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English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.

Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

- Terry Pratchett

I would say it does the needful.

On one single occasion I said this at work without thinking about it. I'd been working exclusively with Indian devs for months and it just slipped out.

Thankfully it was taken well.

Funny enough, I’m from south GA. But when I speak on conference calls to customers, I try to speak without my natural accent especially since many non native speakers especially who aren’t in the US seem to struggle to understand my natural accent.

I was using my normal “consultant voice” with some clients in Tennessee and as I started talking to them, I naturally without thinking started being less careful and throwing some “y’all’s” and southern twang came out.

I heard second hand that they thought I was mocking them. I had to explain I was born and raised in South Georgia and that was my natural voice.

In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.

> For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling,

"bureaucracy" is the English word, but the French word is "bureaucratie" (which is closer to the Norwegian spelling than the English is.)

We do Anglicize pronunciation of loan words, heavily. "Karaoke" is actually a good example of that: https://forvo.com/word/karaoke/#ja

"Carry-Oky"

Brr…

Curiously, we also anglicize, to a large degree, the pronunciation of words even when the intent is to approximate the native pronunciation as closely as possible, such as in popular phrase books for travelers - to the point that I often ask myself if the native speaker would be able to understand me if I speak like that (which I try not to). 'Pway-day ayoodar-may', anyone?

Funny you mention karaoke, the Japanese do the exact same thing to a much further degree.

This was not the point they were making. The context is the previous post that said English just accepts foreign words without changing them. It does not, and loan words like karaoke are mangled in English just as in any other language. Hence you agree with the parent.

(Karaoke is not a gotcha or a complete fluke; it’s discussed all over the thread)

Kerioki lol

We definitely don't shy away from butchering the pronunciation of our loanwords.

There are no special twists in that AFAIK there are no rules that specify for example that "Mathematics" needs to be transformed into "Matematika", but a lot of words do get some sort of alternate English pronunciation that is not the same as the original, even when the original is perfectly possible in English. Your example of "karaoke" (which most people pronounce in English as keriyoki) is one such example. Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

And of course, not all sounds even exist, "Hummus" has a Het sound, not an 'h' and is pronounced as khoomoos, not haamas. Gaza is closer to being Raza than Gaza, etc.

> Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

Should it, really? The concept of Israel dates back millennia; which was the original prononciation? Should we all say it as it was in Aramaic back in the day? The h/g cases you mention are a good example: many languages just don’t have these soundsIn cases like bilingual countries, which of the prononciation is supposed to be canonical (bearing in mind that the linguistic borders shift significantly all the time)?

Arguing about the prononciation of proper nouns always seems foolish to me. There is no solution to these questions.

> In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words

I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually quite far from how they would sound in their original language. There is a simple reason for that: foreign words have sounds that do not exist in English and that English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce without training, about which most people don’t bother. English words sound weird in Japanese, but the opposite is also true.

> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc

This is no different than many other languages. In fact, Karaoke and tsunami are used exactly the same way in French, German, Dutch and Spanish.

> Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.

It is not really. English is completely inconsistent because of its history as an amalgamation of very different languages, but apart from that it is not really remarkable in the way it treats loan words.

You often have to modify pronunciation when you translate a word to Japanese because most Japanese syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. So an English word that ends with a consonant will need a vowel added (unless the consonant is n, which is allowed to be a standalone sound in Japanese).

The word "consonant" would probably have to be pronounced "konsonantu" in Japanese.

> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.

Oh god no. I am Spanish guy living in Japan, our languages have very similar sounds, so much so that we can usually get the pronunciation right on the first try, much to the surprise of Japanese people. English speakers on the other hand tend to butcher the pronunciation so heavily that the words become really difficult to recognise.

But to be fair, the same happens the other way around. All languages adapt foreign words to their own phonology.

> you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words

I dunno what you mean by "have to" here, but English, like most languages, has both a limited set of phonemes and unique patterns of how they are combined and how stress is distributed, and, like most languages, loanwords will usually have their pronunciation changed to fit that phoneme inventory and construction patterns.

English, because any phonetic interpretation of its spelling is more what you'd call guidelines (or may be just jokes) than actual rules is probably less likely to change the spelling of loan words from other languages that use the same alphabet or one with a well-established transliteration, but the actual pronunciation is a different story.

Oh, really?

Let me introduce you to the "order of adjectives" rule: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/grammar-bizarre-weird-rule-...

Talk about bizarre! Every native speaker has this internalized, but they never teach it in school.

Oh believe me, it's definitely taught in school -- it's a part of every standard ESL curriculum. Generally third or fourth year. (Although if you miss class that week you might never see it again.)

It's a weird one, but also pretty easy to internalize just through experience. It's not like anybody's usually stringing together five adjectives in regular speech. If you just learn a single prototype phrase like "ugly little green wool sweater", that will probably get you 99% of what you need in daily usage.

I think GP means it doesn't come up in primary or secondary school grammar lessons for native English speakers.

Every language has things like that where you'll sound odd if you don't phrase things a certain way.

That's why at a certain point you just need to get experience using the language.

Not so sure if this is ironclad.

Like, if someone messes up the order of adjectives, a native/fluent English speaker would still understand what they're trying to say.

The author also introduces Cambridge, Oxford, whatever, when the first ordering is pretty standard.

For example, the common term for an tiny, aged woman in the US is, "little old lady." Size, then age, then the rest.

if the adjectives are out of order, they will be understood but the speaker will seem a little odd and not native.

I don't think that's as ironclad as it says. For example, I wouldn't say a little new knife. I would say a new little knife.

Edit: I see that even the article calls out that this rule is not ironclad.

The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions.

The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible.

Like, you can transliterate spanish or french (or any number of languages) into english, and it will be perfectly understandable in most cases to a native speaker.

It's still intelligible*

(Unless that's the joke)

I fixed it in an edit just as you posted your comment lol!

Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English. If you look at this Wikipedia article, the first entry for English when sorting by headwords is around 140k. German by example is around 100k for it's lowest entry. At the high end it's approaching 400k for German and 470k for English. I'm omitting the Wikipedia dictionaries for all languages.

I suppose that doesn't disqualify your point either.

For me, the greatest strength of "English" currently is that it's widespread adoption means that native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common. This goes to your point as well about transliteration.

By contrast, I am learning Dutch and it's a bit of a meme that Dutch people will switch to English if they detect a hint of an accent (excluding regional dialects of course). My theory is that they do not have an ear for it _because_ most Dutch nationals tend to also speak English at a B2+ level.

Contrast that to native English speakers, where the 3 major nations are home to a huge number of immigrants from all around the world, and it makes sense. If English speakers refused to talk with anyone that didn't have a perfect British/American/Australian accent, then nothing would ever get done.

In countries where the local population is tolerant of individual accents, I think the native language tends to thrive (Germany, China, Brazil, etc).

Edit: article link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...

> native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common

Interesting to read this; I had developed exactly the same hypothesis about French speakers: that they're less accustomed to a variety of accents (with the obvious caveat that it's even more risky to generalise from an anecdote than from data!).

> native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common

So you assert.

I apologize. As a native English speaker now living among one of these cultures, it seems to follow. From the few limited interactions I've had and seen elsewhere online in a similar scenario, it seems to track.

Obviously it will differ per person as well, but as a whole, in my experience, this tends to be a trend amongst homogenous language countries. I suspect it could also be true for countries like Luxembourg and Belgium where it's normal for many people to speak 2-4 languages all within a very close proximity to each other. These people need to listen to competent speakers whose home language may differ from that used by their neighbors and business contacts on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, my hypothesis is that proximity breeds tolerance. Based on other social experiments and observations, I don't think I'm too far off, but thank you for (validly) checking my bullish assertions.

> Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English.

I suspect it depends upon the type of language; consider the difference between "I fell" and "I fall". There's a different word there for doing something in the past. (Obvious examples are run/ran, pay/paid).

In other languages you might use a suffix on the same root-word. So in English you need to learn more words. You can't have a simple rule to say "I read" vs "I read in the past". The word you use is .. different, and you have to know it if you want to be correct.

And then the continuous! “I have fallen/was falling.”

Irregular verbs are not unique to English, but I guess there probably are more of them in the common lexicon. This is probably true is lots of language with irregular verbs. The irregular ones are irregular because the sounds have been adapted to flow better in everyday parlance.

The nice part of most irregular verbs however is that they are also common. If you read regularly or consume lots of content in the language, they will come up over and over again.

Is this something that non native English speakers struggle with early on in the language or does it feel more like a constant battle even past B2?

In Dutch, I’ve largely just accepted that I’m going to screw up irregular verbs until I can start reading novels on my own. I assume at that point the exposure will help drill them into my brain like reading as a young child did in English.

> something like 1/3rd larger than other languages

This is basically an urban legend.

Comparing vocabulary sizes between languages is essentially impossible, as what counts as a word is measured differently. (Think those long compound words in German, for example.) And using things like "total dictionary size" is similarly unhelpful because most of the words are technical or archaic, and it mostly depends on how deep a dictionary wants to go into rare words.

It's true that English has two main historical roots for vocabulary, but that doesn't mean native speakers use more words in terms of everyday normal speech. There are a handful of classic examples ("cow" and "beef", "pig" and "pork"), but they're very much exceptions rather than the rule. (There aren't dual words for "head" or "feet", or "apple" or "orange", or "chair" or "table", and so forth.)

There's zero evidence that vocabulary size is a difficulty for learning English.

(On the other hand, English does seem to overload words with multiple definitions more often than a lot of other languages -- so that definitely can be a minor difficulty for language comprehension, especially at the beginning.)

We do have lots of overloaded words, I sometimes catching myself using like definition 5 of a word - which with some of my friends I can do that - I need to code switch to something simpler when I'm speaking with people in my work environment.

> There aren't dual words for "head" or "feet"

There aren't two words for "feet", but the medical specialism that deals with "feet" (germanic root) is "podiatry" and if you want your feet beautified then you get a "pedicure" (both latin root). In some cases both roots are commonly used.

> There aren't dual words for "head"

Unless you count "chef" and "director"

An Esperantist friend of mine who spoke ten languages said that English is the easiest language to learn to speak badly and the hardest language to learn to speak well.

Practicing seven languages here (and knowing some others a bit) and having the same feeling. However, I'll put French (one of my primary languages) as ex-aequo.

I learned how to read and write in my native language in 2 weeks at age 6, when I learned half of alphabet, because I figured out rest of alphabet on my own. I'm reading non-stop since then.

How much it takes to learn how to properly read, write, listen, and speak in English? It took me about 20 years in total, but I still cannot talk properly.

Languages are more easily absorbed in childhood due to brain development. It's biologically harder to learn a language as an adult, because that part of your brain is more fully developed. Doable, just harder.

But at age 6 you've already been immersed in the language for 6 years. The problem there is to link it to its written form.

When you learn a second language you have the baggage of the first language hindering you (talking about orthography here), and you normally don't start by speaking the language exclusively for 6 years before learning how to read. If you don't know what the language is supposed to sound like, of course it's hard to understand how to read in it.

Much harder. I listen to my six year old boy read Finnish and English. Finnish is trivial, the pronunciation follows the spelling.

English? A word like "night" turns into "nig-hut" which kinda makes sense, but is also completely wrong. There are so many times when I have to say "No, actually you say XXX".

Speaking is fine, mostly. Though there were a few *years* where I had to say "Mommy is a woman, so you say 'she' not 'he'." as Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns. "Your friend is a girl so you say 'her ball', not 'his ball'". That took a long time to sink in, even though he was fine when people spoke to him he'd almost always get it wrong when women/girls were involved - and even Finnish adults make those kind of mistakes quite often. ("I have a girlfriend, his name is Sally".)

English has subjunctive mood, it is often used in counterfactuals like the first clause of "if I were taller, I could reach the ceiling". sometimes you can get away with saying "was" instead of "were" in these constructions, but your middle school english teacher would be disappointed.

Yes, but barely -- it's literally just a single instance of using "were" instead of "was".

While Portuguese? Welcome to full sets of conjugations for past subjunctive, present subjunctive, and future subjunctive. And everybody uses them in regular speech, they're not like a formal writing thing or something.

This use has almost died out in everyday speech though. I listen to many podcasts in which different people across different age groups and backgrounds are always messing it up, e.g. "if I was good at this", which really clangs to my ears, but it's very common.

English is also pretty forgiving when spoken. You don’t need to know all the rules to mostly make sense. In many other languages the threshold to be understood feels higher. Maybe that’s because everyone knows some English though

> Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there.

Sure …when, as native, you don't have to spent years leaning it that easier language …like others.

Oh wait, you dunno toki-pona nor esperanto :(

CJK characters do encode some phonetic content, it’s just an imperfect process and is more or less unreliable from dialect to dialect.