Reasons why English is so Hard to Understand (REHU)

[corporate_gamer]

We make it hard on purpose to confuse and confound those disqualified by reasons of being stupid and/or foreign.

but you repeat yourself.

 

[Crofty]

I think Leicester is the king of odd place names though (Lesta to others)

Loughborough pronounced Lufbra

And not far from Loughborough there's Zouch pronounced Zoch (I maintain that it should be 'ouch' with a z on the front) and Gotham pronounced goat-ham (not to be confused with Batman's home of Gotham city).

 

[MercurySteam]

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

That poor dessert............

 

[Revernd Awesome]

Oneone was a racehorse, Tutu was one too.
Oneone won one race and Tutu won one too.

Also vaguely on topic;

Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?
A: Trilingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language?
A: English.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Q: What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language?
A: English.

That's because English is already seven languages in itself.

 

[Aardvark]

but you repeat yourself.

DISQUALIFICATION!!

If you throw colloquialisms into the mix, you can keep this going indefinitely.

We're ghana fly to Ghana.

 

[Berethond]

Every day in English our teacher brought out a paper that said "this this that this these those"
And we'd talk about it.
Is that that that that we talked about this day with those along with this and that that.

 

[matrix3509]

You want a hard language to understand? Try Finnish.

Nah, Finnish is actually pretty simple. Little kids learn it faster than other European languages. Finnish is just so different to other languages that it seems hard to other people.

Maybe thats why its so hard for me.

Of course Wikipedia says that Hungarian is hardest for native English speakers.

 

[Cadren]

I think Leicester is the king of odd place names though (Lesta to others)

Loughborough pronounced Lufbra
Rothley pronounced Rowthlee
Groby pronounced Grewby
And my favourite Belvoir pronounced Beaver

I had a Leicester near where I used to live, but we pronounced it "Lester". We had an on going joke that 'ice' is actually spelled 'iceice', due to the silent 'ice' in Leicester setting the standard.

Either way, it is completely nonsensical.

 

[Avatar Roku]

The advantages with English is that there are SO MANY foreigners in England, if you speak the language really badly it's accepted as normal, and in fact many people who speak correct English are shunned and considered posh.

French is ridiculous though. Some of the words are basically identical, but if you mispronounce a hundredth of a syllable the French have no idea what your talking about. In English you can mispronounce something and due to the wide range of accents it makes sense. In France if you mispronounce something they'll all 'WTF' you until you feel bad

The only french i know is retard which means late. guess why i learnt that?

One that I know is the difference between "ou" (with \ over the u, I don't know how to put that on) and "ou" (without an accent). The first means "Where" the second means "or"

 

[stompy]

Or Mandarin, where the tone of voice used when saying a word alters it's meaning.

There's a reason the Chinese place a stigma on the number '4'...

 

[Alvandera]

Well, people keep mentioning homonyms, but there's also homophones that make listening to it even harder. I can see the sea in the shape of a c.

So true.

 

[samsprinkle]

The only one I had trouble with is the bass drum one...bass is the first proununtiation(see what I did there?) that pops in my head when I think of that...

 

[implodingMan]

The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.

In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.

 

[vxicepickxv]

All languages have this, at least the germanic and romantic languages do. I don't know anything about eastern languages.

Japanese is a very simple language to speak, because there is only one way to say each letter. The sentence structure is quite simple, because there aren't nine different versions of any singular tense(past, present, future). It's very difficult to read, because there are 3 types of characters, Kanji, Kanagata, and Hirigata.

 

[Incompl te]

The reason it is difficult is because normal written English has no (or very few) accented letters.

In French words like "tête" have their accents written in, so you know how to say it. That said, it still suffers from silent letters, such as the last "e" on the word.

The reason why I love Polish. Everything is pronounced like it's spelt. The only difficulty is learning the accents but once you've got them it's simple.

 

[Dancingman]

I went to Parliament and on the way saw a parliament of owls.

 

[Bored Tomatoe]

There are a bunch of reason that English is hard to understand.

Mainly, English spelling makes no sense at all.

Seriously, have you ever thought for a while about the concept of silent letters? Letters are supposed to represent sounds, but some of them represent nothing. If that's the case, why have them at all?

Or could you ever imagine having to teach how to read 'ough' to somebody and making sense of it? Dough, rough, through, cough, bough... none of them sound anything a like.

That would be one reason I love German. Every word is spelled exactly how it sounds.

Seconded.

 

[naftali1]

I don't know anything about eastern languages.

Oh yes.

Japanese, for instance, not content with having no less than four complete alphabets, each of which is used for different types of words (one of them, handily, is the standard Roman alphabet), even has two different readings for each character in one of them, depending on whether they appear on their own or next to another character of the same alphabet.

That is only kinda right. There is no standard Roman alphabet for the Japanese. They have one syllabary for native words, one for foreign words, and then they borrow kanji from Chinese. The kanji usually have two meaning and pronunciations but some of them have up to twenty...it's quite a *****. On top of that the kanji are mixed with the native word syllabary in writing.

Where did you get your info about Japanese?