man I find german harder than polish
Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.
Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.
Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.
Or invent the internet.
glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components
Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.
The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.
The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, “WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN’T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!”
The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess
The alternative is Czech.
A Polish colleague of mine once accidentally picked Czech in an online work training exercise and then spent the next 30 minutes giggling to himself. I asked him afterwards what was up “Czech sounds like baby talk”
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.
Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you’re trying to spell/pronounce in order to get … oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.
Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.
That’s how it always starts, then the nerds get hold of it
It’s not spelling, it’s the grammar and ortography that would make you want to peel your skin off.
Like the couple dozen ways why can say “two”.
It’s not just numbers. Almost all verbs are like that.
Say “jumping” - skakać
I am jumping - skaczę I was jumping (male) - skakałem I was jumping (female) - skakałam you are jumping (singular) - skaczesz you were jumping (singular male) - skakałeś you were jumping (singular female) - skakałaś you are jumping (plural) - skaczecie you were jumping (plural male) - skakaliście you were jumping (plural female) - skakałyście they are jumping - skaczą they were jumping (male) - skakali they were jumping (female) - skakały
And so on and so on. You have no chance of remembering all of that - you either learn the rules and how to apply them, or you fail at polish language
At least these all have the same radical. Here’s the different radicals you can use in French for the verb “be”:
- Être
- Je suis
- Tu es
- Nous sommes
- Nous étions
- Je fus
- Tu seras
- Soyons
The only common point between some of those is the letter “S”, which is not even part of the infinitive.
(Not all tenses are represented because at least they share the radical with that list, but like Polish we have a bunch of tenses and the verb changes with plurality and pronoun).
Anyway I don’t fucking know why everyone glamorizes French because as a native speaker please do not attempt to learn it, you will just hurt yourself.
The verb “be” (in Spanish we have two of them btw, apparently it’s confusing as hell for foreigners details at the bottom) it’s usually very irregular in a ton of languages. I suppose because it’s one of the prime verbs and thus usage brings change.
(“To be in a a place” -> «estar», “To be something” -> «ser»).
Also, French (while having picky pronunciation rules I don’t think it’s that bad. Sure it sounds as if you were nasally congested but I like it. (Learned a bit in high school). As alsmot any other language I consider it to be better than the phonetical mess that it’s English.
Bro, why can’t you have some fucking sense??
I should have picked philosophy and linguistics instead of CS.
((This coment is a mess and I don’t have the energy to improve it, sorry))
Generally French speakers don’t consider English to be phonetically messy. Because when you pronounce every word with the thickest French accent known to man without any regard for correctness, suddenly the phonology becomes quite regular! (Side-effect being that native English speakers may not understand what the fuck a French speaker is saying, but that’s never stopped French speakers who famously disregard the English’s opinion on… well everything)
What’s really annoying about French besides the needlessly complicated tenses is that it had a bunch of already archaic orthographic and grammatical rules 300 years ago or so, and at that point the aristocracy decided to freeze it in place. I won’t get on another rant about the Académie française but if a French word has an overly complicated spelling given its pronunciation, it’s these guys’ fault who have refused to enact any real reform since the early 1800s despite calls for it since at least the 1700s. Despite it supposedly being their jobs.
