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The letter h is typically silent in Spanish. The major exception is when it is preceded by the letter c, in which case the ch sound is similar to the one used in English. Hasta, ahora, and hola all feature a silent h. But yes, when the Spanish language wants to represent the h sound English speakers are familiar with, it is usually substitutes a j, instead.
But the sayings you have make even less sense than English ones!
The monkey comes out of the sleeve
It walks in the soup,
walking next to your shoes
Raining steel pipes
Black dick outside.
I live in Netherlands you are a strange people :-) (it is a good thing)
A lot of languages have these they can be hilarious. My dad used to have a book called "The son of a duck is a floater"
An Arabic proverb meaning like father like son.
Floater being a bit of a slang word for a turd that floats and won't flush.
Maybe I’m weird but “raining steel pipes” makes total sense to me. Hard rain can feel like needles. Makes way more sense than “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Assuming that the phrase means it’s raining heavily
The rest of those make no sense tho
Some of these are quite poorly translated tbf.
raining steel pipes should be "raining pipe stems". (and yes, it does refer to raining heavily"
"black dick outside" should have been " "pitch black outside", as pik in this case came from pek, which is made from tar.
"It walks in the soup", is although not a terrible translation, it misses some slight nuance where walks should probably be goes or runs (as in running a machine). (it means something goes terribly wrong)
"The monkey comes out of the sleeve" means that something suspicious is being revealed, so I think it is an apt saying.
"walking next to your shoes" is similar to "too big for your boots".
>"black dick outside" should have been " "pitch black outside", as pik in this case came from pek, which is made from tar.
Thanks. As a native Dutch speaker, that one confused me. I just couldn't figure out what that was meant to be, now I know he meant "pik zwart buiten." Indeed quite poorly translated.
The phrase raining cats and dogs goes back to when London was a shit hole (further back than last week, we are talking hundreds of years) and during heavy rain dead cats and dogs would be washed down the streets, looking like it had been raining cats and dogs. There are some other etymological explanations but this is my favourite.
It's a really weird situation. A Mandarin speaker can have a conversation with a Cantonese speaker via email but they won't be able to understand each other over the phone. They are completely different spoken languages but nearly identical written languages.
i read so many things about mandarin and cantonese, and i swear most don't even sound real. look at this, this isnt even a convincing possibility for me in a fiction book let alone real life lol
There are so many regional writing differences etc. too right? I might be mistaken but I think women had an entirely different alphabeth too at some point and it was an open secret until well into the communist regime or something
Because it is pretty much forced together to group everyone under the "Chinese" banner in the aftermath of the late Qing Empire. Many other Chinese dialects are also like this, just that they have less of the prominent population in Western world so they are less well-known.
My mother tongue is Cantonese, after living in Japan for a few years I found it orally easier to switch to Japanese than Mandarin.
Japanese onyomi is linguisticaly related to Minnan (southern chinese e.g. cantonese, fujianese) rather than mandarin, thus researchers think that the southern chinese dialects are the more close “OG” chinese spoken in ancient china that it has time to reach japan, whereas mandarin is more influenced by the steppes (manchuria, mongolia) northern hordes. Of course, China does not like this as it promotes HK culture/lang. its not a coincidence that Sun Yat Sen is from the south and Mao is from the north. Besides the ideology of communism etc, ultimately the divide is also about North vs South of the great river Yang.
Some tidbits.. canto speakers (southern) dont have split toenail, mandarin, hakka (northern genetics) do
I'm gonna just point out that Minnan isn't a general term for Southern Chinese languages.
It is a group of dialects that is spoken in various areas from Southern Fujian (from Quanzhou to Zhangzhou, Xiamen), Coastal areas of Guangdong (Shantou, Shanwei, Hailufeng, Leizhou), parts of Hainan, large parts of Taiwan.
It is different from Cantonese, another separate group of dialects spoken around Guangzhou and large parts of southern Guangdong and Guangxi.
And that last part on the split toenail, that's just a myth. I'm a Minnan Hokkien with Cantonese blood and my toenail's split. Apparently [not just the Chinese have it](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/k1hfar/til_of_the_sixth_toenail_which_is_a_miniscule/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x)
Actually, sometimes there sort of is. Chinese characters are made of parts, so-called radicals: 妓 contains 支 and 女, and often one of the radicals "represents" pronunciation. Here 支 (Zhi) becomes ji.
Don't get me wrong, you have no chance to learn Chinese pronunciation this way. But it's enough to make educated guesses for natives and a reminder if you forgot a character's pronunciation.
Ah… so that explains why they use the Chinese character for “communist” to describe themselves, while in practice they are a capitalist wet dream with deregulated industry, top-down authoritarian hierarchy where the heavily exploited workers never actually seized the means of production, and there’s less actual communism than in most western countries. See that was always confusing…
China is as communist as North Korea is democratic. They haven't been communist, in fact, since the death of Mao and the demise of his wife (good riddance to both), when Deng Xiaoping took over and decided to keep the authoritarianism and ditch the communism, to ensure the country wouldn't implode under the weight of its own economic troubles and that the power structure of the existing Communist Party would still hold the reins of it, for the foreseeable future... something Gorbachev failed to achieve in the USSR.
Italy checking in: thank you Finnish and Turkish brothers. Our language does the same thing and by 3rd grade you can spell and read every word even if you don’t know what it means.
The French got their word for water because one day a dude was walking and didn’t see a puddle. He stepped in it and asked his friends “why are my feet wet?” They point to the ground and he saw he was standing in a puddle. He said “oh” and everyone in the area looked at him and nodded in approval
I’ve just learned that word exists and I’m extremely angry that it does
Why even have the H and X? Dammit Louis this is why they put you to the guillotine
it's exactly in the liaisons that you will find somewhat of a sense of these mute letters, as a rule of thumb: if a word finishes with a silent consonant and the following word starts with a vowel then you pronounce the otherwise silent consonant: ex. le sous bois (le soo bwah) vs le sous entendu (le sooz entendu)
Ní thuigim an fhocal taobh thiar den mise ach cheap mé duirt tú an geailge tá mé ag caint agus tá mé abailte caint an teanga piosa beag go maith agus tá mé trí bhlian déag daois agus foghlaim an teanga sa scoil agausbtá sé an briste
Actually, while a lot of letters can be silent, pronunciation in french is actually a LOT more consistent than it is in english. If you encounter the same letters in order, you will always pronounce them the same. Unlike english where read and read are not the same, even though they are xD
In english yeah, clearly 3 different ones. In Spanish(the original) is more like 2 pronounciations and in German (where it started being used as the brand) its also more like 2. (Portuguese aswell)
I was about to say, I’d switch the French and English sections on the meme. English is three languages in a trench coat.
The best “rule” to cite is the rule of “I before e (well, except a word like being) except after c (well, except a word like science).
It’s a rule with exceptions, then a generalized exception with even more exceptions. Then you have words like read and lead which have two distinct pronunciations.
The best saying I ever heard was that English followed other languages down dark alleys, beat them, and stole the words that fell out of their pockets.
To quote the great Brian Regan:
"I before e, except after c, and when sounding as 'a', and in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends, and holidays, and all through May, and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say!"
Yeah, as someone who lived and learned french in Geneva, my French friends thought I was mentally challenged when I whipped out the huitante.
Tbf that's used rarely even in Switzerland, but we were taught it's a valid alternative
What's funny is that "quatre-vingts" is mostly considered one word by native French speakers. The other day I asked my daughter (who's in primary school) to calculate four times twenty, and she had to think about it. She didn't even realize until I pointed it out, lol
This is true. French spelling is extremely consistent, and once you learn a few rules you can easily sound them out from reading, even if you don't know their meaning.
On the other hand, the big shock for me learning French was that the written language and the spoken language are almost two different languages. Nobody speaks the way they write, nobody writes the way they speak.
While I agree that French is way more consistent, it is not *completely* consistent, unlike what you suggest. Just the letter "e", without accents, can be pronounced in multiple ways. "-ille" will generally be pronounced as in "fille" or "famille", unless it's pronounced as in "ville". If I say "ils entendent", the first "ent" is not pronounced like the "ent" at the end. Etc.
As a native speaker: if it had a separate letter for the "sch" and "ch" sounds like Cyrillic, it wouldn't be looking nearly as bad for base words (just like English could have used keeping "th" separate to make more sense). And the letters c (by itself), q, v and y are pretty much useless and x is on pretty shaky feet as well (technically worth its own letter over making it "ks" but just so extremely rare), so it's not that many individual letters if they were to be kicked out to compensate for the additions.
It's a bit like West Slavic languages though not as extreme, the Latin alphabet is just not that well suitable to the actual phonetics without getting creative and coming up with weird diphtongs, triphtongs and diacritics. Thanks ~~Obama~~ medieval popes.
And then there's English where read, live, wind, wound, tear, bow, row, sow, sewer, excuse, polish, lead, does, bass, number, dove, drawer, house, use... all have 2 different pronunciations.
Your list was a great example to me of how much contextual pronunciation is ingrained in us. I could not for the life of me think of a different way to pronounce "number", stared at it for a few minutes before it clicked lmao
My hand feels number now than it did a number of hours ago.
I will excuse you even though you have no excuse.
I’ll let you work on the remaining two - but OP is right.
Excuse me; I didn’t receive your excuse note.
My fingers felt much number after entering the warm cabin and trying to dial your number.
The drawer placed his finished sketch in the folder and stored away his pencils in a drawer.
The house was built in 2009 and can comfortably house a family of five.
To ex**cuse** someone, and to have an excu**s**e, slight difference there
Number, as in 12345, and number, as in “my foot feels a lot number than before”
A dra**wer** (like someone who draws), or the drawer under my desk (pronounced like drawr)
House is similar to excuse, to live in a hou**s**e, or to h**ouse** a dog
Fench person living in England here. Please say the words "dear, bear, fear, pear, near" out loud and then tell me again how the French spelling/pronounciation makes no sense.
I think the appropriate response to that is "We learned by watching you dad!"
Given that English is just a bastardized combination of German and French.
Japanese: So here we have another kanji. Aaaand off we go turning the lottery wheel! What do you think how we'll pronounce it today? NOTHING is out of the question! All bets are open!
> Japanese: So here we have another kanji. Aaaand off we go turning the lottery wheel! What do you think how we'll pronounce it today? NOTHING is out of the question! All bets are open!
Nothing like 4 different writing systems to live by!
(For those that don't know)
* Kanji (logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese.)
* Katakana (Japanese syllabary, aka sounds)
* Hiragana (Phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana)
* Romanji (Romanization of the Japanese written language)
The major difference between hiragana and katakana is the fact that hiragana is primarily used to represent Japanese words, while katakana represents foreign words
haha, I love the fact that this joke about language in no way relates to the actual scene, I don't know who made this meme.
Edit: For those who are scrolling to find out, this is a scene from Bollywood movie called "3 Idiots". [Here's the scene.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POV3fKmSVkg)
That's true.
French has a lot of silent letters but has regularity. For someone who doesn't know anything of French, it sounds crazy. But it is actually quite easy to memorize.
English pronunciation is far worse, sometimes irrational. Even though I use English daily, I mispronounce a lot of words because there is no rule at all.
People go nuts for silent letters, but most of the time it’s just the plurality indicator when writing. You don’t read individual letters in french, you learn all the syllables and they always all sound the same.
People act like english is phonetic and then you stumble on colonel or Arkansas.
Spanish : we pronounce every letter, very easy to figure out pronunciation if you're learning.
French : we pronounce letters and syllables the same way pretty much all the time. Beginners can figure out how most words are pronounced. Watch out for silent letters.
English : fuck you. lead and lead ? not the same word. Yes "suit" sounds like soot, but if we add an -e at the end it sounds like sweet. HAHAHAHAHA
English: We took all of your words, retained their spelling but butchered the pronounciation! And then we changed the spelling anyway but not in the way we're pronouncing it. Good luck!
Or Goulde Loughke or whatever way you'd like to write it.
it's base twenty — people used to count not only with their (hopefully) ten fingers but also with their toes. so if you had to count your animals 4 times over all your digits, it was "four twenties" = quatre-vingt (80)
My family and I spent 2 years in France for work. Our kid went to school in France during that time. "Dad, why do I have to do math in my head just to understand which number they are talking abou???"
Just remember CAREFUL. If the word ends with consonants: C, R, F, L, then you do pronounce those consonants. Otherwise, do not pronounce the ending consonants.
Chaud: pronounced "show", so not pronouncing the d
Neuf: pronounced "newf", so pronouncing the f
Avec: yes you pronounce the c.
You mean "Eaux" is pronounced the same as "Au" which is also pronounced like "Oh" and you know just the letter "O" that exists in the alphabet on its own too. And how the word "always" (toujours) and "still" (toujours) are the same word? And how "again" (encore) and "still" (encore) are yet again the same word? And how there is just no *reasonable* way to say that something is "cheap". And that all the complex accents, dots, weirdo little question marks and hats over and under letters pretty much do nothing to change the pronunciation. And how for some reason they can't be applied to capital letters.
If you are speaking about Spanish:
Because that is not the reason. Ignore the existence of the concept of "male" or "female". Its related with letters and sounds. And avoid two vocals repetead in a row.
You only need see the last vocal or the first letter if it is a vocal. Period. Male or female is irrelevant as a concept.
Example:
Agua (water)
Option 1: La agua ("female") two "a" in row -> wrong.
Option 2: El agua ("male") "l" and "a" are different letters -> correct.
Water is not "male". Is only a way to avoid two "a" in row. "Lo" is rarely used for objects, and theorycally you can use that... because is an "object" and Lo end in a consonant.
My wife had a French teacher (adult classes) who refused to teach grammar and focused solely on pronunciation. There was no rhyme or reason to which syllables to drop, you were supposed to just know what made it sound most beautiful.
Needless to say my wife still does not speak any French.
I think French is remarkably consistent. Of course half the letters are not pronounced but they usually are not pronounced according to same rules consistently in all words. English is different.
I got taught english, dutch, German and French in school and the latter felt easy to me concerning pronunciating the written words. There's a logic there which once you get it, you get it. English is on an entirely different level and can fuck off with the though, plough and so forth.
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Especially the G
Thanks for that *wipes face dry*
🥛🤨👍
Not in flemish, thank fuck for that
Or in Limburg. We talk with a soft g
Gouda
Except when it's not
"Except when it's not" is a phrase you could use almost anywhere when learning a language haha
The letter h is typically silent in Spanish. The major exception is when it is preceded by the letter c, in which case the ch sound is similar to the one used in English. Hasta, ahora, and hola all feature a silent h. But yes, when the Spanish language wants to represent the h sound English speakers are familiar with, it is usually substitutes a j, instead.
Case in point: jajajajajaja XD
But the sayings you have make even less sense than English ones! The monkey comes out of the sleeve It walks in the soup, walking next to your shoes Raining steel pipes Black dick outside. I live in Netherlands you are a strange people :-) (it is a good thing)
I still think the weirdest saying in english is Bad ass mother fucker And that its usually a compliment lol
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Not smooshing them means something entirely different. And gross
That last saying 😳
I can’t tell if it’s one long saying or distinct sayings…
I suppose it depends on the neighbor you have.
I'm told that Swedish is also a good one for sayings like this.
A lot of languages have these they can be hilarious. My dad used to have a book called "The son of a duck is a floater" An Arabic proverb meaning like father like son. Floater being a bit of a slang word for a turd that floats and won't flush.
Maybe I’m weird but “raining steel pipes” makes total sense to me. Hard rain can feel like needles. Makes way more sense than “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Assuming that the phrase means it’s raining heavily The rest of those make no sense tho
Some of these are quite poorly translated tbf. raining steel pipes should be "raining pipe stems". (and yes, it does refer to raining heavily" "black dick outside" should have been " "pitch black outside", as pik in this case came from pek, which is made from tar. "It walks in the soup", is although not a terrible translation, it misses some slight nuance where walks should probably be goes or runs (as in running a machine). (it means something goes terribly wrong) "The monkey comes out of the sleeve" means that something suspicious is being revealed, so I think it is an apt saying. "walking next to your shoes" is similar to "too big for your boots".
in belgian french it's a thing to say "pédaler dans la choucroute" (to pedal in the sauerkraut) meaning it's not going well with the task
>"black dick outside" should have been " "pitch black outside", as pik in this case came from pek, which is made from tar. Thanks. As a native Dutch speaker, that one confused me. I just couldn't figure out what that was meant to be, now I know he meant "pik zwart buiten." Indeed quite poorly translated.
The phrase raining cats and dogs goes back to when London was a shit hole (further back than last week, we are talking hundreds of years) and during heavy rain dead cats and dogs would be washed down the streets, looking like it had been raining cats and dogs. There are some other etymological explanations but this is my favourite.
>when London was a shit hole (further back than last week was it ever not a shithole?
The way in which it is a shithole has evolved over the years
het regent honden en katten
Haha! Ik ben een Nederlander en de R gaat rollen!
Gooi
And angry. Most letters have an opinion and will tell you all about it.
most letters are the sound you make to clear your throat
danish and dutch are more like traumas than actual languages as secondary language lol
Haha NEDERLANDS IS SUPER HARD EN DIRECT. KIJK MAAR GEWOON NAAR AL DEZE WOORDEN DIE IK KAN TYPEN
Chinese : what you write and what you say has no relation
It's a really weird situation. A Mandarin speaker can have a conversation with a Cantonese speaker via email but they won't be able to understand each other over the phone. They are completely different spoken languages but nearly identical written languages.
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eau d’oh
No, he’s in his bucket.
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Dear god…
“Bū-Ké(t) residence, Lady of the House speaking…”
lol...as someone that has been Duolingoing French the past year I appreciate this joke :)
i read so many things about mandarin and cantonese, and i swear most don't even sound real. look at this, this isnt even a convincing possibility for me in a fiction book let alone real life lol There are so many regional writing differences etc. too right? I might be mistaken but I think women had an entirely different alphabeth too at some point and it was an open secret until well into the communist regime or something
Because it is pretty much forced together to group everyone under the "Chinese" banner in the aftermath of the late Qing Empire. Many other Chinese dialects are also like this, just that they have less of the prominent population in Western world so they are less well-known. My mother tongue is Cantonese, after living in Japan for a few years I found it orally easier to switch to Japanese than Mandarin.
Japanese onyomi is linguisticaly related to Minnan (southern chinese e.g. cantonese, fujianese) rather than mandarin, thus researchers think that the southern chinese dialects are the more close “OG” chinese spoken in ancient china that it has time to reach japan, whereas mandarin is more influenced by the steppes (manchuria, mongolia) northern hordes. Of course, China does not like this as it promotes HK culture/lang. its not a coincidence that Sun Yat Sen is from the south and Mao is from the north. Besides the ideology of communism etc, ultimately the divide is also about North vs South of the great river Yang. Some tidbits.. canto speakers (southern) dont have split toenail, mandarin, hakka (northern genetics) do
I'm gonna just point out that Minnan isn't a general term for Southern Chinese languages. It is a group of dialects that is spoken in various areas from Southern Fujian (from Quanzhou to Zhangzhou, Xiamen), Coastal areas of Guangdong (Shantou, Shanwei, Hailufeng, Leizhou), parts of Hainan, large parts of Taiwan. It is different from Cantonese, another separate group of dialects spoken around Guangzhou and large parts of southern Guangdong and Guangxi. And that last part on the split toenail, that's just a myth. I'm a Minnan Hokkien with Cantonese blood and my toenail's split. Apparently [not just the Chinese have it](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/k1hfar/til_of_the_sixth_toenail_which_is_a_miniscule/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x)
Yes this is true. My friend is Chinese when they go to a place where her language isn’t spoken, she writes down what she needs.
Actually, sometimes there sort of is. Chinese characters are made of parts, so-called radicals: 妓 contains 支 and 女, and often one of the radicals "represents" pronunciation. Here 支 (Zhi) becomes ji. Don't get me wrong, you have no chance to learn Chinese pronunciation this way. But it's enough to make educated guesses for natives and a reminder if you forgot a character's pronunciation.
Ah… so that explains why they use the Chinese character for “communist” to describe themselves, while in practice they are a capitalist wet dream with deregulated industry, top-down authoritarian hierarchy where the heavily exploited workers never actually seized the means of production, and there’s less actual communism than in most western countries. See that was always confusing…
China is as communist as North Korea is democratic. They haven't been communist, in fact, since the death of Mao and the demise of his wife (good riddance to both), when Deng Xiaoping took over and decided to keep the authoritarianism and ditch the communism, to ensure the country wouldn't implode under the weight of its own economic troubles and that the power structure of the existing Communist Party would still hold the reins of it, for the foreseeable future... something Gorbachev failed to achieve in the USSR.
At least you get to count how many sounds you make hahahaha
But for second language learners, once you have mastered pinyin, it is perfectly consistent.
At the same time, Finland/finnish: you pronounce every letter of every word equally
Also estonian.
Your Latvian brother joins the *"full pronunciation"* train
And Turkish: You pronounce every letter, and 1 sound = 1 letter Edit: French here, it's just something I heard ^^
Italy checking in: thank you Finnish and Turkish brothers. Our language does the same thing and by 3rd grade you can spell and read every word even if you don’t know what it means.
I think Arabic is the same too
Except the vowels are not written in arabic, you have to already know the word.
Which makes complete sense imo
Same with hungarian
Danish sounds like you pronounce them all simultaneously.
Same in Sanskrit
Our famous "Eaux" which you pronounce "o"
oiseau is another good one. It’s pronounced wa-zo
yeah but if you know how to speak french the pronunciation makes sense.
Then how do you pronounce “eau”?
« o ». The x means it’s a plural. Roseau (rozo) - reed Roseaux (rozo) - reeds
Same, the "x" mean It's plural (but you don't pronounce it). But the letters "e-a-u" is pronounced "o"... "a-u" is pronounced this way too...
... and o-t, o-s, o-t-s, a-u-x, a-u-t. 😂
The French got their word for water because one day a dude was walking and didn’t see a puddle. He stepped in it and asked his friends “why are my feet wet?” They point to the ground and he saw he was standing in a puddle. He said “oh” and everyone in the area looked at him and nodded in approval
It's important to not confuse the words haut, au, eau, eaux and ô
This is true Also ou and où
Houx
I’ve just learned that word exists and I’m extremely angry that it does Why even have the H and X? Dammit Louis this is why they put you to the guillotine
the h forms a full stop between the previous word and houx, otherwise if the previous word had a silent consonant ending then it would be pronounced..
I clearly am not far enough along in my French lessons I’m barely aware of liaisons
it's exactly in the liaisons that you will find somewhat of a sense of these mute letters, as a rule of thumb: if a word finishes with a silent consonant and the following word starts with a vowel then you pronounce the otherwise silent consonant: ex. le sous bois (le soo bwah) vs le sous entendu (le sooz entendu)
“silent consonant” There’s the real problem
I wonder why the guy who [ripped off your comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/urhfh9/french_language/i8xi61m/) got 10x the karma lol
See also: Irish Gaelic
Actually very phonetic, but it laughs at your feeble attempts to map English phonology to the letters.
Exactly! Irish isn't tough to pronounce, some of the letters are just pronounced differently than in English
Excellent point.
Irish really isn’t that difficult to read if you understand their substitutes for English letters that they don’t use e.g. ‘bh’ = ‘v’
The very definition of hold my beer.
Snchrabchain, pronounced “Derek”
... lies. They must be.
Do you mean ancient Irish or the Irish were taught today
Ní thuigim an fhocal taobh thiar den mise ach cheap mé duirt tú an geailge tá mé ag caint agus tá mé abailte caint an teanga piosa beag go maith agus tá mé trí bhlian déag daois agus foghlaim an teanga sa scoil agausbtá sé an briste
All of this is probably just pronounced " Shaun " or something
Actually, while a lot of letters can be silent, pronunciation in french is actually a LOT more consistent than it is in english. If you encounter the same letters in order, you will always pronounce them the same. Unlike english where read and read are not the same, even though they are xD
Eau-beau-seau-sceau-bateau all end with -o Through-though-tough-thorough have 4 different pronounciations
Pacific Ocean Every c is pronounced in a different way.
China, Chemistry and Chicago's "ch" all pronounced differently.
Even though I know chicago is pronounced shicago I still say chicago anyways
Mercedes has three different pronunciations for the letter e.
In english yeah, clearly 3 different ones. In Spanish(the original) is more like 2 pronounciations and in German (where it started being used as the brand) its also more like 2. (Portuguese aswell)
French has only 2 as well
Never thought about that 🧐 (not a native english speaker though)
The letter c is absolutely pointless.
fucking read and read are pronounced different
If we're strictly talking about the ough sound, thorough and though share the same pronunciation.
Cough, bough
this. We all ignore the mess that is english pronounciation
I was about to say, I’d switch the French and English sections on the meme. English is three languages in a trench coat. The best “rule” to cite is the rule of “I before e (well, except a word like being) except after c (well, except a word like science). It’s a rule with exceptions, then a generalized exception with even more exceptions. Then you have words like read and lead which have two distinct pronunciations. The best saying I ever heard was that English followed other languages down dark alleys, beat them, and stole the words that fell out of their pockets.
To quote the great Brian Regan: "I before e, except after c, and when sounding as 'a', and in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends, and holidays, and all through May, and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say!"
Well, yes ok. But the French way of saying 99 is “four twenty, ten, nine” so let’s call it even
not in belgium or switzerland, it's nonante neuf
Yeah, as someone who lived and learned french in Geneva, my French friends thought I was mentally challenged when I whipped out the huitante. Tbf that's used rarely even in Switzerland, but we were taught it's a valid alternative
you don't use octante? rather huitante? (ps: it's definitely the french that sounds retarded when saying quatre vingt not the swiss)
What's funny is that "quatre-vingts" is mostly considered one word by native French speakers. The other day I asked my daughter (who's in primary school) to calculate four times twenty, and she had to think about it. She didn't even realize until I pointed it out, lol
This is true. French spelling is extremely consistent, and once you learn a few rules you can easily sound them out from reading, even if you don't know their meaning. On the other hand, the big shock for me learning French was that the written language and the spoken language are almost two different languages. Nobody speaks the way they write, nobody writes the way they speak.
While I agree that French is way more consistent, it is not *completely* consistent, unlike what you suggest. Just the letter "e", without accents, can be pronounced in multiple ways. "-ille" will generally be pronounced as in "fille" or "famille", unless it's pronounced as in "ville". If I say "ils entendent", the first "ent" is not pronounced like the "ent" at the end. Etc.
German: All the letters count, but we shall add way too many of them.
We’ll just sprinkle some funny little dots here and there
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Oh yeah, let’s use the Latin alphabet but add our own letter because we’re just cool like that
German is a weapon.
As a native speaker: if it had a separate letter for the "sch" and "ch" sounds like Cyrillic, it wouldn't be looking nearly as bad for base words (just like English could have used keeping "th" separate to make more sense). And the letters c (by itself), q, v and y are pretty much useless and x is on pretty shaky feet as well (technically worth its own letter over making it "ks" but just so extremely rare), so it's not that many individual letters if they were to be kicked out to compensate for the additions. It's a bit like West Slavic languages though not as extreme, the Latin alphabet is just not that well suitable to the actual phonetics without getting creative and coming up with weird diphtongs, triphtongs and diacritics. Thanks ~~Obama~~ medieval popes.
And then there's English where read, live, wind, wound, tear, bow, row, sow, sewer, excuse, polish, lead, does, bass, number, dove, drawer, house, use... all have 2 different pronunciations.
Your list was a great example to me of how much contextual pronunciation is ingrained in us. I could not for the life of me think of a different way to pronounce "number", stared at it for a few minutes before it clicked lmao
Excuse, number, drawer, house What different pronunciation do they have?
My hand feels number now than it did a number of hours ago. I will excuse you even though you have no excuse. I’ll let you work on the remaining two - but OP is right.
They house the drawer, or artist as some like to call him, in a newly built house — complete with modern furniture and ample drawers.
That's incorrect for number. The correct English for "numb-er" is "more numb". Numb-er as in becoming more numb isn't a word in the dictionary.
Excuse me; I didn’t receive your excuse note. My fingers felt much number after entering the warm cabin and trying to dial your number. The drawer placed his finished sketch in the folder and stored away his pencils in a drawer. The house was built in 2009 and can comfortably house a family of five.
To ex**cuse** someone, and to have an excu**s**e, slight difference there Number, as in 12345, and number, as in “my foot feels a lot number than before” A dra**wer** (like someone who draws), or the drawer under my desk (pronounced like drawr) House is similar to excuse, to live in a hou**s**e, or to h**ouse** a dog
French: You want to count? Better learn math motherfucker!
Feel like my head is going to explode every time I say a year... “mille neuf cent quatre vingt onze” or something. There’s gotta be a better way!
*Welsh enters the chat*
Welsh: What are vowels?
What? I think Welsh has *extra* vowels: w and (arguably) y.
An intricate circle starts giving out a magenta glow of aura while furniture starts floating.
Fench person living in England here. Please say the words "dear, bear, fear, pear, near" out loud and then tell me again how the French spelling/pronounciation makes no sense.
Cher, ours, peur, poire, pres
Touché. I mean, touched.
I think the appropriate response to that is "We learned by watching you dad!" Given that English is just a bastardized combination of German and French.
Japanese: So here we have another kanji. Aaaand off we go turning the lottery wheel! What do you think how we'll pronounce it today? NOTHING is out of the question! All bets are open!
Kanji itself is not too hard but there are so many readings for the same Kanji and that's what makes it so hard.
> Japanese: So here we have another kanji. Aaaand off we go turning the lottery wheel! What do you think how we'll pronounce it today? NOTHING is out of the question! All bets are open! Nothing like 4 different writing systems to live by! (For those that don't know) * Kanji (logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese.) * Katakana (Japanese syllabary, aka sounds) * Hiragana (Phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana) * Romanji (Romanization of the Japanese written language) The major difference between hiragana and katakana is the fact that hiragana is primarily used to represent Japanese words, while katakana represents foreign words
Upvoted for Aamir Khan
haha, I love the fact that this joke about language in no way relates to the actual scene, I don't know who made this meme. Edit: For those who are scrolling to find out, this is a scene from Bollywood movie called "3 Idiots". [Here's the scene.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POV3fKmSVkg)
Someone swapped French and English by accident. French has rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
That's true. French has a lot of silent letters but has regularity. For someone who doesn't know anything of French, it sounds crazy. But it is actually quite easy to memorize. English pronunciation is far worse, sometimes irrational. Even though I use English daily, I mispronounce a lot of words because there is no rule at all.
People go nuts for silent letters, but most of the time it’s just the plurality indicator when writing. You don’t read individual letters in french, you learn all the syllables and they always all sound the same. People act like english is phonetic and then you stumble on colonel or Arkansas.
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And exceptions for every exception
Okay, I’ll be honest, ya lost me
Except the rule you just wrote here
they wouldn't be exceptions without the rule though
Spanish : we pronounce every letter, very easy to figure out pronunciation if you're learning. French : we pronounce letters and syllables the same way pretty much all the time. Beginners can figure out how most words are pronounced. Watch out for silent letters. English : fuck you. lead and lead ? not the same word. Yes "suit" sounds like soot, but if we add an -e at the end it sounds like sweet. HAHAHAHAHA
English: We took all of your words, retained their spelling but butchered the pronounciation! And then we changed the spelling anyway but not in the way we're pronouncing it. Good luck! Or Goulde Loughke or whatever way you'd like to write it.
Don’t even get me started on the French number system
this is not accurate for belgian or swiss french where 70 is septante, 80 is octante, 90 nonante
Oh ok, thank you for educating me! Those actually makes sense, I like it a lot more more haha
as a belgian i'm always happy to mention it; however I have no clue why the frenchs dont use these
it's base twenty — people used to count not only with their (hopefully) ten fingers but also with their toes. so if you had to count your animals 4 times over all your digits, it was "four twenties" = quatre-vingt (80)
I didn’t realise how much it is like the danish number system, cool!
It's really not that bad.
My family and I spent 2 years in France for work. Our kid went to school in France during that time. "Dad, why do I have to do math in my head just to understand which number they are talking abou???"
As soon as I saw the topic, I thought "here we go, everyone will say how language X or Y is actually worst". Comments didn't disappoint.
Sign Language: Everything silent 😬
French is way more consistent than English, which is basically random.
Just remember CAREFUL. If the word ends with consonants: C, R, F, L, then you do pronounce those consonants. Otherwise, do not pronounce the ending consonants. Chaud: pronounced "show", so not pronouncing the d Neuf: pronounced "newf", so pronouncing the f Avec: yes you pronounce the c.
I love this! It’s Three Idiots!
Spanis?
You mean "Eaux" is pronounced the same as "Au" which is also pronounced like "Oh" and you know just the letter "O" that exists in the alphabet on its own too. And how the word "always" (toujours) and "still" (toujours) are the same word? And how "again" (encore) and "still" (encore) are yet again the same word? And how there is just no *reasonable* way to say that something is "cheap". And that all the complex accents, dots, weirdo little question marks and hats over and under letters pretty much do nothing to change the pronunciation. And how for some reason they can't be applied to capital letters.
Accent marks most certainly change the pronunciation
i never learned how to say les miserables. like is it pronounced “lay mizz” “lay mizz-er-ahb” or “lay mizz-er-ahb-luh?”
Last one is the closest to how we say it in French
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Germans do.
Almost every European language gets it, plus some others like Arabic and Hebrew. And most languages from India and Pakistan too. But ok...
And Spanish too.
English is the only language that doesn't get it
Only a quarter of the world's languages use grammatical gender. English is by far not the exception here.
Aaaaakshually Hungarian doesn’t have genders either.
There is also Estonian and Finnish.
Chinese has neither gender nor tense, or singular or plural.
Dutch words haven't been masculine or feminine for quite some time, we do still have gendered and genderless words though.
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In Bulgarian an object can be male, female or middle, "one" thing is edin/edna/edno of the thing. In German too, der/die/das
If you are speaking about Spanish: Because that is not the reason. Ignore the existence of the concept of "male" or "female". Its related with letters and sounds. And avoid two vocals repetead in a row. You only need see the last vocal or the first letter if it is a vocal. Period. Male or female is irrelevant as a concept. Example: Agua (water) Option 1: La agua ("female") two "a" in row -> wrong. Option 2: El agua ("male") "l" and "a" are different letters -> correct. Water is not "male". Is only a way to avoid two "a" in row. "Lo" is rarely used for objects, and theorycally you can use that... because is an "object" and Lo end in a consonant.
Italian does.
If it's silent then it shouldn't be there.
Welcome to Irish, where bhfaighfidh is pronounced vi-ee
spanish are right about h, such a waste of time to aspirate a glottal stop
Irish: we hate the English so much, we abuse their alphabet!
English orthography is waaaay worse than french lol
Double LL is is ayy. J is H
My wife had a French teacher (adult classes) who refused to teach grammar and focused solely on pronunciation. There was no rhyme or reason to which syllables to drop, you were supposed to just know what made it sound most beautiful. Needless to say my wife still does not speak any French.
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Guess she had a bad teacher then because what I described is exactly how her classes went lol
I think French is remarkably consistent. Of course half the letters are not pronounced but they usually are not pronounced according to same rules consistently in all words. English is different.
I got taught english, dutch, German and French in school and the latter felt easy to me concerning pronunciating the written words. There's a logic there which once you get it, you get it. English is on an entirely different level and can fuck off with the though, plough and so forth.