Comment by mkingston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkingston | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner.

Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks")

Ils / elles parlent ("they speak")

Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural.

Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.

Dutch (and I assume German?) has a similar verb story for various pronouns.

"She" is also "they" in both stressed/unstressed forms (ze/zij).

"His" is the exact same word as the infinitive form of "to be" (zijn).

The formal "u" can mean "you" or "you all" and it always has the same accompanying verb form, even for plurals.

The only way to tell them apart is context, like you said.

While English does have these examples as well, they tend to be with homophones and less with verb forms and pronouns.

Side note: before learning a second language, did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker? Personally, I never thought about it AT ALL until I started learning a second language as an adult.

I guess I don't know if it's similar in other languages, but at least in all of the Germanic flavors, these verbs are crucial and dictate literally every single aspect of the language. Now that I've seen this distinction, English has become more novel to me as I notice these constructions in the writing of others.

I think it says a lot about our culture that we place so much emphasis on these ideas of individualism and property that they are codified into our writing and speech so heavily. Moreover, I'm curious if there are other languages that do not emphasize these verbs and if that also plays a role in the general sentiments of people and their thoughts on collectivism and community?

I can't wait to start learning my 3rd language once I have Dutch fully under my belt! :)

> did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker?

Definitely not to the extent that I'm having to for French! At the moment I don't have a lot of spare time to think (eek) and reflect on this, but regarding those verbs, French definitely has some different usage of them when compared to English including sometimes using "have" where we'd use "be", and vice versa, which is a little jarring at first.

It is the same in Dutch. "To be" and "to have" are modal verbs that can be combined with other verbs to convey a mixture of past, present, and future tenses.

For example, in some forms of the past tense, you must start the sentence with 1. subject, 2. modal verb, rest of the sentence, and then the verb infinitive.

Ik _ben_ naar de supermarkt gegaan.

"I _am_ to the supermarket gone." - is the literal translation. The correct translation would be "I went to the supermarket."

But for a different verb, say, "Zitten" (to sit), you have to create the past tense with the verb "to have"

Ik _heb_ op de bank gezeten.

I _have_ on the couch sat. You get the idea.

There is a rule for when to use "be/have" and it relates to what I've been told is "a sense of movement or change". This could be literal, like a change of location, starting/stopping, or it could even be a _change of mind_. In those scenarios, you use "to be", which I think makes logical sense! You are literally changing yourself, changing your state of being, by literally moving or thinking about something in a different way.

In all other scenarios, you use "to have". It makes less logical sense on it's own, but is fine when you contrast it with "to be."

It is by far the hardest part of grok-ing a vital part of the grammar, but I am thankful that it at least follows some sort of logical rules when I compare it to English. Being native speakers, we take a lot of those things for granted.

One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.

It's the other way around, if you can see a word written you can pronounce it, but French notoriously has a large number of homophonous syllables.

I beg to differ. Here's a simple example, both "eaux" (waters) and "oh" sound the exact same.

Actually they don't

Ô haut zoo aux eaux d'ozone,

Qu'un verre en verre vert de vers

Puise en vous, puis en vous puisse envoûter vos badauds au bas dos.

We have dictée exercises at school, during which an entire text is read aloud and then you're supposed to transcribe it.

I need this for practice. Perhaps I ought to use text-to-speech and then transcribe the audio back to text and compare.

A fun meme to this effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWNzmX4QBK4

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