This poem is a classic example: https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/
"read" vs "read" (I have read this book/I will read this book).
"bow" vs "bow" (At the end of the opera everybody takes a bow/We shoot the arrows with a bow).
etc.
while standing on the bow (of a boat).
How bout 'A bowed bow fired from the bow requires that we take a bow to receive a bow'
For example:
"come around" (apparently change your mind?) "come down on" (apparently this means "attack or punish harshly", not oral sex) "come down with" (get sick with some disease, ok you go down because you lay in bed, although you dont lie "on" the bed) "come up" (you come up with new ideas, for example that one can "calm down"; why up and down?)
There are tons of those phrasal verbs that are easy to natives, but those are so illogical who has to learn them. For example when Tony Soprano tells to "do someone in", maybe you can figure it out from the context, but without context it is just a mess.
Overall it feels like a simple language though, none of the annoying stuff such as gendered nouns and declension.
And even more tellingly, there's so many words in english where native speakers don't even agree how it's pronounced since there's no consistent pattern. Just depends how each person first heard it and got used to it.
In finnish pronounciation and spelling are 1:1, competely predictable with no exceptions. The english language game of a spelling bee would be extremely boring in finnish as there are no trick spellings. It's always written the way it is said.
As an English person, there are parts of my own country where it will take me a bit of time to get my ear tuned to the local accent and dialect (just this evening my wife's mother, from south yorkshire, used a word I'd never heard). But I was under the impression this is pretty common, at least across Europe. I've heard French people complaining about how people from some other part of France speak, the same for Germany. Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
I'm not being defensive or anything, this is a genuine question. As someone who struggled to spell at school I'm well aware of what a mess English is.
AFAICS, I'd say yes, it is.
There are some dialects (way up north, and in the East) where stuff is pronounced differently, but that's so hilariously different that I think speakers of those dialects are themselves fully aware that the way they pronounce stuff, it oughta be spelled differently. And conversely, what with only the "official" spelling being taught in school, they automatically learn the "correct" nationwide pronunciation from that -- thanks to the "everything is spelled as it's pronounced, and vice versa" phenomenon.
I find it fascinating how differently languages have developed.
Comparatively, learning German to a level where you can get by is a bit harder, but building on top of that to master the language is not an extraordinary amount of work.
Like, one would get much further with natural language processing based on a purely mechanistic approach targeting German, while English would have more exceptions than contenders where a rule applies.
Coming from Spanish and our irregular verbs, memorizing the inconsistencies is a piece of cake. The sounds though...