Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
Hover tooltip text:
Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
Bonus panel:
RSS Feed: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rss
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
508 points (98.5% liked)
Linguistics Humor
1121 readers
1 users here now
Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
Share this community: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])
Serious Linguistics community: [email protected]
Rules:
- 1- Stay on Topic
Not about Linguistics, language, ways of communications - 2- No Racism/Violence
- 3- No Public Shaming
Shaming someone that could be identifiable/recognizable - 4- Avoid spam and duplicates
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.
When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.
It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.
You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.
Yeah. It's funny because I am learning Danish eight now and it makes infinitely more sense than French ever did but I think it's because, at least to me, it's much closer to English and a lot of it is "well we do it just cause?" and my brain is like "oh cool great! I know how to cope with that".
Whereas learning something that is so structured like German/French it feels very overwhelming I guess in that sense. I don't feel like I have to think about Danish because it feels very 'normal'.
Huh, I mean, sure French is different from either English and Danish, since it’s a Romance language, but I’m not sure why you would add German to that, which is closely related to English and to Danish as well. Especially if you speak Lower German dialect you understand a lot of Danish, which has been influenced by Low German since medieval times.
Danish is actually more structured, you have less leeway regarding syntax.
A lot of my teachers (danish speakers) or miscellaneous people often comment that German is easier because of its structure or uh formulaic-ness, or that is what I tend to hear that mostly. It might just be that there are a lot of Germans or German speakers in my area.
Conversely when I was learning French it was never prescribed as difficult, just lots of memorization for the uh... forms/genders? it's been too long I barely remember any of it to be honest, but now I see all of the French loans in Danish ಠ_ಠ
But generally my issues or frustrations with Danish stem from when modern words are prescribed as 1:1 translations when older/uncommon English words more aptly describe what is being said. Which in fairness would probably not be words a non-native speaker would have knowledge of.
I think syntactically Danish is much less complex and easier, you know, only two cases, two genders. It’s just that nobody understands shit when they open up their mouths… ¯\(ツ)/¯
https://youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Oh, and the way they count is… I mean, you couldn’t do it worse than the French if you tried, but the Danish are just „hold my gløgg… halvfjerds“ 🤡
I hate danish numbers because I flip letters/numbers a lot when I speak in English so Danish is just turbo fuck-you mode of numbers sucking ass.
And yea it does come out as ... noise vaguely masquerading as "important sounds". At least Norwegian was like "lol wtf are out doing get those shitty letters you don't even say out of here nerds". Swedish .... Swedish scares me. I hate when there is Swedish in Danish movies because I can't hear Swedish and read Danish without my brain melting.
Yeah, but I’m used to that, it’s the same in German (and it sucks, especially for people with dyslexia), no, what I meant is the way they actually count.
You know, like 99 in French is „quatre-vingt-dix-neuf“? „4 (times) 20 (plus) 10 (plus) 9“.
Which I always thought the most idiotic way ever to come up with counting? Until I learned about the Danish…
Ever wondered why 50 in Danish is „halvtreds“? Because „halv tredje“ means… „half-third“? Which is 2 1/2.
Are you sitting? „Halvtreds“ is short for „halvtredsindstyve“, which literally means „half third times twenty“.
2 1/2 * 20 = 50 🤡
Same with 70, 90…
Yeah the mathing bits I knew were from something older, the entire equation I don't remember offhand. French has been mostly repressed.
I'm more upset about time verbage being absolutely fucked and ... crap I think it's 30 minutes... into the hour instead of before? It's so confusing and I get it backwards constantly because who fucking counts time like that even.
Like half til 6 (or however you say it idk) is 5:30 and not ... 6:30 or some asinine BS. I will take strange ye olde numbers over that shit any day. I just default to 24 hour time because I absolutely cannot be assed and it's very dumb. I've explained it very poorly but hopefully it makes sense lol. And they use quarter/half past like please... please stop, just tell me weird numbers.
Hah! Yeah, I understand, but I’ve been hearing this in spoken English as well, „half seven“ instead of „half past six“, though in school I was taught only the latter existed.
It’s like this in German as well, and it’s also regionally different, but once you get it it’s actually nice:
In most parts of Germany (and where I grew up) and in Standard German you tell time (literally) as:
Six, quarter past six, half seven, quarter before seven, seven.
In the south of Germany it’s: six, quarter past six, half seven, three quarter seven, seven. This never made sense to me, until…
… I moved to East Germany, where it’s: six, quarter seven (!), half seven, three quarter seven, seven.
Imagine my face, I never even had heard of this before I moved there 😂
I immediately picked this up because it rolls off your tongue way easier in German than the standard way. And it’s mindblowingly logical. I love it:
You just need to imagine an hour as a cake: one quarter of seven, half of seven, three quarters of seven, seven. Genius.