Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages

• Dojan@pawb.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.

  Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).

  English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!

  The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You can get away with lots of things in English too! Just curious, do you speak another (than english) second language ?

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    • Dojan@pawb.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I speak Japanese, and can still read German and understand most of it. German’s the secondary language I studied.

      I’m a native Swedish speaker so technically English is my second language, and the others came after.

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