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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

As a natively speaker let me just confirm: English is a very inconsistent language, where rules just as often result in doing the wrong thing as they do the right. Many native speakers get the 's/'/s/ies thing wrong, as well as two/too/to, and so on.

I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

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> I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

clearly you have never tried out German :-)

As a German native speaker who generally has a lot of difficulty learning languages, I can assure you that English was a lot more feasible for me compared to anything else I tried.

(Of course you'll find an error in this comment - that is bound to happen in any comment talking about language mistakes)

The only quirk to me is using "much" to modify an adjective ("feasible"), which in my experience (admittedly southern American English) a native speaker would not choose to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner (If you want to hate English slightly more :-) )

I've heard a nice explanation of the difference between learning English and learning German:

The rules of English are relatively simple but there are a ton of exceptions that take a long time to get right and will give it away you're not a native speaker.

German doesn't have as many exceptions so you can easily reach near-native levels of fluency once you know all the rules, but there are far more rules you need to be aware of (and even then you'll need to keep track of grammatical gender).

In other words, you can learn German by simply following all the rules and memorizing the vocabulary, but it's far easier to do for English (where you'll miss a ton of exceptions if you only do that).

Let's just say I'm happy I'm a native German speaker already -- I probably couldn't be bothered to become as fluent in it as I'm in English as a second language.

In my experience, German was a piece of cake. Sure, it's a bit difficult at first, but pronunciation is easy once you figure it out and the grammar is not that hard.

Dutch, on the other hand... :)

I've been trying for five or six months now to pronounce 'Groningen' right, but I never succeeded. If there's one 'g' in a word, I can pronounce it. If there are two letters 'g' in one word, it's practically impossible for me.

"Scheveningen" is the one that stopped me in my tracks.

Maybe it's the trauma from compiler design, but in times of multiple stylistic options in English I try to trend towards standardization / the more broadly applicable version.

Drop in the bucket, but my small part towards decreasing the number of exceptions.

Edit: and just personally, I try to mentally associate homophones (two/too/to) with another word that helps clarify them (e.g. too:also).

Hey, at least we don't have goddamn gendered nouns. What an awful, awful idea that is.

Or [noun classes][0] generally.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class

The I Before E Except After C "rule" is another great example.

Obligatory QI citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duqlZXiIZqA

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