slangs we use here in the US, a lot of the younger generation know or use. Culture is our biggest export lol

@@alistairt7544 well yeah, the Philippines was colonised by the us for quite a while (even if not officially, it was effectively colonised), hence the amount of american influence. Hell, even our government uses english more in writing and enforcing laws more than our national language. i could go on an extensive rant about how it further separates the educated and privileged from most people which contributes to the increasing gap in income and opportunity in the country, but I've rambled long enough.

@@noakinn well don’t worry about it. Now they are being colonised by the Chinese instead, so English will probably be replaced soon.

English is just the easier language in the world.

I don't know, I think Russian has several features which make it absolutely brutal for non-slavic learners, mainly the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns and the grammatical aspect of verbs.

indeed, previous to this, the "don't" negative was an emphatic one, just like the "do" affirmative is emphatic ("I DO play"). for some reason, negative emphatics have a tendency to become the standard negative in a language - it happened in French too, for instance, with "pas" initially being an emphatic adverb and then transitioning into being the main negative particle ("je dis pas", with "ne" often ignored in speech) It happens so commonly that there's even a name for it, the Jespersen Cycle!

As someone who speaks both English and Chinese fluently, this video did explain a lot of the peculiarities I did hear from my Chinese family members learning English. Also explains why I often hear people with Russian accents dropping articles.

As a Chinese speaker learning English. The video is really true to me. But one thing left is plural. We don't care that much about plural, especially when it reacts with the tense of verbs and auxiliary verbs. My brain can't just be able to run those grammar rules simultaneously when speaking.

At first when I started learning Japanese every sentence without plurals and articles felt wrong lol, especially without a plural form XD I'm more used to it now though :3

Chinese doesn't have articles but it has measure words which perform a very similar function most of the time.

@@gameragodzilla you know, for me russian accents always sounded natural speaking english. Like, when you uniformly drop the articles, it sounds like you just speak a different kind of english.

Just assume all vowels are schwa, and you won't go far wrong.

@@malcolm_in_the_middle Unless you are in the American south and or the Appalachian Mountains then just speak like Shakespeare or the King James Bible.

@@Delgen1951not everyone knows what that sounds like.

I am a native English speaker, and although I do convert random vowels into Schwa all the fucking time, DO NOT REDUCE YOUR Ts TO GLOTTAL STOPS! I know a lot of native English speakers do it, but they are A L S O D O I N G I T W R O N G A N D S O U N D H O R R I B L E! I hate when people do "wəʔ" it just sounds terrible, please don't pick up that habit from people. If you don't, you can get the dubious honor of speaking better English than them.

Whreudion

Dude I think you forgot to put "how" in the middle of "just" and "insanse"

@@dimi5862 Dude you mispelllled "insane"

@@adrianjamesgamboa5236Vude you misspelled “misspelled”

@@Forgued dude yu misspelled “dude”

@@vallano8970 dode you misspaled "you"

like "For Shore" vs "for sure" even worse in the American South where you can go "far shore to the right of the Catawampus house for a tab and get were you want to be.".

The pronunciation is the worst for me. It is so confusing when you have a language where you have very few silent lettres in a word (3 ways to lengthen a vowel: die, dehn, boot and 2 ways to shorten a consonant: heck, tritt and 3 sounds comprised of several lettres: schnee, ich, ei). Every other sound is directly linked to a lettre. No they're, there, their. No view and few. No thourough, taught, thought, through, though (I mean there is a reason why people write this one as tho: it is half as long and sounds exactly the same). The worst offender tho is any word that has a silent e at the end, because it impacts the vowel before the last consonant. Why not write write as wrait or wreit or wriet to avoid confusion with writ (a short i sound instead of the long one of write). When I hear a german word I dont have to ask myself how it is written (except for some edge cases, mostly with long i sounds or consonant clusters, like Schifffahrt, but even those follow certain rules. Also certain is a perfect example for how to avoid the silent e ending, like in octane. Except for the origin of the word there is no reason to expect one spelling over the other...). When I hear English it can happen, that when I try to look up the word I get a completely unrelated result, because I used the wrong spelling, even tho phonetically I was correct.

I think the -ough words are the toughest (see what I did there). Hard to say as a native speaker, but there’s a lot of variation as to how it is pronounced

@Giorgio Fegatini I often forget that there are people who actually try to learn the Georgian language. I do not understand why someone would do that, but I still respect the hell out of someone who makes even a small bit of progress in what I imagine to be a VERY painful process.

​@@steggyweggy True, learning to pronounce the -ough words is rough, and I've certainly had a tough time with it. No matter how thoroughly I tried, it was never enough. I've come to accept that some words can only be learned through trial and error. Although there may be a useful rule somewhere, it probably would have too many exceptions for anyone to care. Unless we have some kind of breakthrough in language learning, we'll have to stick with the rigorous process of watching English movies and talking to English-speaking people. Although it's not efficient, it definitely is fun.

@@xunqianbaidu6917 Yeah, I get that the point of the video was mostly to tell native English speakers that the stuff they find basic and intuitive may not be so for everyone. Which is nice but I think it's also interesting that despite all this, I still think English is one of, if not the easiest to learn as a foreign language.

Fellow hungarian here. I studied german in high school and I found the gender system very hard, especially because the grammar is very heavily based on it (den or dem). Whats the gender of a noun? I know there are some rules, but it seems like there is no system and its a guessing game. Contrast that with spanish, only 2 genders, easily differentiated with some exceptions, and it doesnt really play a role in the grammar.

also, in english, you don't have to change the number of the other things that refer to the noun (except for verbs). you don't say "thes beautifuls girls", you say "the beautiful girls".

The way I’ve often heard it put is that English is easy to learn the basics, but an absolute pain to master - a lot of the most fundamental elements are simpler in English than in most other languages (which makes it straightforward to get a basic level of competency as second language), but things like pronunciation, spelling, tenses, and the sheer volume of vocabulary make it nightmare to come close to sounding like a native.

@Immortal Science of Hauntology - the proof that it is as hard as any language is the fact that most people don’t learn to speak it perfectly. Even with its apparently incredibly simplistic conjugations, people still can’t manage to remember to add an S for third person, or when to use present perfect, or to negate verbs with “don’t”.

Reforming it wouldn't make it any easier to learn, and it may very well complicate things for native speakers. But the idea it's so bad as a lingua franca that it encourages language preservation is hilarious!

@@gavinwilson5324 I don't agree... If we take difficult words and simplify their spelling (for instance, though becoming tho in informal writing) you'll spend less time having to learn both the pronunciation and the spelling, since knowing one induces the other. If native speakers get laxer with replacing dental fricative with /f/ and /z/ (or any other pair), then you don't have to learn to do/differentiate those, either. If "which" and "who" (and "whom", I guess) become synonyms, then you don't have to learn the grammar behind those. It's not easy, but it's not impossible!

@CJH36 Samueru same with Danish speakers tbh

@CJH36 Samueru btw, I know you guys can speak good English but sorry the accent really comes through and I can easily spot the pronounciation blunders a Norwegian makes while speaking.

Or we can maybe make a new artificial language with easy grammar easy pronunciation an easy writing system and a logical structure and then make it the international language.

Okay, but then you look at French and realize that English is just fine.

Yeah, like how English has a very specific adjective order that must be followed. Every native speaker knows how to follow the order by heart and knows when someone messes the order up, but nobody can list the order off the top of their head.

@@5h0rgunn45 adjective order? I just pile up all the adjectives I want to say in one line

@@typhoonn3478 red little riding hood sounds bad

the fact that native speakers still make you're and your mistakes baffles me tho

We use it to talk about future plans. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow. I'm meeting with the principal on Wednesday. And don't get me started about why we use a present tense to talk about something that has clearly happened in the past. (I've told you a thousand times!)

German does that too, in speaking, people seldom use the actual future tense. They just use the present and a word to indicate that it is, in fact, happening in the future.

​@@xaviotesharris891That example is of the past perfect. 4:56

@@w.reidripley1968 Yes. I agree. At 4:56 there is on the screen an example of past perfect (I had fucked off) and past perfect continuous (I had been fucking off). I paraphrase, of course, but what's your point? Or are you, Mr. Ripley, trying to catch me out on my phrasing of "something that had clearly happened in the past"? Are you aware that the past perfect in English is very often used to reference an event that happened before such a time that you are already talking about in the simple past? e.g., I had been fucking around all afternoon on the computer when I finally saw some boobies. Or ... When the police found the tatty remnant of John Wayne Bobbit's severed dick, it had lain in the snow for several hours. WTF is your point, Mr. Indeterminately-Talented Ripley? NB: If you are not a native English speaker, you should probably shut up here. If you are, you should probably know that I went to school to learn how to teach English to non-native speakers of English. That is, I know what the fuck I'm talking about, and I'm pretty sure you don't, and you should probably shut up now. 'M'kay?

@@w.reidripley1968 Wrong, it's of the present perfect. Past perfect would be "I had told you", not " I have told you".

Even many articulate of English speakers tend to say "street" like "shchreet" because our R is further back in the mouth.

i'll grant /kn/ and /pt/ as pretty common, but /dl/? which languages have that?

@@robynkolozsvari English does have dl in the middle of words, like needless. But if you're talking about dl at the beginning of a word, I only know of Polish, which itself only has it in two words I know, dla (for) and dlaczego (why).

We have pt like in leapt or dreampt

@@endme4002 I would argue there's no p sound in dreamt. but I understand it would be easy to automatically insert between the m and t.

lol same thing for me, i just listened to a lot of english content. It's a really good way not only to learn pronunciation, your brain also handles the usual word placements, how people use prepositions and articles, tenses, etc, so you will just have a feeling that it's right to say something that way and not the other, sometimes without even knowing a rule.

@@organicice4638 yeah, exactly. I also find myself repeating the words i don't know in my head without thinking about them.

Lol

@@diobrando666 yeah, i basically didn't take English classes at school, except the ones that were mandatory, and there i learned to pronounce the verb "to be" as TOBY. Yeah, not so great. Edit: autocorrect is BS

I come from an alpha chad country 🇦🇿

Generally, -ing is when the action is currently being done, and the present simple tense is a general or habitual action. For example "I drink coffee" = I may drink coffee every day, every week, I've done it many times and I'll do it again. But "I'm drinking coffee" is when you're holding a cup of coffee as you speak. Also stative verbs use the simple present and very rarely the -ing form. "I love this house" for example, but "I'm loving this house" would sound strange.

All tenses are correct in your comment! It's written just like a native speaker, and I say this as a native speaker who studies linguistics :)

@@Pining_for_the_fjords i'm loving it!

@@Pining_for_the_fjords "I'm loving this house" doesn't sound weird at all. It's the same habitual/present thing, it's just a little harder to grasp because love is a much more abstract verb than "drink". "I'm loving this house" would be said in the context of a house tour, or even in the first few days/weeks/months of living in a house.

@@kekker_ babelingua did a cool video on this exact topic! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-P4ADkl_wmlA.html

What country?

I couldnt disagree more. English has been by far the easiest language ive studied. The phrasal verbs are a piece of cake, the grammar system is the easiest ive seen (words dont even have genders and verb conjugation is insanely simple- and the absence of cases makes it incredibly easy to learn). You just have to learn the stress on the words, the same way you have to do it in e.g. Russian.

I like that analogy and it seems true to me. Foreigners I know get to a certain level after a few years, and that's usually where they stay for a very long time. But it's adequate. They're using English. They know more languages than I do.

Um english grammar is much much more easy than french grammar .In my opinion at least

We're sorry about the spelling and pronunciation thing, but it's an unfixable problem by this point. For example, "Let me take off my boot because I'm about to have a bout of gout" In American English, "about" and "a bout" are only able to be told apart by rhythm. "About" and "a bout" both rhyme with "gout". In Canadian English, "about" almost rhymes with "boot", but "bout" still rhymes with "gout". In British English, good luck because the first question is asking "Which British English?" If we changed the spelling to fit the pronunciation, the sentence which can be understood by all becomes mutually incomprehensible.

French lexical stress is just the last syllable of whatever goes. I'm a Russian speaker, Russian lexical stress is a mess you have to learn by heart so officially there's a rule that says "if the word is originally French, put the stress on the last syllable minus parts that were added in Russian". Ballet, boulevard, bouquet, actress, réalisateur (film/play director), parter, baguette (bread, also painting frame), baton (bread), comme il fault (exists as one world without blanc spaces), puree, bullion, côtelette (mean a different dish here though - minced meat balls), salad, pomme'd ore = tomato, menu (could write a long list of foods here), etc.

Tbf, I don't know many languages that do use lexical stress the same way English does, and it's sort of a nightmare for native English speakers too. Growing up, you see a word for the first time in writing, you just make a guess on where you think the stressed syllable is, internalise that and assume that's the pronunciation, then feel like an idiot when you say the word out loud later and everyone looks at you like you've lost your mind ones that spring to memory for me are celebrity and canal, I thought the stress went on the i in celebrity, and the first a in canal Also really annoying how the stress shifts in different variations on the same word (terrific/terrified)

also there's a really good Tom Scott video on lexical stress, he compares it specifically to French too iirc

As a native speaker, English is incredibly malleable and can take form of anything you wish. Leading to beautiful poetry, books, and sentences that include words that can perfectly describe the situation.

There are some cases where English is quite a bit vague, in my opinion. However, I do find its adaptability to be the best.

@@geekzombie8795 in which cases ?

When I was going to university I realized how difficult it was for people who used English as a second language to be specific. When I tried to learn other languages I realized many languages may have more simple words with highly specific contexts. The consequence of this kind of language seems to be an extraordinary inflexibility. The strict rules almost imposed restrictions on creativity. The more creative the subject or abstract the more the complexity of the English language came out and the harder it was for people I talked to to grasp certain concepts. When I tried to speak other languages I realized there was an odd efficiency to the English language. English is like drawing ven diagrams of meaning to derive hyper specific contexts even when there are no individual words that exist within the language to describe that. Other languages have to compensate with a much larger lexicon. A lot more words that are very prescriptive rather then intuitive. I have difficulty learning prescriptive language as a result. You have to speak in many more simple sentences rather then a combination of abstract concepts to derive specific ones. Someone who is very good with the english language can be the most concise over the largest number of concepts with the fewest sentences. By contrast being poor with English causes the exact opposite issue in which the concepts get messy far too quickly and things get lost in translation even between native speakers.

Yes! I love this about English, my native language lacks some of these features and I always feel weird not being able to do things like the "I do go" emphasis, sometimes I find myself literally unable to fully express myself in my own native language because of this. And that was an example in and out of itself, can't emphasize "my OWN language" like that in my own language 😂

Most native speakers of English don't know/remember either so unless you want to go more indepth your fine.

@StellarKnight not really... in most languages I've seen, you can read and pronounce properly almost any word you see even without context the first time you see it.

@@Fetrovsky vietnamese and chinese fr, there are rules for how words should be written and they're pronounced exactly that way, you write the words how you pronounce them

Yes. I think it is the main reason that so many native English speakers throw their hands in the air and proclaim "I don't know how to pronounce this word", when confronted with a new word. I have been puzzled by that for a long time, as I know most words are pronounced as they are written. It's kind of the point of writing things, at least when using an alphabet. Except for English.

@@stellarknight04 no. Chinese is not like that, Japanese is not like that.

@@MrHkl8324 Chinese and Japanese (when written in Kanji) aren't phonetic at all, instead, the written symbols allude to the word's meaning. English is a language that tries to be phonetic, but fails at doing so. You can't tell how to pronounce a word just by knowing how to spell, nor viceversa. Instead, you have to memorize each word twice (once for spelling, once for pronunciation). Learning pronunciation is specially hard for non-native learners because of this, since they have no way to even grasp that there is a difference between the pronunciation of many different words.

@@epsi Then you hit Fish, fish and Fishes. Fish a bass, fish 2 or more bass, Fishes a whole kettle of different kinds of fish. By the way what is a "Bive"? It is old English it is plural what is one of them called?

"it's wild how I can just automatically understand something so complex that non-native speakers take a while to learn" No, it's not wild. It's known as a native language.

@@g3523jaen i know lmao i was talking about how interesting different languages are . not everyone is dense

@@rainboSnails yeah. I'm so dense, that I only speak 6 languages.

@@g3523jaen i never said you were dense . i dont understand why youre pressed . chill before this becomes a Thing

Is there a correct way to use certain prepositions? Kind of an absolutist statement. Is it more inherently correct to say "I will work on Sunday" vs "I will work Sunday?" I think it would cause a big argument if one were to say one was more correct than the other. Unlike many languages, English has so many idioms and dialects, it can sound like you are imposing one standard on another if you start making corrections that just aren't correct in another dialect, which is why native English speakers have to be very careful when making corrections for minor things.

@@marmac83 Certainly there isn't one singular right way to use all prepositions, but 'I will work Sunday' does sound very unnatural to me, then again I am not a native English speaker. I'm only talking about what I noticed from people learning English in Hong Kong as their second language, as well as my own experience. Though I will say, that even with prepositions there is an obsession with 'the correct', in that my teacher used to teach us the proper way to use prepositions, like how 'on' and 'upon' are not interchangeable when used in the context of 'upon my arrival/on my arrival', and we can only use 'upon' I do have to say though, when people here learn English, there is much less a concern of what is correct and not correct in another dialect, we are just concerned with not losing too many marks to grammar mistakes and speaking fluently. And that usually also points to there being a single 'correct English' standard, if there is even one to begin with

@@hea1655 "At my arrival." Yeah whatever "English" they're teaching is inflexible and unnatural.

This is very true. English is actually a crazily super flexible language. I am a Chinese Canadian, and I would much prefer to use the English translator to translate other languages. For example, the Japanese put their verbs at the end of the sentence. "I study Japanese at home tonight" would become "Tonight at home, the Japanese language is the one i study". However, Chinese always put their pronoun at the beginning of the sentence, so looking back at the sentence, it becomes something bizzare like "The Japanese language studies me". (only in soviet Russia?). Usually I would use the English translator when I play Japanese video games, but occasionally I would switch to Chinese because the Japanese and Chinese all have like 30 ways of calling "I" as a person. Anyways, i just wish everyone in the world all understands each others languages.

Many languages have that. Czech has it even worse. Spanish has para/por. And you know what? You dont even have cases in english. And for plurals you just have “s”. And you dont even modify words by the gender and quantity of the subject 😂 english is insanely easy, you just havent taught other languages.

a big problem with english for language learners that was touched on shortly at the very end is orthography. i mean, in almost every word in my last sentence, there’s gonna be no rules for stress, consonants and vowels do not sound the way they are taught, silent letters, different pronunciation when stringing words together vs. when they’re isolated, few rules for what pronunciation to choose for vowels and consonants, etc. english spelling is really a mess. it makes it a beautiful language for sure. also don’t forget the absolutely arbitrary and ridiculous amount of irregular plurals and irregular past tense/perfect aspect conjugations. i ate? he leapt? she felt? i rung? i shot? i brought, i could, i paid, it shone, it broke, it shook, it made, it flew, it thought, it shut, i won…

@@henrystoes6508 As a German learner, the simple past in German also has a lot of irregulars (that then spill into present tense and past perfect irregular conjugations as well) so I imagine it might be a frequent attribute of Germanic languages.

I agree with your comment. Learning English is hard no doubt, but it’s a relatively simple language grammatically. The hardest part is pronunciation but even then, many native English speakers are used to figuring out what a non-native is trying to say. Plus the vast amount of really good and popular media that is originally in English makes exposure to it a lot more frequent

Why have adults in other cultures kept their inconsistency while the English didn’t in those places?

I think articles are not so bad, they make sense most of the time. But present perfect sucks, definitely. As for adjective order, isn't it universal (at least in indoeuropean languages)? I've never memorized the rules for it, I think I learned from a Tom Scott's video that different types of adjectives are intuitively placed in the same relative positions.

Jestem Anglikiem i uczę się polskiego. Podziwiam każdego, kto uczy się angielskiego jako drugiego języka, bo wiem że nie jest łatwy.

As a native speaker with dyslexia who had to spend years of remission to grasp its spelling and written grammar I completely agree.

@@pascalfibonacci What's remission?

@@Anonymous-df8it Being held back a grade, like being old enough to be in 4th grade but held back in the third grade. Been there done that. I was not diagnosed as having Dyslexia until I was a sophomore in collage.

@@Delgen1951 Why didn't they just hold you back for [insert native language here] classes and let you move on with everything else?

@@Anonymous-df8iteverything is written you can’t solve a math answer or write a good history essay if you spend 10 minutes trying to read a sentence

Slower is the key, and clear articulation. A bit louder, so it isn't as mumbling can help. But shouting at the same speed isn't helping.

@@Liggliluff Yes, exactly.

I hear people shout, faster and with more stressing (please try a more even, clear pronounciation).

I could have gone my whole life before realizing there is he’s not and he isn’t lolol

It's a bastard language, cobbled together from old French, German, Latin, Celtic roots. I love the adaptability and the expressiveness that's possible with all the different ways you could choose to phrase the same information. It makes the poetry so rich and nuanced.

You also don't have to follow it's rules. You'll still be understood. You can make English do whatever you want it to. When I was 11 I cared deeply about spelling and rules and I would correct my teacher. But I've learned that 'poor' English is still English. It's richer and more complex and more alive than some people would like it to be.

what different meaning does "he's not" have from "he isn't"?

@@TheFlyfly I'm wondering the same thing

Not to mention the 10,000 characters you have to learn... Such a primitive system....

@@eladpeleg745 Not necessarily. In japanese school children learn ≈1800 kanji. After going to uni, students know approximately +2000 kanji. Add up scientific terms and characters that person learns at work etc. and you have roughly 5000. However, it is sufficient to know ≈1800 for speaking japanese fluently (there is a list of kanji of each level, for instance beginner (N5) knows kanji 日(sun) 月(moon) and so on).

@@tobeflyhigh Never the less it is a more primitive system of characters more closely resembling Egyptian Hierogliphs

​@@eladpeleg745 More primitive is implying a lack of sophistication and complexity, when in fact the opposite is true. Japanese as least in terms of space taken by individual characters is much more efficient than English in conveying information.

@@LancesArmorStriking But also equally tedious to learn... If you wish to argue that a logographic system is superior then go ahead

As a native English speaker, who is learning Dutch, I can definitely say Dutch has been super easy to learn for me so far. I’ve always heard now and again that Dutch is one of the easiest languages to learn for us, but I didn’t realise that until I started looking into it myself. There’s SO many similarities.

@@latinasawntop Yeah, I don't speak Dutch, but I lived in the Netherlands for a few months. It's strange, hearing often _feels_ like you're hearing English, before you pay attention and realise you can't understand the words....😅

Yeah I don't get the fuss with the (ð, θ) letters, Icelandic, Spanish, Faroese and Greek - just in Europe - use them.

Native English speaker, Dutch is close enough that I can just kind of guess my way through Dutch wikipedia, even though I've studied dick-all dutch.

I didn't know that, I suppose that would also affect their ability to acquire certain tenses, haven't read any literature on it though

@@kklein Actually Japanese not have present tense. They called past and non-past. Because the non-past can be present and future too. Which in fact makes the japanese tenses very easy (atleast for my Hungarian nativeness which use the same past non-past method, except for only one verb what have a future form too).

@@tovarishcheleonora8542 Technically, English also has Past and Non-past. The "future tense" is just the same as present conjugations, sometimes adding the "will" particle (which doesn't qualify it as a separate tense, "will" is just like other particles like "would" or "must", and there's no "would tense" or "must tense"). be going to, present continuous and even the present simple conjugation can be used in a future sense.

Truly a tarded language

@@CarMedicine Subjunctive tense, Necessitative tense (I had to look that last one up)

Yes, but as it was the same in old english. Those two symbols having different meanings in English dictionaries is a modern creation of the IPA alphabet. In old English both represented th in voiced and unvoiced forms and was sometimes just up to the writer to choose one. That’s why thorn remained popular in written Middle English and eth died out centuries before. Regardless of which you used, it’s assumed to be unvoiced by default but you usually voice it when between vowels, so when it’s voiced at the end of a word we add an e like bathe or lathe. The only real problem nowadays is th at the beginning of words. If the two old English th graphs were consistent we would’ve just kept them because that’d be cool and useful instead of using a digraph, but they weren’t and th is the best we’ve got.

@@jacobhayes4085 What they were used for in the past is irrelevant to my point. They're cool and useful now, and using th for both is dumb.

@@5h0rgunn45 you said bring back, not repurpose. My bad

@@jacobhayes4085 I guess if you read it that way, your response makes sense. What I meant was we should use them for modern English to distinguish between the th in 'this' and the th in 'thing' like they do in Icelandic.

Gross. We should just stick to Greek δ/θ

I still have trouble with æ and ɛ

@@tomasbeltran04050 I think æ was sent here from the heaven to punish us for our sins.

@@tomasbeltran04050 Some of us just one day learned to distinguish them at some point, but before that? Raw frustration 😂

@@krzychukar676 Completely deserved if your language(s) ha (ve)s [not sure if you're already bilingual natively or not so...] tenses, tones [like Mandarin], genders, declensions [like Russian], conjugations [like Spanish], flowing syllable times over stress times, final devoicing, rolled R's, throat R's, post-positions, uncertain word order, or some other blemish. Also deserved if you failed to have empathy from an English speaker who just wants to not be that monolingual guy, and insisted on switching to English at the first mistake instead of a good exchange.

I still struggle hearing the difference between /s/ and /z/, and I hate the American name "zee" because it sounds like "cee", while the British "zed" is unique. Many situations it's clear, "Dragonball C" is Dragonball Z, and "press the C/CR button" is the Z/ZR button on a Nintendo controller. "Ctrl+C to copy" is Ctrl+C, "Ctrl+C to undo" is Ctrl+Z, but "press Alt+C to [command]" can be either Alt+C or Alt+Z.

i be a engrish too, good!

To be fair, there are non-rothic English accents that doesn't pronounce the R in "girl" and "world". The R only appears if the next letter is a vowel. So /ɡɜːl/ and /wɜːld/.

Yeah ten of millions of us don't pronounce the r in those, it just flavours the vowel sound

For the former, you could just opt to drop the r completely. One of the two main accents of English does, giving /əː/ instead of /ɚ/ for /gəːl/ and /wəːld/. Even without dropping it completely, there are a lot of ways to pronounce /r/ that seem to be accepted, though [ɹ̠ʷ] is standard for the most part. For the latter, personally, I barely pronounce the "p" in "depths." Pretty much all I can hear of it is just the pop from the mouth opening. /θs/ from what I can tell seems to largely just be starting a /θ/ and then quickly pulling my tongue back to make the /s/. That said, swapping /θ/

@@Liggliluff oh, true

@@angeldude101 ooo, the "ths" thing is really helpful. Thanks

You're right. This guy is just glossing over how most other popular languages have much higher initial barriers than English (e.g. tones, complex grammatical cases, crazy verb conjugations, gendered nouns, agglutination)

same here, english also makes me feel like using more specific words without sounding like a movie character

It depends more on what language you are learning from

I would like to highlight that your written English is excellent for a non-native speaker who seems to have only picked it up from the internet. Better than many native speakers in fact.

I agree that English seems relatively easy to start learning (though mastering it is a whole different matter). What do you mean with similarities? I mean, Portuguese seems to have big differences; English is a germanic language. I'm native german and am surprised by some similarities; there are even a lot of words in english which are directly originated from german (kindergarden, zeitgeist, doppelgänger, schadenfreude etc.).

"There's no visible light." "There's no light visible."

(also there are other examples that DEFINITELY have four consonants in the coda- my favourite is "texts" /tɛksts/ with /k s t s/ for a coda)

"angsts" arguably ends in 5 consonants though this is uncommon... plenty of "texts" "sixths" and "twelfths" to go around to justify the CCCC coda I definitely dont think the... palatalized? (is that the right word) "t" sound that appears in "tr" is helpful to analyze as 2 different consonants

@@robynkolozsvari The ts in 'texts' is one single alveolar affricate (an affricated s), so that makes 'texts' CVCCC.

@@Cloiss_ i think you meant affricate or postalveolar. (using wikipedia)

@@urinstein1864 i'd argue that unlike /tʃ/ which definitely appears as a true affricate (phonologically acting as a single consonant), /ts/ in English should be understood as a cluster. phonetically you could count this as an affricate, but phonologically it kinda has to be a cluster (no distinction in usage between eg laps, rats, tacks /læps/ /ɹæts/ /tæks/, plus the morpheme boundary in the specific case of "texts"); no /ts/ phoneme in English