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Comment by barking | Hacker News Reader

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

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English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the subjunctive mood, but it is used in a more limiting set of circumstances (If I were you...)

English has the subjunctive mood as well, though it is phasing out of use. If you were to express a hypothetical, you would use "were" as the subjunctive tense. For example, the song title "If I were a rich man" rather than "If I was a rich man", or the previous sentence in this post.

yes, I had just realized that and added it as an edit.

I'm pretty sure you can ignore the subjunctive and still have it be correct, i.e. I don't think there is anything grammatically wrong with saying "If I was rich", at least in the sense that it wouldn't be picked up on in casual speech

For the most part, yes. Though, if you flip the word order, it immediately sounds off. "Were I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds reasonable. "Was I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds rather jarring.

It seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order.

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

Yep, and in a lot of other Indo-European languages as well. However, it's not a constant trend across languages as Finnish and Estonian both have more cases than their ancestor language did. It's likely that English will circle back around and start becoming less analytic as time goes on due to various things such as grammaticalization.

I agree, it is very hard to master the special cases of English. A paper might communicate ideas with perfect clarity and still be filled with subtle mistakes. After entering STEM academia, I have been exposed to more English writing by non-native speakers. It made me appreciate the difficulty of mastering English. It also made me sympathetic to some deeper criticisms of English beyond the inconsistent spelling rules. For example, the overuse of articles and the verb "to be".

Ha, I'm in a similar position - I'm a scientist and I work with two people who speak Slavic languages, and they miss out 'the' and 'a' everywhere, because they don't exist in that language family. I also work with a Chilean, and he's the opposite - he adds in 'the' and 'a' everywhere, even when it's not necessary! The Germans I've worked with have generally been the best I've found both at speaking and writing.

What is 'English grammar'? (Hopefully you don't mean spelling.) And what are examples of such exceptions? (English doesn't strike me as having any more exceptions in morphology or syntax than any other language, and has a simpler morphology than many languages.)

A lot of English's exceptions are things we hardly notice as native speakers. For example, we have a lot of irregular verbs. Of course other languages also have these, but oftentimes they fit into more neat patterns or small verb classes as in Spanish. Using verbs together is more complex than in other language (when do you add the word to?). We have a lot of nouns that you treat specially, like glasses/pants/deer.

English also has a lot of complexity. Comparison adjectives can be difficult, e.g. when to use faster or more fast. Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).

English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.

None of these properties, which may not even be most of them, are unique on their own, but in combination they add up to quite a lot. It's hard for me to even think of all the rules like this since I'm a native speaker, but when learning Spanish I noticed how much more uniform many of its rules are.

In terms of things that are difficult for non-native speakers, English doesn't have grammatical gender, which takes an immense amount of time to acquire.

English's irregular verbs also fall into classes. There are only a couple of (very common) verbs like "be", "go" which are truly idiosyncratic. And English has the advantage of actually having very few verbal forms overall. Other than forms of "be", the present tense only has 2 forms (3rd person singular and everything else (e.g. "I go, you (sg.) go, he/she/it goes, we go, you (pl.) go, they go") and the past tense only one form (e.g. "I went, you (sg.) went, he/she/it went, we went, you (pl.) went, they went").

> Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).

These all have to do with modality and work the same way in every language I know.

> English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.

This is true, and is fairly unusual (though French has some weirdness of this sort).

Verb irregularity is often overstated as a complexity in English. For example, my French-English gives 120-ish different classes of verb conjugation, but most people would say that it has ~4-ish classes, plus some simple modifications on top of that, plus random exceptions here and there. If you tried to group English verbs into similar conjugation classes, you'd arrive at probably a smaller number. It's just that, because English has so little conjugation left, it's easier to list out all of the exceptions as a single list.

English's problems generally stem from the Great Vowel Shift destroying our spelling (and ruining the remnants of the Germanic ablaut system for conjugation), and, most importantly, our proclivity for borrowing foreign words with foreign spellings and foreign conjugations. Doubly so when we can't even conjugate the foreign words properly (it's supposed to be octopodes by that rule, not octopi; octopuses is perfectly functional reasonable).

As a native English speaker who has passable Spanish, I think the main hurdle, which I guess wouldn't be called a "complexity", of learning Spanish to a high level is understanding native speakers in natural conversation given how fast they talk.

Me too. My Spanish reading is probably at around a 12th grade level and writing somewhere around 9th grade, but my listening comprehension of native speakers is atrocious. I think it's just a matter of practice/exposure though

Spanish may be simpler, but it also conveys less information per syllable iirc.

That really depends on the particular domain e.g. compare ‘Are you sure?’ to ‘¿Seguro?’. Also, at least spoken Spanish tends to reduce the amount of pronouns that otherwise are pretty much mandatory in English as in ‘I can drive a car’ vs. ‘Se conducir’

I think having to memorize a (fairly) arbitrary masculine/feminine prefix/postfix for nouns makes quite a few romance languages harder than they "need" to be.

Would be nice to have some slightly more rigorous spelling and tenses in English, though almost all euro languages have some quite irregular verbs.

English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.

But you're really talking about orthography.

No, English is pretty rough in both orthography and phonology: while it's nowhere near as bad as e.g. Chinese, English has a large number of vowel sounds compared to most languages, and several uncommon consonants that many people struggle with if not exposed from birth.Note how many non-native English speakers, no matter what their first language, struggle with dental fricatives ("th").

English is only roughly middling in terms of phonemic inventory (about 40). Romance languages tend to be on the phonemically sparse side of things, but Germanic languages have broader phonemic inventories. And while the thorn/eth are difficult to pronounce, I'll take those over Arabic's pharyngeals, thank you very much.

Dental fricatives are somewhat 'poor' sounds generally - they don't have a lot energy, so they tend to be difficult to recover in noisy environments. And note that even in English dialects these dental fricatives have a tendency to shift to other sounds (e.g. to alveolar stops).

While English pronunciation/inventory may be harder than say Spanish or Italian, I think it's pretty middle-of-the-road compared to other languages in terms of size of inventory/difficulty.

That doesn't really matter, you get used to more than a dozen quite different pronunciations within a week for basic talk, within a few months you can understand each other perfectly.

EDIT: Visit England you cunts (wrt downvotes).

Every language has tradeoffs. Sure, Spanish might be easier to pronounce since the rules are more rigid, but on the other hand the information density is way lower. It takes 2-3 syllables of Spanish to communicate the same information as 1 syllable of English.

Yes, but the rate at which languages convey information is roughly the same [1]. So Spanish speakers just speak faster.

[1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

The PDF linked is a draft of the paper, freely available; it's been removed from Academia, so here's the JSTOR link of the final release:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23011654

For speaking, sure, but if you are writing then Spanish will take longer because you have to physically type out more characters.

As a fluent speaker of both languages I couldn’t say. In general Spanish requires less mental effort as you write what you say, whereas in English there’s always that particular randomness that’s otherwise arbitrary between how to write a word and how it sounds.

Hahaha, reminds me of this Itchy Feet comic http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2015/09/conspiracion.html#.W1u...

In the paper you link to, the information rate of English is about 10% higher than Spanish. That may not seem like much, but it's probably enough to matter.

You're missing an /s ;)

> simple and logical

That's why though/thought/through are pronounced the same way. And similarly for height/weight

That's why the plural of feet are feets or the plural of child is childs, right? Oh wait...

That's why a kid cat is a catty, a kid dog is a doggy and a kid swan is a swanny. Right?

And why the past of get is begotten and the past of can is canned.

And why you should call the police if you see a murder of crows.

It is simpler than most European languages, in my experience, as well. Logical, not so much, heh

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