I see french i upvote.
Wait till you hear about Chinese measure words. Check out that table.
Dude, I’m trying to learn German and those goddamn articles are so infuriating. I wonder how difficult it would be for there to be a linguistic reform to make it simpler
Quite the statement for an English comment. English spelling is nonsensical and in desperate need of a major reform. RobWords even made the case for using runes again as it would probably fix a lot of issues already. The language simply isn’t made for Latin letters.
But I don’t want to make this a sole whataboutism comment. Each language poses it’s own challenges. I will say that changing how roughly 100 million speak is easier said than done and would destroy a lot of culture. It would be much easier to force everyone to speak a different language entirely.
Personally I don’t think it should or could be done at all. Unlike a spelling reform that English needs desperately and German had plenty of recently. There is nothing wrong with a language being complicated but there’s plenty wrong with arbitrary spelling if you ask me.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that. I mention it because my native language has gone through a reform for the reasons of simplification. English may be shit, but it was much much easier to learn than the hell I am going through with German. Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad. The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that.
I wasn’t assuming that, don’t worry. That’s why I phrased my message like that.
I guess I agree to disagree here. Language is an expression of culture and heritage too. I would never speak German differently now just because of a reform. Neither would 99% of German speakers I assume. Yet we freely integrate English words into our language because it feels natural. These English words often come and go anyway so I’m not actually concerned the German language will become deluded from Internet lingo or anything.
Gendered nouns in German are just as stupid and arbitrary as spelling in English. Why is a pencil masculine? Why is beer neutral but coffee masculine? Why is school feminine?
you’d have to have case endings for all the nouns instead.
I understand all of these languages.
but I also never have sex.
life is full of trade-offs.
Yeah but I have you tagged as manosphere, so that is probably a you problem.
oh and how do you label yourself then?
I have them tagged as judgmental lmao
Ōlelo Hawaiʻi: ke / ka
Depending on the first letter of the next word.
Czech is even worse than German.
Elaborate.
I thought there wasn’t a word for “the”.Never mind. I didnt realize it was for “the”. You’re correct, there is no “the” in Czech. I saw the German part and i was triggered by Czech cases (7 of them).
Oh! Well Czech is at least worse than Russian which has ‘only’ 6, then.
Hebrew:
the: prefix “ha” ה-
in the: prefix “ba” ב-
to the: prefix “la” ל-
example:
book: ספר sefer
the book: הספר hasefer
in the book: בספר basefer
to the book: לספר lasefer
Lithuanian: “”
I don’t know about Russian but at least Croatian which is also a Slavic language confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
Cases are what kill you in Slavic languages. Articles are a breeze though 😉
Russian has 6 cases. two more than german.
the added ones are instrumental and prepositional.
Technically it’s the other way around - the ones German lost in comparison to Russian were the Instrumental and Prepositional (Locative).
This is from the original 8 (or 9) cases in their ancestor, Proto-Indo-European: Nominative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative, (Allative).
confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
And rightfully so. I’m also German, I learned Sorbian (slavic minority in Lusatia), and I can very much feel your pain.
Russian doesn’t have definite/indefinite articles?
I think it’s the case with most Slavic languages. My wife’s native tongue is Serbian, and knowinf when and how to use articles was one the hardest parts of learning English for her.
it doesn’t really use article at all.
it’s highly cased, the cases and inflection do all the work.
That doesn’t sound more simple.
The case are quite complicated, yes. But not having articles is way simpler. And I can’t say it ever caused confusion growing up.
English has strict word order and all these stupid helper words, how is that simpler?
By being the devil we know, I guess? 🤷🏻
And they aren’t clear when to use them either, it’s kinda cute when they look at you questioningly if they did correctly after formulating a sentence.
Neither does Polish. I know at least one polaka who confuses the/a(n) 15% of the time.
One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.
Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.
It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.
Guess same for your colleagues.
…which sounds surprising to me, because AFAIK Polish also has separate he/she words (on/ona).
I assume he’s aligning the pronouns to the gender of the noun, rather than the person. “Susie is a great worker, he’s very efficient” kind of stuff.
ETO TOM
TOM MEDIC
thanks duolingo
Тот Том - медик Этот Том - медик Любой Том - медик
We don’t have an equivalent of a/an/the in lithuanian either =w= but we do have definite adjective forms, which is kind of like saying the, so there’s that
lui
