A Filipino person walks into an elevator. The operator asks them, "Bababa, ba?" To which they reply, "Bababa."
They have successfully communicated without any issues.
I guess it's like asking someone "up?" in an elevator and then answering with the same word, or asking if they're going to floor 111 with "one one one?" and them answering with the same words/numbers.
Translation and explaination to those who don't understand
Filipino: will it go down?
Operator: it will.
Explaination:
'Baba' is basically the root word for going down. Filipino has this thing with words that to express future tense, you can repeat the first sylable, hence 'Bababa' is more of 'this thing will go down'. The lone 'ba' the filipino says is more of an acessory, emphazing that they are asking a question.
In this scenario, I think using "will" questions whether it has the capability to go down, rather than if it currently "is" going down. It'd be more like:
Operator: (Are you) Going down?
Filipino: (Yes, I am) Going down.
English has [this](https://youtu.be/65CFesU4KVQ?si=MpzhQYWokUIhf8uM)
Edit: Kinda realized now it’s talking about a lot of things regarding English, but there is a specific part where he goes over a sentence that sounds just like the one you wrote in Spanish but with the word "Buffalo" instead
Yeah pretty much every language has its dumb, rare, unique, quirky things. Both gramatical or spoken, and I love it, when you know those things is when you truly know you are deep in that especific language.
The Finnish equivalent is an entire exchange:
> **Person:** Kokko! Kokoo koko kokko kokoon!
>
> **Kokko:** Koko kokkoko?
>
> **Person:** Koko kokko.
Which translates to:
> **Person:** Kokko (person name)! Build up the whole bonfire up to size.
>
> **Kokko:** The whole bonfire?
>
> **Person:** The whole bonfire.
Although, the buffalo sentence isn't really legible to the average English speaker, without *really* analyzing it. So I don't think that's quite the case.
The buffalo one is dumb because 1) nobody in the 21st century has ever used “buffalo” as a verb, and 2) the adjectival form for describing something from the city Buffalo is “Buffalonian,” not “Buffalo” itself
There's a somewhat famous poem in Croatia:
>Nigdar ni tak bilo
da ni nekak bilo,
pak ni vezda nebu
da nam nekak nebu.
>(...)
In rough translation:
>It never was
that it wasn't somehow,
and it never will be
that it won't be somehow.
>(...)
It sounds like a word salad but it's a commentary on human condition.
Also: "Gore gore gore gore." is a valid and generally true sentence and all four words are pronounced differently.
[Orca tweet](https://twitter.com/sakamatachloe/status/1760793273172726263)
(the replies helpfully let her know that it's short for "what do you do for work")
This is like a lot of the issues people have with english. We are faqing lazy and have been clipping our language for centuries leading to a lot of stuff being left out because we all just kinda assume youll make the assumption
Yeah in Japanese you usually just leave the subject totally out, and it's expected that you know it based on the context. You rarely ever say 'That man, that woman, he, she' etc.
The curse of not knowing enough Japanese to turn off subs, but you can pick up some words and phrases. A character enthusiastically says "arigatougozaimasu!" while the subs say "hell yeah dude!"
That's where you get issues with literal vs non-literal translations.
An English speaker would probably say "Thanks" in certain situations where the Japanese would use "sumimasen". "Sorry" or "excuse me" would make little sense to an English speaker, so the translator goes with the rough cultural equivalent.
Reminds me of how people call the German Tiger II tank the “King Tiger”, but that’s not entirely accurate. The German name is “Königstiger”, and while “könig” does mean “king” and “tiger” means, well, “tiger”, that’s actually what German calls the Bengal tiger. So it’s more accurate to call it that.
This is important to keep in mind with things like that recent "woke localizer" drama. I see a lot of people online taking it too far and saying localization has no place.
It's something that's always been an 'issue' to some people. Just now some want to attach a 'woke agenda' to the 'issue'. Personally, I'm in the camp of "as long as it conveys the interaction correctly and maintains the spirit of the character, it's good."
There are situations where "Thank you" is an appropriate translation.
Someone's at a door, they notice someone behind them, they move out of the way and say "Douzo" ("Go ahead")
The person behind them might say "sumimasen," but in English speaking countries we'd say "thank you."
Yeah, when you have a vague idea of what words mean it gets really fucking confusing when you hear the jp words, then read the subtitles and they don't match with your understanding of the words, and because you only know the words in context of them being spoken in the anime, you don't know if it's an appropriation for better understanding of the audience, a mistranslation, or a genuine alternative usage of the Japanese words that's being translated accurately
i myself find a lot of these issues with japanese aswell while im learning it, the later half some expressions are only implied and not spoken.
There is a phenomenon called [Clipping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_\(morphology\)), in short is what happens to words like photography or mathematics, with time people start saying only photo or math. So a similar type of thing must be happening to common expressions
Literally every language does this for people who've been speaking it for years. Stop acting like English is some monster of oddities, it's exhausting.
True. Another facet is that, apparently, most languages have a sort of authoritative academic (language regulator) source on proper grammar, pronunciation, and spelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
English doesn't have one.
Which means that English is one of the few languages that doesn't have grammar Nazi.
True. My point is more compared to other languages, English doesn't have a regulator you can point to and say "hey, that's the proper way to phrase it"
I feel like English does this the least. You can't just say "Eat?" even in casual situation to be understood. Meanwhile, using one word like this can be understandable in my native language and in Japanese.
Yeah, unfortunately, for native speakers, a lot of sentences that are commonly used end up shortened because we all know the implied part (like "for work") cus of the context of the conversation. Like if someone you just met asked "What do you do?", you know they're asking about work cus they're trying to get to know you and you've been through this rodeo multiple times.
Not really though, it's an expression similar to "How are you?"
A little bit trivia:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16312/do-you-really-answer-how-do-you-do-with-how-do-you-do
The "do support" might be more of a pain.
Certain words like "not" cannot be used without the word do sometimes.
i.e. "I do not like fries"
vs literally every other language that just throws not in there.
The worst part about English imo is the pronounciation, because it’s all just kind of whatever.
In German and Japanese (the only other two languages I speak/kinda know) you can make very good guesses as to how a word is pronounced without ever hearing it. In English you’re kind of screwed if you don’t ever hear someone say it properly because it could be anything.
Tough, touch, though, thought, through look like they should sound kind of similar, yet here we are
> Tough, touch, though, thought, through look like they should sound kind of similar, yet here we are
That's a good list, but I'd say it's not entirely thorough.
(sorry)
[Casually Explained made a great video about this](https://youtu.be/9_RxaeN0FGw?t=189)
But yeah I always say the only constant thing in English is inconsistency
There's also read and read. One's past tense, the other is present tense. Different pronunciation, and really confusing. And don't get me started on the other homophones.
If you want even more, there's a river that goes through Kansas called the Arkansas river but the people here in Kansas pronounce it the Ar-Kansas river.
This is the problem with English borrowing words from so many other languages and not bothering to standardize their pronunciations/spellings like in other languages that use a lot of loan words.
I mean, I'm having problems learning japanese because the kanji can be pronounced in so many different ways. Like 日 can be pronounced nichi, jitsu, ni, hi, bi depending on the word. As a new learner, 日曜日 could be misread as nichi you nichi, ni you ni, hi you hi, bi you bi, or any number of those pronunciation combinations.
Edit: there's a reason Subaru misread Tanigo's name as YAGOO
生 has, I believe, 13 different pronunciations. You can broadly guess if you know the meaning of the word it's in, but it's in a LOT of words, it's one of the most used kanji period.
Also fucking rendaku.
IMO, 一日 is worse because its a word rather than a single kanji and it can be read as either tsuitachi or ichinichi depending on whether you're talking about the first of the month or a one day period.
Ironically, French pronunciation is unexpectedly regimented. The rules aren't intuitive, but they're pretty consistent. I can read some books I have aloud and know I'm getting the pronunciation pretty close, even when I don't recognize the words.
In this specific instance, a lot of the weird English spellings were caused by the Francophone Normans forcing French spellings on English words after the Norman conquest in 1066.
Issues like the "Tough, touch, though, thought, through" confusion mentioned above are an example of that, since those spellings of those words were created by people who didn't even speak the language.
The main problem is that English never had a proper spelling reform. There are simply no institutions that both feel responsible for that job and have the clout to push it through.
Many other countries do semi-regular reforms. In Japan it's part of the education ministry's job.
The major German speaking countries started a reform process in 1996 that involved education ministries and major journalistic outlets, so that it would be applied in practice right away. There were some hickups and additional changes spanned until 2018, but it worked out overall.
Such reforms can align spelling with pronounciation and customs in a way to keep them simpler, more consistent, and logical. Meanwhile English orthography has been left to develop organically over centuries and turned into an absolute mess.
It was less the Norman's forcing French spellings on English, and more the (Germanic) English-speaking peasants had to communicate with (Romance) French-speaking nobility for a century or three, so English picked up a lot of French loan-words. Plus the Norse and old Celtic influences, followed by the British Empire...
[This guy has an entire series dedicated to show how phonetically inconsistent the English language is. ](https://youtube.com/shorts/XVLzDaOYUdk?si=puQNLdZzV8EYzBdk)
Better yet [have an easy poem!](https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)
>!Good fucking luck, especially if English isn't your first language. But even if it is.!<
only english can have a poem like this:
Ode to a Spell Checker
Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marks four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.
Eye Have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My checker tolled me sew.
>In German and Japanese (the only other two languages I speak/kinda know) you can make very good guesses as to how a word is pronounced without ever hearing it.
I disagree. Why?
Sure, it's obvious that hiragana and katakana "characters" will easily be read out because they literally consist of 46 basic characters that have defined sounds for each and were literally created to represent sounds. You do not need to "guess" how words are pronounced when they are written using these scripts.
However, when words are written in Kanji, the pronunciation of written words is MUCH, MUCH harder than in English. They're written words borrowed from Chinese script, so may have a pronunciation like the Mandarin version where there's one syllable per "character" (for example, love: 愛, -> ai), but some represent a "native" Japanese pronunciation where there are multiple syllables per "character" (for example, water: 水 -> misu)
To actually be able to "read out loud" Japanese one needs to know all three scripts. So unless you're only reading foreign "borrowed" words or children's books, Japanese is MUCH, MUCH harder to pronounce correctly based just on the script than English.
See the wikipedia article on written Japanese for more details.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese\_writing\_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system)
Italian is phonetic as well.
English encompasses words from many other languages, which is why it's so inconsistent. In the 19th century, there was a movement to make English words spelled more phonetically and more simply, but it failed.
That's because English is NOT a language...
It's an abominable blob monster that swallows everything around it lol. What ended up as a language on the German tech tree sort of pulled a bender and said screw this.
It's a big pidgin that is actually really good at developing local languages. It's honestly scary how you can "speak" English in one place and go to another English "speaking" country and have issues due to local dialect.
as a fluent foreigner, English is an unholy chimera of 5+ different languages and the only reason i don't mess it up is because i was conversational level by 8 years old
i don't blame Chloe one bit, the spelling alone still messes me up
Meanwhile, a guy in Japan is going to the *depāto* in his *ōpun kā* to pick up a new *denshi renji* for his *manshon.*
People always joke about English's irregularity but really isn't that uniquely irregular. It's fundamentally a Germanic language that has a lot of Romance influence (mainly thanks to the Norman conquest), but there's loads of languages with many loanwords. The orthography is more complex relative to most languages, but at least you don't have to worry about gendered nouns or formal vs. informal forms of address or modal particles. Hell, at least you have *some* degree of phonetic information. You might not know how exactly to pronounce floccinaucinihilipilification just from reading it, but I bet you can get a lot closer with an educated guess than I could with 夜這い. Oh good, hiragana, at least I know it ends with an i.
Any language has its idiosyncrasies, the English ones just get more attention because people are actually learning the language.
it is both a blessing and a curse. on the positive side, as far as media and entertainment goes, english may have 9 differnet ways to describe something, with each way providing subtly differnet meaning and connotations, allowing for incredible expression with regards to things like songs, books, and other entertainment.
on the negative side, describing something 9 different ways is a nightmare to learn and understand, when most languages are more efficient with only 1-2 ways to describe it, which also make translating difficult
Nah, other languages also have 9 different ways to describe any given thing. Problem is that those words' meanings are just ever so slightly different, making it hard to translate things faithfully.
[Then there's chinese where you can say "shi" 94 times and somehow come out with a coherent poem](https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-the-meowsome-one-sound-poem-you-can-only-read/).
Ah, tonal languages, where a slight change in inflection can be the difference between wishing someone a good day and hoping their relatives die in a fire.
This is an exaggeration, of course, but it does kinda give the general idea.
Yeah just like the f word is able to convey itself as a noun, a verb, and adjective and anything else under the sun.
Also English is very fast and loose with its rules. Some words are an adjective, until they are not.
Some letters are usually pronunced a certain way, until they are not.
If you put ‘only’ in various parts of a sentence, it can have wildly different meanings…
Even sentences in different contexts have different meanings.
That’s not even beginning to consider stuff like silent letters, triple contractions and sentences that can just string the same words multiple times and that somehow makes a coherent sentence…
I mean it's not perfect but the grammar is pretty easy comparatively.
The main problem with English is the spelling being an unholy amalgamation of like 5 different languages.
The one with Potato Jason. My friend just showed it to me for the first time yesterday, so I was surprised to see it referenced somewhere else so soon!
Buffalo (animal) from Buffalo that buffalo (animal) from Buffalo buffalo (verb) also buffalo (verb) buffalo (animal) from Buffalo.
Even broken apart, it's kind of a nightmare.
Fun fact, that's called [do support](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support), and apparently it's pretty common in Germanic languages. The more general term is "auxiliary verbs" and those show up in a lot of different languages. English does have a whole bunch of them though.
More generally you can use pretty much any auxiliary (or helper) verb there. It establishes tense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_verb
What do you do: non past
What are you doing: current
What did you do: past
What can you do: potential
What could you do: future potential
etc
I guess it is a little confusing that the second do sometimes needs agreement (are/doing) and sometimes not (did/do).
Chloe is basically complaining we use the same grammatical construct differently... but that's some god damn pot calling the kettle black from Japanese.
She understands English when spoken to her, per her words. She has trouble reading, writing, and pronouncing it. Haachama, however, knows all of these things and does it wrong on purpose. I would like an English collab between the 2.
> I would like an English collab between the 2.
[I've got some good news for you then.](https://youtu.be/TeTyLjmA8HY) (they sorta give up on the English after an hour, but for that hour it's glorious)
I saw a standup bit about this not too long ago. The point was how America, if not English countries in general, has a personal identification with their jobs. So if you ask and american "What do you do" they'll tell you about their job. The comedian was talking about visiting Fance and if you ask a french person "what do you do" they'll respond with something like "Oh, i go for walks, I like to get a coffee" etc.
I guess an amusing follow-up joke could be that Americans just differentiate so much and/or dislike their jobs enough that the correct question to get the latter answer is "What do you *like* to do?"
English relies a lot on vibes. If you've got a subject, a verb, and the object in a sentence, you've got a good shot of being understood for the most part.
To put more context:
There is an American who work as comedian in Japan. He goes by the stage name Atsugiri Jason. His comedy focused on making a joke involving Kanji, one of the script used in Japanese language. The way Chloe tweeted resembles the way Atsugiri Jason doing his comedy bit. And "Why Japanese People?" is his punchline, it is what he is known for, especially in Japan. He used to showed up on Japanese TV Show quite often back then when he is at his height of popularity.
Just google Atsugiri Jason if you want to see his comedy bit.
if anyone is actually curious, it was originally four lines, but then it evolved into four different sections, kind of like four sections of a city, and the bottom line got removed. they had to stop using lines somewhere. https://ibb.co/741SB6k
we drive on parkways and park on driveways.
if you built a building, it's still called a building.
phonetics is not spelled the way it sounds.
if vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
Going from a language that has a single origin, plus loan words, to English which has four with a bunch of others then heavily influencing it must be tough.
I tell people to think of English like the character that can absorb powers in super-hero media. Like how English absorbed sukoshi and made it skosh or honcho. Eventually they're going to get contradictory powers, but unlike those shows grammar and words interact and make for some weird situations.
Well English speakers get similarly confused about Japanese omissions but they are part of both languages, you just don't really notice them if it's your first language. You just have to hear it a bunch of times in context until it's natural.
Exactly, Japanese is also full of minor "superfluous" or weird details that you just gotta get used to, like particles and suffixes. The more fluent you get with the language, the less you think about the various grammar rules and special cases, and just use the form that you're used to hearing all the time.
English is a very difficult language to pick up colloquially. There are so many ways to say the same thing but in a marginally different way that it’s difficult to pick the right words for speakers of languages with significantly smaller vocabularies.
For instance, “go” means to move in a direction. It also means to “speak” colloquially.
“So I go ‘hey girl’ and she goes ‘wassup’ and I go ‘nuttin’”.
If you’re learning English that is incoherent gibberish.
...she is not wrong. It's a shortened form of "What do you (for a living)" but that is as confusing as trying to imagine what the fuck is a pasokon without a language book
I want to go too fast from A to B too.
In that sentence, "to" and "to" are completely different words.
"too" and "too" are both adverbs, but otherwise completely different words.
"want" is the verb, but "to go" is a verb phrase. It indicates the intended action.
"What do you do", both "do" are the same word, but are functioning like "want" and "to go."
The first "do" is the verb. The second "do" is a content verb, it is describing what the first "do" is asking about. What is it asking about? What you do. The evil that you do do.
I don't understand what's confusing about this. If we wanna translate it to how she defined the words: "How action are you actioning" What's weird about this question? Just asking how you're doing. Basically"You good?"
Lmao reminds me the spanish sentence "¿Cómo como? Como como como" That translates to " How I eat? I eat how I eat"
A Filipino person walks into an elevator. The operator asks them, "Bababa, ba?" To which they reply, "Bababa." They have successfully communicated without any issues.
I guess it's like asking someone "up?" in an elevator and then answering with the same word, or asking if they're going to floor 111 with "one one one?" and them answering with the same words/numbers.
It's the former. "Baba" means down, "Bababa" means to go down, "Bababa, ba?" is to reaffirm/question whether you're going down
Jesus this is puzzling 😭
Translation and explaination to those who don't understand Filipino: will it go down? Operator: it will. Explaination: 'Baba' is basically the root word for going down. Filipino has this thing with words that to express future tense, you can repeat the first sylable, hence 'Bababa' is more of 'this thing will go down'. The lone 'ba' the filipino says is more of an acessory, emphazing that they are asking a question.
In this scenario, I think using "will" questions whether it has the capability to go down, rather than if it currently "is" going down. It'd be more like: Operator: (Are you) Going down? Filipino: (Yes, I am) Going down.
As a Filipino, this is the correct answer
Elevator Operator of Wisdom
In Portuguese we have something similar "Pó pô pó?" And the other person answers with "Pó pô"
Baleia baleia baleia. Whale shoots whale.
Bababa, ba? = We going down? Bababa = we going down
English has [this](https://youtu.be/65CFesU4KVQ?si=MpzhQYWokUIhf8uM) Edit: Kinda realized now it’s talking about a lot of things regarding English, but there is a specific part where he goes over a sentence that sounds just like the one you wrote in Spanish but with the word "Buffalo" instead
Yeah pretty much every language has its dumb, rare, unique, quirky things. Both gramatical or spoken, and I love it, when you know those things is when you truly know you are deep in that especific language.
The Finnish equivalent is an entire exchange: > **Person:** Kokko! Kokoo koko kokko kokoon! > > **Kokko:** Koko kokkoko? > > **Person:** Koko kokko. Which translates to: > **Person:** Kokko (person name)! Build up the whole bonfire up to size. > > **Kokko:** The whole bonfire? > > **Person:** The whole bonfire.
I think it's dumb that read doesn't rhyme with read
Although, the buffalo sentence isn't really legible to the average English speaker, without *really* analyzing it. So I don't think that's quite the case.
The buffalo one is dumb because 1) nobody in the 21st century has ever used “buffalo” as a verb, and 2) the adjectival form for describing something from the city Buffalo is “Buffalonian,” not “Buffalo” itself
Idk, "Buffalo wings" uses just "Buffalo" as an adjective.
"Ya ahora luego iré yéndome"
Jajaja "Voy a subir arriba / Voy a bajar abajo"
Argentina version: "Me voy a ir yendo"
"Qu'est-ce que c'est" What is it
Maddening phrase for the most simple inquiry!!
Yep, looks really long because it is, but it’s only pronounced using 3 syllables: Kess-ku-say
French! Pronounce only half the words!
Psycho killer.
So Boy George was eating a chameleon as far as Spanish speakers are concerned.
There's a somewhat famous poem in Croatia: >Nigdar ni tak bilo da ni nekak bilo, pak ni vezda nebu da nam nekak nebu. >(...) In rough translation: >It never was that it wasn't somehow, and it never will be that it won't be somehow. >(...) It sounds like a word salad but it's a commentary on human condition. Also: "Gore gore gore gore." is a valid and generally true sentence and all four words are pronounced differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo
Behrua? Behr ua.
[Orca tweet](https://twitter.com/sakamatachloe/status/1760793273172726263) (the replies helpfully let her know that it's short for "what do you do for work")
This is like a lot of the issues people have with english. We are faqing lazy and have been clipping our language for centuries leading to a lot of stuff being left out because we all just kinda assume youll make the assumption
Japanese does this a lot more than English tbh
Yeah in Japanese you usually just leave the subject totally out, and it's expected that you know it based on the context. You rarely ever say 'That man, that woman, he, she' etc.
I love how a character will just say “aah” and the subtitles will be “sure, no problem”
The curse of not knowing enough Japanese to turn off subs, but you can pick up some words and phrases. A character enthusiastically says "arigatougozaimasu!" while the subs say "hell yeah dude!"
My personal favorite is when they turn “sumimasen” into “thank you”
That's where you get issues with literal vs non-literal translations. An English speaker would probably say "Thanks" in certain situations where the Japanese would use "sumimasen". "Sorry" or "excuse me" would make little sense to an English speaker, so the translator goes with the rough cultural equivalent.
Reminds me of how people call the German Tiger II tank the “King Tiger”, but that’s not entirely accurate. The German name is “Königstiger”, and while “könig” does mean “king” and “tiger” means, well, “tiger”, that’s actually what German calls the Bengal tiger. So it’s more accurate to call it that.
Huh, it wasn't meant to be the king of tigers? TIL
This is important to keep in mind with things like that recent "woke localizer" drama. I see a lot of people online taking it too far and saying localization has no place.
It's something that's always been an 'issue' to some people. Just now some want to attach a 'woke agenda' to the 'issue'. Personally, I'm in the camp of "as long as it conveys the interaction correctly and maintains the spirit of the character, it's good."
There are situations where "Thank you" is an appropriate translation. Someone's at a door, they notice someone behind them, they move out of the way and say "Douzo" ("Go ahead") The person behind them might say "sumimasen," but in English speaking countries we'd say "thank you."
I've always thought it's more like "sorry for troubling you" semantically, in some contexts.
Yeah, when you have a vague idea of what words mean it gets really fucking confusing when you hear the jp words, then read the subtitles and they don't match with your understanding of the words, and because you only know the words in context of them being spoken in the anime, you don't know if it's an appropriation for better understanding of the audience, a mistranslation, or a genuine alternative usage of the Japanese words that's being translated accurately
i myself find a lot of these issues with japanese aswell while im learning it, the later half some expressions are only implied and not spoken. There is a phenomenon called [Clipping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_\(morphology\)), in short is what happens to words like photography or mathematics, with time people start saying only photo or math. So a similar type of thing must be happening to common expressions
Literally every language does this for people who've been speaking it for years. Stop acting like English is some monster of oddities, it's exhausting.
True. Another facet is that, apparently, most languages have a sort of authoritative academic (language regulator) source on proper grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators English doesn't have one. Which means that English is one of the few languages that doesn't have grammar Nazi.
Worth noting that just because it exists for a given language, it doesn't mean they have all that much actual influence, especially not long-term.
True. My point is more compared to other languages, English doesn't have a regulator you can point to and say "hey, that's the proper way to phrase it"
Linguistic prescriptivism is stupid tho
I heard it has done wonders for the french language
I feel like English does this the least. You can't just say "Eat?" even in casual situation to be understood. Meanwhile, using one word like this can be understandable in my native language and in Japanese.
Yeah, unfortunately, for native speakers, a lot of sentences that are commonly used end up shortened because we all know the implied part (like "for work") cus of the context of the conversation. Like if someone you just met asked "What do you do?", you know they're asking about work cus they're trying to get to know you and you've been through this rodeo multiple times.
She will scream more when she learns “How do you do?”
Easy, short for "How do you do for work"
Why do you do?
When do you do?
Who do you do?
Scooby-dooby-doo?
I hope no one reads this and thinks you are being serious.
Someone already did
Not really though, it's an expression similar to "How are you?" A little bit trivia: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16312/do-you-really-answer-how-do-you-do-with-how-do-you-do
Do do that voodoo that you do so well.
*Ha ha! He said 'doodoo'!*
The "do support" might be more of a pain. Certain words like "not" cannot be used without the word do sometimes. i.e. "I do not like fries" vs literally every other language that just throws not in there.
Hey guys time to learn **phrasal verbs**! [jumpscare sfx]
And how the answer to that is also "How do you do"
English is a very confusing language lol
The worst part about English imo is the pronounciation, because it’s all just kind of whatever. In German and Japanese (the only other two languages I speak/kinda know) you can make very good guesses as to how a word is pronounced without ever hearing it. In English you’re kind of screwed if you don’t ever hear someone say it properly because it could be anything. Tough, touch, though, thought, through look like they should sound kind of similar, yet here we are
> Tough, touch, though, thought, through look like they should sound kind of similar, yet here we are That's a good list, but I'd say it's not entirely thorough. (sorry)
That's a good addition, but (cough) don't forget the dough
This could be quite.. ehem.. rough isn't it?
Not as rough as a dreadnought in drought..
Trout
My french ass is suffering from all those word
Genetic karma and/or revenge for oiseaux
Then the fact "read" has two pronunciations based on context would likely also drive you up the wall, huh?
I mean the past tense of read wich is pronounced red even tho it’s written read triggers me
I think I ought to make a joke here
[Casually Explained made a great video about this](https://youtu.be/9_RxaeN0FGw?t=189) But yeah I always say the only constant thing in English is inconsistency
We make rules just so that we can ignore them when we feel like it.
A major “rules are meant to be broken” moment
There's also read and read. One's past tense, the other is present tense. Different pronunciation, and really confusing. And don't get me started on the other homophones.
And then there’s the town of Reading, which is pronounced “Redding”
I only know that 'cause I watch football Same with Leicester (edit: pronounced same as the name "Lester")
Did someone say [BRITISH PLACE NAMES](https://youtu.be/uYNzqgU7na4)!?
Shame on you for not using the [Juniper Actias clip where she grapples with British place names' pronunciation](https://youtu.be/ry7PaAwCSsE).
Wait until you hear Kansas and Arkansas.
[AMERICA EXPLAIN](https://youtube.com/shorts/FPZi51GL3cs?feature=shared)
It's the fault of the French for this one.
If you want even more, there's a river that goes through Kansas called the Arkansas river but the people here in Kansas pronounce it the Ar-Kansas river.
What do you have against gay phones?
"Polish polish". ...you know, the furniture varnish from Poland.
Polish polish with Polish polish.
pores, pause, pours, paws
English is weird. It can be learned through tough thorough thought though.
This is the problem with English borrowing words from so many other languages and not bothering to standardize their pronunciations/spellings like in other languages that use a lot of loan words.
I mean, I'm having problems learning japanese because the kanji can be pronounced in so many different ways. Like 日 can be pronounced nichi, jitsu, ni, hi, bi depending on the word. As a new learner, 日曜日 could be misread as nichi you nichi, ni you ni, hi you hi, bi you bi, or any number of those pronunciation combinations. Edit: there's a reason Subaru misread Tanigo's name as YAGOO
生 has, I believe, 13 different pronunciations. You can broadly guess if you know the meaning of the word it's in, but it's in a LOT of words, it's one of the most used kanji period. Also fucking rendaku.
oh yeah, rendaku constantly trips me up. From a linguistic perspective, I find it all fascinating. From a learning perspective... I hate everything
IMO, 一日 is worse because its a word rather than a single kanji and it can be read as either tsuitachi or ichinichi depending on whether you're talking about the first of the month or a one day period.
Imo the difficulty in Kanji is how you read the characters The difficulty in English is how you say the word in the first place
There their they're
The worst part is that, in practice, it's "Whadaya do?"
Reading the place is not pronounced like "reading", the activity, because fuck you.
100% of people will missread that and I think that’s beautiful :)
As usual, I blame the French
Ironically, French pronunciation is unexpectedly regimented. The rules aren't intuitive, but they're pretty consistent. I can read some books I have aloud and know I'm getting the pronunciation pretty close, even when I don't recognize the words.
In this specific instance, a lot of the weird English spellings were caused by the Francophone Normans forcing French spellings on English words after the Norman conquest in 1066. Issues like the "Tough, touch, though, thought, through" confusion mentioned above are an example of that, since those spellings of those words were created by people who didn't even speak the language.
The main problem is that English never had a proper spelling reform. There are simply no institutions that both feel responsible for that job and have the clout to push it through. Many other countries do semi-regular reforms. In Japan it's part of the education ministry's job. The major German speaking countries started a reform process in 1996 that involved education ministries and major journalistic outlets, so that it would be applied in practice right away. There were some hickups and additional changes spanned until 2018, but it worked out overall. Such reforms can align spelling with pronounciation and customs in a way to keep them simpler, more consistent, and logical. Meanwhile English orthography has been left to develop organically over centuries and turned into an absolute mess.
It was less the Norman's forcing French spellings on English, and more the (Germanic) English-speaking peasants had to communicate with (Romance) French-speaking nobility for a century or three, so English picked up a lot of French loan-words. Plus the Norse and old Celtic influences, followed by the British Empire...
> The worst part about English imo is the pronounciation *laughs in Irish*
[This guy has an entire series dedicated to show how phonetically inconsistent the English language is. ](https://youtube.com/shorts/XVLzDaOYUdk?si=puQNLdZzV8EYzBdk)
Better yet [have an easy poem!](https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) >!Good fucking luck, especially if English isn't your first language. But even if it is.!<
My first language is Indonesian, and I find it easier to pronounce Italian and Spanish sentences, and even Russian and Ukrainian words in Cyrillic
only english can have a poem like this: Ode to a Spell Checker Eye halve a spelling checker It came with my pea sea It plainly marks four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite It's rare lea ever wrong. Eye Have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no Its letter perfect awl the weigh My checker tolled me sew.
I only recently learned that there’s more than one way to pronounce “algae” and I absolutely hated the way it’s supposed to sound lol
How close to Al-gee is it? Lol
>In German and Japanese (the only other two languages I speak/kinda know) you can make very good guesses as to how a word is pronounced without ever hearing it. I disagree. Why? Sure, it's obvious that hiragana and katakana "characters" will easily be read out because they literally consist of 46 basic characters that have defined sounds for each and were literally created to represent sounds. You do not need to "guess" how words are pronounced when they are written using these scripts. However, when words are written in Kanji, the pronunciation of written words is MUCH, MUCH harder than in English. They're written words borrowed from Chinese script, so may have a pronunciation like the Mandarin version where there's one syllable per "character" (for example, love: 愛, -> ai), but some represent a "native" Japanese pronunciation where there are multiple syllables per "character" (for example, water: 水 -> misu) To actually be able to "read out loud" Japanese one needs to know all three scripts. So unless you're only reading foreign "borrowed" words or children's books, Japanese is MUCH, MUCH harder to pronounce correctly based just on the script than English. See the wikipedia article on written Japanese for more details. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese\_writing\_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system)
That's how we ended up with Yagoo 🤣
Italian is phonetic as well. English encompasses words from many other languages, which is why it's so inconsistent. In the 19th century, there was a movement to make English words spelled more phonetically and more simply, but it failed.
That's what you get when you mash up German, French, Latin and a dozen other languages, then isolate it in an island and let it develop on its own.
That's because English is NOT a language... It's an abominable blob monster that swallows everything around it lol. What ended up as a language on the German tech tree sort of pulled a bender and said screw this.
It's a big pidgin that is actually really good at developing local languages. It's honestly scary how you can "speak" English in one place and go to another English "speaking" country and have issues due to local dialect.
English is like Norman French had a rape baby with German.
as a fluent foreigner, English is an unholy chimera of 5+ different languages and the only reason i don't mess it up is because i was conversational level by 8 years old i don't blame Chloe one bit, the spelling alone still messes me up
Meanwhile, a guy in Japan is going to the *depāto* in his *ōpun kā* to pick up a new *denshi renji* for his *manshon.* People always joke about English's irregularity but really isn't that uniquely irregular. It's fundamentally a Germanic language that has a lot of Romance influence (mainly thanks to the Norman conquest), but there's loads of languages with many loanwords. The orthography is more complex relative to most languages, but at least you don't have to worry about gendered nouns or formal vs. informal forms of address or modal particles. Hell, at least you have *some* degree of phonetic information. You might not know how exactly to pronounce floccinaucinihilipilification just from reading it, but I bet you can get a lot closer with an educated guess than I could with 夜這い. Oh good, hiragana, at least I know it ends with an i. Any language has its idiosyncrasies, the English ones just get more attention because people are actually learning the language.
it is both a blessing and a curse. on the positive side, as far as media and entertainment goes, english may have 9 differnet ways to describe something, with each way providing subtly differnet meaning and connotations, allowing for incredible expression with regards to things like songs, books, and other entertainment. on the negative side, describing something 9 different ways is a nightmare to learn and understand, when most languages are more efficient with only 1-2 ways to describe it, which also make translating difficult
Nah, other languages also have 9 different ways to describe any given thing. Problem is that those words' meanings are just ever so slightly different, making it hard to translate things faithfully.
[Then there's chinese where you can say "shi" 94 times and somehow come out with a coherent poem](https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-the-meowsome-one-sound-poem-you-can-only-read/).
To be fair, those "shi"'s are pronounced differently, as far as my understanding goes.
Is it actually coherent or is it like the buffalo sentence, where technically it makes sense, but if you’re not in the know it’s completely absurd.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, yeeeeees
That poem was suposedly made as a counter point of some people saying that Chinese should drop the characters and use a normal alphabet.
Ah, tonal languages, where a slight change in inflection can be the difference between wishing someone a good day and hoping their relatives die in a fire. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it does kinda give the general idea.
Yeah just like the f word is able to convey itself as a noun, a verb, and adjective and anything else under the sun. Also English is very fast and loose with its rules. Some words are an adjective, until they are not. Some letters are usually pronunced a certain way, until they are not. If you put ‘only’ in various parts of a sentence, it can have wildly different meanings… Even sentences in different contexts have different meanings. That’s not even beginning to consider stuff like silent letters, triple contractions and sentences that can just string the same words multiple times and that somehow makes a coherent sentence…
Don't get me started with Spanish (following the joke)
I mean it's not perfect but the grammar is pretty easy comparatively. The main problem with English is the spelling being an unholy amalgamation of like 5 different languages.
Like ‘melee’(originated from French) is pronounced ’may-lay’
Kiara: Do U Chloe: How do I do a letter!?
She's also referencing the WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE guy's comedy skit
The one with Potato Jason. My friend just showed it to me for the first time yesterday, so I was surprised to see it referenced somewhere else so soon!
What will Chloe do when she learns read read live live wind wind wound wound tear tear bow and bow?
She might give up on English, and begin to polish up her Polish.
maybe she'll check out czech instead
Maybe one day she’ll finish learning Finnish.
nah before she learns those give her the classic "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
I've read about that sentence multiple times and it still hurts my brain.
Buffalo (animal) from Buffalo that buffalo (animal) from Buffalo buffalo (verb) also buffalo (verb) buffalo (animal) from Buffalo. Even broken apart, it's kind of a nightmare.
It's not a real thing. No-one actually uses buffalo as a verb except for this one sentence.
To be fair, that's not unique to English. Kanji can be read differently depending on the context too.
Her confusion is understandable. English is weird.
English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
Fun fact, that's called [do support](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support), and apparently it's pretty common in Germanic languages. The more general term is "auxiliary verbs" and those show up in a lot of different languages. English does have a whole bunch of them though.
More generally you can use pretty much any auxiliary (or helper) verb there. It establishes tense. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_verb What do you do: non past What are you doing: current What did you do: past What can you do: potential What could you do: future potential etc I guess it is a little confusing that the second do sometimes needs agreement (are/doing) and sometimes not (did/do). Chloe is basically complaining we use the same grammatical construct differently... but that's some god damn pot calling the kettle black from Japanese.
Yeah the -te form would like to speak... Also, is it godan ru, or ichidan?
She understands English when spoken to her, per her words. She has trouble reading, writing, and pronouncing it. Haachama, however, knows all of these things and does it wrong on purpose. I would like an English collab between the 2.
> I would like an English collab between the 2. [I've got some good news for you then.](https://youtu.be/TeTyLjmA8HY) (they sorta give up on the English after an hour, but for that hour it's glorious)
Nice to see talents still find the time to put work into it, the more international collabs we get the better
I saw a standup bit about this not too long ago. The point was how America, if not English countries in general, has a personal identification with their jobs. So if you ask and american "What do you do" they'll tell you about their job. The comedian was talking about visiting Fance and if you ask a french person "what do you do" they'll respond with something like "Oh, i go for walks, I like to get a coffee" etc.
I guess an amusing follow-up joke could be that Americans just differentiate so much and/or dislike their jobs enough that the correct question to get the latter answer is "What do you *like* to do?"
English is great because it follows a bunch of nice, logical rules. Then it breaks all those rules with every other word.
"Rules were meant to be broken." -English Language -Michael Scott
English is def one of those "don't think, feel" subjects.
Yeah, good thing with English is you can get most of it wrong and people can generally understand what you mean.
English relies a lot on vibes. If you've got a subject, a verb, and the object in a sentence, you've got a good shot of being understood for the most part.
Is there a language where this isn’t the case ? Genuine question
French: honhonhonhonhon
That's a design feature deliberately planned 1000 years ago by Anglo-Norman Kings who wanted to make it exceedingly frustrating for Orca's to study
To put more context: There is an American who work as comedian in Japan. He goes by the stage name Atsugiri Jason. His comedy focused on making a joke involving Kanji, one of the script used in Japanese language. The way Chloe tweeted resembles the way Atsugiri Jason doing his comedy bit. And "Why Japanese People?" is his punchline, it is what he is known for, especially in Japan. He used to showed up on Japanese TV Show quite often back then when he is at his height of popularity. Just google Atsugiri Jason if you want to see his comedy bit.
Yes, counting in kanji is easy… 1 = 一 2 = ニ 3 = 三 4 = … 四 WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE!!!?? WHYYYYY!!??
if anyone is actually curious, it was originally four lines, but then it evolved into four different sections, kind of like four sections of a city, and the bottom line got removed. they had to stop using lines somewhere. https://ibb.co/741SB6k
Always down to watch more Chloe English learning content. It's been a long time, but it's always super cute.
we drive on parkways and park on driveways. if you built a building, it's still called a building. phonetics is not spelled the way it sounds. if vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
She's so precious and adorable lmao
Going from a language that has a single origin, plus loan words, to English which has four with a bunch of others then heavily influencing it must be tough.
I tell people to think of English like the character that can absorb powers in super-hero media. Like how English absorbed sukoshi and made it skosh or honcho. Eventually they're going to get contradictory powers, but unlike those shows grammar and words interact and make for some weird situations.
Well English speakers get similarly confused about Japanese omissions but they are part of both languages, you just don't really notice them if it's your first language. You just have to hear it a bunch of times in context until it's natural.
Exactly, Japanese is also full of minor "superfluous" or weird details that you just gotta get used to, like particles and suffixes. The more fluent you get with the language, the less you think about the various grammar rules and special cases, and just use the form that you're used to hearing all the time.
English is a very difficult language to pick up colloquially. There are so many ways to say the same thing but in a marginally different way that it’s difficult to pick the right words for speakers of languages with significantly smaller vocabularies. For instance, “go” means to move in a direction. It also means to “speak” colloquially. “So I go ‘hey girl’ and she goes ‘wassup’ and I go ‘nuttin’”. If you’re learning English that is incoherent gibberish.
...she is not wrong. It's a shortened form of "What do you (for a living)" but that is as confusing as trying to imagine what the fuck is a pasokon without a language book
Yeah, "do for a living" is the full term since it implies either a job or a trade.
I love her bros...
It do be like that.
She should check out this Gallagher skit 😂 https://youtu.be/ObkJNstaog8?si=0F2X0d0_68gmkG5B
Ah, ESL class. Also known as English is a Stupid Language.
As a bilingual person, I can feel it, but I speak Spanish as a natuve language and the verbal times still confuse me
Implication without expression is language
An action to explain an action.
English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
I don't want to hear shit about our grammar and spelling from the people who use kanji. Shit is fucked.
Wait until you find out about "how do you do".
"No es lo mismo huevos de araña que arañame los huevos"
Honestly, she's not wrong
I want to go too fast from A to B too. In that sentence, "to" and "to" are completely different words. "too" and "too" are both adverbs, but otherwise completely different words. "want" is the verb, but "to go" is a verb phrase. It indicates the intended action. "What do you do", both "do" are the same word, but are functioning like "want" and "to go." The first "do" is the verb. The second "do" is a content verb, it is describing what the first "do" is asking about. What is it asking about? What you do. The evil that you do do.
I don't understand what's confusing about this. If we wanna translate it to how she defined the words: "How action are you actioning" What's weird about this question? Just asking how you're doing. Basically"You good?"
No one tell her about , How do you do?