Comment by notNow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notNow | Hacker News Reader

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What's with the bashing of languages excluding English & countries that are not part of the English speaking world as of late on HN?

It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric.

Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either.

What makes you think that English is any better?

Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at least from orthography and pronunciation standpoints and in contradiction to the prevailing belief of the opposite.

Unlike in Spanish or Italian and to some extent French which enjoy an almost uniform rules regarding pronunciation and orthography, in English you should memorize how individual words are pronounced and written and you can't deduce correctly how a certain new word to be pronounced or written based on the pronunciation because it is not 1:1 translation from official letter sounds to words.

On the other hand, when you encounter a Spanish or Italian word and you know your alphabet and letters and simple rules, you pronounce the word as is no surprises in the process. When you hear a word correctly, you could decipher how it's written even when you encounter it for the first time and the success ratio is around 99%.

Good luck trying this with the English language. Please get off your high horse and don't kid yourself, we foreigners are not learning your language that's English because of its innate "superior" qualities to other world languages. It just happens to be the global lingua franca of this age and we're adopting to this nothing more nothing less.

French here. I do believe that English is very easy to learn, because not really error prone. Do you conjugate verbs? No (well, kind of). Do the English nouns have genders? No. It's true that English is not straight forward to pronounce, but that's pretty much the only difficulty of the language.

On the other hand, I would say that French is very error prone: it's like Spanish or Italian (in the sense that you need to know lots of conjugations and the gender of the nouns), and the spelling of the words is very complicated, for example the sound 'o' can be spelled 'o', 'au', 'eau', 'ô'. In fact the spelling is so hard that I am suspecting it has been made hard on purpose so people who are not educated could be spotted straight away when they write a letter.

Please note that I am not writing this out of content ("Look how we French people are smart for mastering such a complicated language"), but because I like the simplicity of the English language. In fact, I believe anything made hard in a language is just some incidental complexity in how we express our thoughts, and if I had to create a language I would use English as a base.

> and the spelling of the words is very complicated, for example the sound 'o' can be spelled 'o', 'au', 'eau', 'ô'.

As a native English speaker who has studied Spanish and French (though I've neglected both for far too long to do much with them now), the spelling of French compared to its pronunciation my be less regular than Italian or Spanish (going from pronunciation to spelling can be error-prone for unfamiliar words, but going from spelling to pronunciation usually isn't), but compared to English it is a model of simplicity.

I think French and English spellings are complicated for different reasons: given its pronunciation, the spelling of an English word is generally easy to guess (and I insist on generally: I needed the automatic corrector to tell me that I spelled 'pronunciation' wrongly at first), while in French it will not be straightforward; on the other hand, a French word is easy to pronounce when one sees it in writing, and in English it's not the case (like, the word 'live' can be pronounced in two ways).

Hi S4M,

- Do you conjugate verbs?

Sure you do in English and there are also the irregular verbs problem to crack such as go went gone / read read read (As you know, the past and past participle are pronounced as the word "red" and there's no clear non-ambiguous rule governing this usage you just have to memorize it sucks big time, doesn't it?)

- IMO, gender-based languages make much more sense to me and genderless langs like English are very confusing and suffixing every noun with -o or -a is not really a huge investment to take to avoid this confusion.

- I acknowledged that French is a bit more difficult to master than other Romance languages like Spanish and Italian and it takes much more effort to write or read but it still if you get around the rules in French and get familiar with the sounds, it would be far easier to guess words pronunciation or spelling without looking up a dictionary compared to English.

By the way English still retains some of the influences of the French language as a result of the Norman Invasion of England such as the subjunctive mood where you need to pick the right tense to express doubt in your communication. It's also worth mentioning that some people would argue that the complexity and tediousness in English spelling is attributable to adopting French words into the lexicon but seriously I don't care not my problem.

So, I would disagree with you that English is a simple or an easy to learn language. On the contrary, it's a life long investment and very high maintenance not only for the most complicated parts such as idioms or poetry but for the most basic ones such as reading and writing.

I'd be compelled to add that even Arabic and despite all the negative publicity it gets for being a complicated language which in some aspects it pretty much is, it still has a more streamlined and straightforward process than in English to reading and writing once you get your head around the concept of weak and strong vowels to start reading and writing and there's no need to memorize words one by one to be able to speak properly.

Lastly, the nerve of him calling a Romance language not pretty. I might not favor French over Italian or Portuguese when it comes to the domain of musical sounds but it's definitely way way better than English in that regard.

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