English spelling had a bit of a disaster. Spelling got settled over the same time pronunciation was changing, at the same time printers became a thing and people getting something printed had loads of ability to change what would be standard spelling and they liked to show off how much they knew the history of the language by inserting silent letters reminding them of the Latin or Greek root word
Also English has many more vowels than the Latin alphabet so it’s practically impossible to accurately reflect the way a word is said in its spelling and some words got frozen in text just before they changed how they were spoken and others just after so there’s no consistency
As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.
my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.
I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷
It also makes it annoyingly difficult to talk about other people without people making assumptions about their gender because of an imbalance of male, female and neutral terms in one’s language.
English is the weird one of the Indo European languages in dropping grammatical gender. Or if you look at it from Persians perspective, we don’t go far enough because we still have gendered pronouns.
IMHO English is easier to learn in the beginning, but gets ridiculous later on. Pronunciation is completely random and makes no sense, vocabulary as well. German pronunciation is probably harder (maybe? The English “th” is a challenge as well!), and articles are stupid. But: once you have a certain level it gets way easier. Pronunciation makes sense, vocabs make sense.
For example, what’s a “plane” supposed to be? Flugzeug (“flying thing”) makes much more sense, even if it’s the first time you read it.
As someone who learnt both German and English as a second language, german was far easier to learn. Atleast the spelling and stuff makes sense.
English spelling had a bit of a disaster. Spelling got settled over the same time pronunciation was changing, at the same time printers became a thing and people getting something printed had loads of ability to change what would be standard spelling and they liked to show off how much they knew the history of the language by inserting silent letters reminding them of the Latin or Greek root word
Also English has many more vowels than the Latin alphabet so it’s practically impossible to accurately reflect the way a word is said in its spelling and some words got frozen in text just before they changed how they were spoken and others just after so there’s no consistency
English spelling is easy!
Just learn which word comes from which language.
Kindergarden. German, you spell the i like in German.
fable. French, you don’t spell every letter
Island. French
pace. Latin, you just spell it like you read it.
English has the problem that it just took words from many other languages and kept their pronunciation.
Which leads to a whole mess of words. Older words seem to have a bit more consistency.
As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.
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I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.
I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷
It also makes it annoyingly difficult to talk about other people without people making assumptions about their gender because of an imbalance of male, female and neutral terms in one’s language.
Also why can’t employees times be qeer? o.o
English is the weird one of the Indo European languages in dropping grammatical gender. Or if you look at it from Persians perspective, we don’t go far enough because we still have gendered pronouns.
IMHO English is easier to learn in the beginning, but gets ridiculous later on. Pronunciation is completely random and makes no sense, vocabulary as well. German pronunciation is probably harder (maybe? The English “th” is a challenge as well!), and articles are stupid. But: once you have a certain level it gets way easier. Pronunciation makes sense, vocabs make sense.
For example, what’s a “plane” supposed to be? Flugzeug (“flying thing”) makes much more sense, even if it’s the first time you read it.