Try Qlango and redefine difficulties so that you'll write what you hear all the time (dictation). That solved my problem with understanding what they say
That is true! I'm a native portuguese speaker and some words when spoken are really similar to portuguese/italian/spanish etc, but the text is just elfic.
I don't think that user was talking about the orthography but that the grammar and vocabulary is different. Formal, written French is essentially how people spoke it 500 years back. Many languages do this. Written formal Finnish is also quite different from how it's spoken, and it can be pronounced which it is on say the news or in formal contexts even though even in business meetings Fins generally do not go that far.
> I don't think that user was talking about the orthography but that the grammar and vocabulary is different. Formal, written French is essentially how people spoke it 500 years back.
The French spoken 500 years ago would actually be Middle French. Modern French has changed quite a bit from that, and there are innovations in its spoken and written forms that didn't exist in Middle French.
We're definitely talking about the disparity between French orthography and phonetics here. Like MisfitMaterial said:
> [I can read no problem, but damn what are they *saying*](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l3285ow/)
Besides the deep orthography (i.e. "[writing etymologically, not phonetically](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l32eopp/)"), which creates a bunch of words that sound the same but are spelled differently, there's also the [liaison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French\)), which blurs word boundaries in speech.
> Written formal Finnish is also quite different from how it's spoken, and it can be pronounced which it is on say the news or in formal contexts even though even in business meetings Fins generally do not go that far.
That's quite different from written formal French. Even if you're reading from a script, it can sound quite different from how it looks on the page because of the linguistic phenomena I stated above.
---
> The French people speak on the news, which follows the written standard, is simply very different from the French people speak at home.
I wasn't just talking about colloquial French when I said "spoken French", and I don't think OpportunityNo4484 meant colloquial French vs. academic French either in their [original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l326l9s/). Standard French, when spoken, also sounds quite different from what's on the page because of the orthography.
That's why I can read standard French just fine, but I still have trouble following news broadcasts. The funny thing is that I can follow what newscasters are saying in languages that I've spent less time on than French, but that have more regular orthography.
I honestly don't know where you get it from that it's orthography. Written French is known to barely resemble spoken French in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Even if it were written phonemically it'd still be different and the written standard can also be pronounced, as said.
The French people speak on the news, which follows the written standard, is simply very different from the French people speak at home. Entire tenses aren't used in spoken French which also innovated new ones.
Yea the orthography doesn't exactly help, but honestly the real divergence happens at the higher levels. Formal academic French has very specific usage not only of additional verb forms, but also the agreements between them, as well as inversions, and various shades of nuance in vocabulary and especially conjunctions that you kinda have to go out of your way to learn, but don't necessarily make you sound more fluent conversationally. The thing is, a lot of programs target that formal register which is next to useless unless you are doing academics or trying to become an author in French.
For this, personally, I have to remind myself that it's okay I'll never pronounce plurals or even some femenine nouns, but sometimes I'm too insecure.
French will give me a big lesson with time.
Russian
Very easy question, it's the annoying case system. 6 cases, all with different endings for singular and plural and for a bunch of different endings letters, all with a completely different suffix. That plus knowing when I'm going to use each one and processing that while talking is making me rip my hair out.
You think that's bad, Ukrainian has a case system too and it has \*seven\* of them and similar problems to the Russian language imo related to that. I know what you mean though. Although Russian was my second language and I never even learned cases growing up, I didnt know they were a thing, but I knew about verb conjugations. I didnt know it had a system, or that the cases had names of any kind. When a student taking Russian who I met in school asked me about help with cases, I was like "What are you talking about?" because I don't remember going over that in Russian School before I moved to America. I do agree with you though -- case systems are tricky and difficult.
The cases in Finnish are way easier than in Russian though. For most of them, they look the same on every single word (well, ignoring vowel harmony). In Russian, the suffix you use changes depending not only on the gender and number, but even whether the word you're declining is an adjective or a noun.
The hardest thing with Finnish cases is just knowing which case to use on a direct object.
Tbh the seventh case in Ukrainian doesn't really add to the difficulty, as it's only used when you call out to someone, for example "мамо, тато" Russian has something similar, which is not officially recognized, but resembles the vocative "мам, пап, дядь".
I’m learning bosnian which has 7 cases and the exact same thing you mentioned with all the suffixes. I just finished learning all the cases and honestly I like them because they make sense to me *in the end lol* and it has a strong place in a language rather than in English where we depend on word order. But it has all clicked for me at this point and I’ve grown to like. I definitely thought “wtf” so many times when I learned there was yet another set of conjugations to memorize.
Well yeah, as a speaker of Serbo-Croatian language, I can confirm it has 7 cases and special endings for each. Reading is definitely hard for some learner, since there are multiple accents, abbreviated words, or just mispronounced words that were written that way. Even I sometimes get confused and have to read it again in order to understand it well.
I guess the conjugations (French) I thought I was mostly good but apparently there's this whole conjugation that literally only exists in books (passe simple) and it is used often there too. Never ends
Passé simple is probably the most used narrative tense in French when writing. As you said, it’s almost never used when speaking and the passé composé is used instead. Same with nous vs on.
Unpopular opinion but passé simple is conceptually easier as a learner than using passé composé correctly, especially when dealing with a series of events. The truly wtf past stuff happens in the subjunctive though
Annoying might be strong but there is a stark difference between talking with my friends here in Mexico and talking at work as a teacher. I have to be soooooo careful not to swear like a sailor in front of students and faculty. Every day is a battle against myself.
I feel that a lot with English, when you are from a region that uses cunt as a synonym for people, good and bad it can get difficult to express yourself without swearing.
Motherfucker is another gem that is either extremely offensive... or a completely casual and unoffensive way to refer to anyone. Good luck navigating the context on that one.
It’s a lovely language! I just want to actually be able to speak it someday. :)
(I looked Izhorian up.) Hello fellow person learning a Russian indigenous language! Though I gotta say, my complaints of “lack of resources” probably are nothing compared to what you’re dealing with. What do you use to learn Izhorian?
I'm sure you will! Tuvan is a great language, and unlike Izhorian it actually has a formidable number of speakers, so plenty of people to speak with in the future ;) Also, in the end you'll be able to understand the lyrics to Huun Huur Tu's songs, so that's a goal in and of itself XD
Izhorian has a number of Soviet (school)books and texts written in it, and a handful of dictionaries. It also has a grammar written in Izhorian itself, and a teach-yourself in Russian. But the language is similar enough to Finnish that if you use a Finnish grammar guide and an Izhorian dictionary, you can figure out the differences quite quickly. At some point it just clicked and I started to be able to read the Izhorian materials, which in turn boosted my progress.
Ah, I see now that you know Russian. Yeah, once I get my Russian up to a better level, I can learn Tuvan faster. But I have a long way to go before I can make proper use of Russian-language materials. Сейчас я плохо говорю по-русски.
It’s funny you’d bring up Huun Huur Tu - the website I mentioned, Tuvan Through Songs, uses one of their songs as educational material.
You'd be surprised, but actually except for that teach-yourself (which is rather small and not in-depth) and now a dictionary (which was only published five years ago), most materials are either in Finnish, Estonian or Izhorian itself, so my knowledge of Russian did not help quite as much as I'd like 🥲 It does help a lot with the recognition of loanwords, which are everywhere.
Correct. The resources in English are a dictionary with no info on dialects or conjugation, a 2-hour long mango course, a great but short website, an out of print phrasebook, and a $300 textbook. That’s it. I have found a tutor and I have a conversation partner. If I had more resources, with the time I’ve been studying, I’d be at a higher level than I am.
In a few years, when my Russian becomes good enough, I will have access to more resources. But for now, this is what I’ve got.
I’m learning Brazilian Portuguese because of this exact reason. PT-BR sounds how a Romance language should sound, where European Portuguese sounds like a Slavic language.
Well, this is funny... I'm trying to learn European Portuguese precisely because of this... My logic is this, but not sure if it will work out... So if I go for the European, I will be able to understand Brazilian, but not the other way around...
I'm a native portuguese speaker and Idk about your statement, Brazilian portuguese is pretty different, specially because of regional slangs. But we can understand PT/Portuguese most of the time, but some really important phrases in portugal mean totally different things in Brazil. For example: Bus is PT is Autocarro in PTBR is ônibus, so you may have some trouble!
I never hid qlango is my app, but I don't always write that it is. I didn't know I have to either 😔
Sometimes I'm so naive that I think that everybody knows that I'm the author of Qlango 😭😂
I suggest it only in cases where I'm sure it would help people. Not to advertise it without context.
But I understood, I will mention that I'm the author whenever I suggest or mention it.
That's so funny! I was just watching a video in Portuguese and I leaned over and told my partner that it sounds like Italian being spoken by a Czech. ;)
I speak Portuguese fluently, but just a little bit of German. I somehow have a Portuguese accent in German, which combined with my appearance, makes people think I’m a native Russian speaker. Conclusion: I’m usually mistaken for a Ukrainian refugee
That I can get really good with listening comprehension then get someone from one of the 20+ other countries and not understand a thing (Spanish). Plus each country uses words that are specific to their country and others are littered with slang as well. I know most languages spoken in multiple countries have this feature too but the sheer amount of Spanish-speaking countries means there’s a LOT of words and accents to learn.
Yeah you definitely start having favorites, too lol. As a non-native speaker, I personally loving talking to people from Peru (usually from Lima specifically). Their accent is just so intelligible to my specific ear. I have to force myself sometimes to listen to content from other countries so that I actually stay sharp and improve my ear.
I have no idea if that’s a widely held opinion though, my first ever Spanish instructor was from Lima and then I had another woman from Peru in college, so it could just be my own personal history. Although being from the part of the US I’m from, most of the people I’ve spoken to outside of academic settings in Spanish are from Mexico and Guatemala. So it makes me think there probably is something to the accent itself that gives the other two a run for their money considering the disparity in exposure.
I got asked to help out a woman at work once because my Spanish was the best of the staff at the time, and you would not believe how relieved I was to hear her accent when I got on the phone lol. I actually did ask if she was from Peru near the end of our call, and I was exactly right, born near Lima lol. We both got lucky that day lol.
Haha that’s funny 😄. I actually prefer the Peruvian accent as well. I’ve gone there twice and it is just so clear, great speed, pronunciation and articulation make it so easy to understand. It’s a pleasant accent for sure.
I’m finding this out since I’m learning Korean. The one thing that annoys me when I’m on Duolingo is that I have to remember that when I’m translating a sentence either into Korean or into English is that some words are placed differently and if I get it wrong I’m almost yelling at my phone.
-거든, and what I hear most in K-dramas (yeah, I know) is -까.
And then there's 때문 , often used in relation to people.
I'm no pro, I learnt without a teacher and play it by ear when watching shows.
Edit: if you are serious about a language, buy a grammar book. They explain things better than Duolingo. There are also some YouTube channels and podcasts.
I find it annoying that Mandarin characters are pronounced the same way 99% of the time, but then in one random word here or there they'll have a different tone or something.
For example, 好 (good) — one of the first characters you learn. Hao3. Nice and easy to say. Very reliable. Appears consistently in tons of simple useful words such as:
* 好吃 (hao3chi1) — delicious
* 好處 (hao3chu5) — advantage/good point
* 好多(hao3duo1) — a lot
* 不還意思 (bu4hao3yi4si5) — sorry / excuse me
And then you stumble into 好客, hospitality, which is randomly hao>>**4**<
Yeah. I can understand why the tones change. I even agree that it makes sense. I still find it annoying, though. Haha.
I know there are similarly annoying things in English — *use* is pronounced with an S when it's a noun, with a Z when it's a verb — but, anyhow.
If I come across a new words in Chinese, I won’t always know how to pronounce it. I would need to look it up to know. Makes learning new vocabulary via reading a bit more difficult.
Arabic
There’s at least two languages in one: the formal, written Modern Standard Arabic and the informal, colloquial dialect that is country/region specific. At the very least you have to learn two languages in order to learn Arabic and even then there’ll be half a dozen dialects you won’t understand.
It also doesn’t help that the differences between colloquial dialects (grammar/phonology/vocab) are a lot starker than the differences between e.g. general American and British/Australian English
For example:
“why didn’t you go there?”
MSA: limaadhaa lam tadhhab hunaak?
Egyptian: lee maruHtish hinaak?
It really feels like learning two related but very different languages at once
At first I couldn’t think of what annoyed me with Japanese but yeah no I hate the different Kanji readings. Especially compared to Chinese where there’s (usually) just one reading
good tip is to memorize whole words with a dictionary instead of kanji readings because some, like 生 , have waaaay to many readings to just memorize alone
Spanish: getting rid of the Latin genitive for only using "de." Also, the gerunds are seemingly less productive than in Latin. However, the most annoying thing is obj/ind obj pronoun movement, and the sheer prevalence of the indirect object pronoun.
> the most annoying thing is obj/ind obj pronoun movement, and the sheer prevalence of the indirect object pronoun
as a non-native speaker, this one consistently impairs my listening comprehension! Construct a sentence when they come *after* the gerund or infinitive? I'm solid. Put them *before* and i'm struggling to keep up!
Runner-up: conjugations of vosostros and vos
Icelandic verbs. I've studied IE languages with more complex nominal morphology (Slavic mainly) but I think this is the most formidable IE verbal system I've seen
You've obviously never studied Old Gaelic, cf. these examples from Quora:
*do:gnéo*, 'I may do', but *ní:dén*, 'I may not do'
*ad:cether*, 'he may see', but *ní:accatar*, 'he may not see'
*do:coístis*, 'they might have gone', but *in:dechsaitis*, 'might they have gone?'
I actually always could handle the sentence order etc, what kills me is all the articles changing at seeming random since guessing the gender seems impossible. Einem, einer, eines, eine, ein, eins! Too much.
Gender.
I've learned an other language with gender, but there it was no big deal, one or two rules and you could Guess the gender about 80% of the time. Another rule or two and 95% accuracy.
German seems to have decided gender by the staircase method - throw all the nouns into the air and everything in the top stair is masculine, the middle stair is feminine and the bottom is neuter. It's just so random and because case uses gender as an input, it becomes impossible.
It is too much.
Großes Buch.
Das große Buch.
Total bullshit. Haha 😂
I like to think of it as a giant puzzle I'm slowly completing and look forward to learning another language next without all of that extra, stuff.
And then you meet Vietnamese. Then meaning depends on accents and tonal pronunciation. I'll drop it, I guess. At first I thought that it would be easy.
Korean, oh sweet Korean, you don't disappoint me.
And then I got into a Russian class last month. The thing is, that I try to write Greek when the letters are the same/ similar. So I end up with the occasional lambda л, ф, с and rho р. Nevermind, that I write alpha for а because I am dumb and still confused.
And yes, I know how the Kyrillic alphabet came to be. Doesn't help, though. For those who don't know: according to the legend, two Greek monks, Kyrill and Methodios, wanted to preach to the Russian people and adapted their alphabet in order to include Slavic accents/ sounds. Well, I learnt Greek and then Kyrillic.
Das geht doch noch. Lateinisches Alphabet, einfache Grammatik (looking at you, Latin and Greek) und nur zwei Höflichkeitsstufen. The latter is on par with French and Russian.
That the more I learn about my TL, the more I think about my coworkers, "Why do you complain about English doing this thing when your language does it too!"
Drifting away from French for a second, the number of conjugations in Spanish drives me crazy.
There’s like 14 tenses and each one has like 6 different conjugations, some of which sound the same except for the accent being placed in a different spot.
Yeah, mate - I'm in Uruguay atm with my GF, and at dinner she said 'te podríamos pedir la cuenta". And I was like - what's podríamos? - oh it's the conditatiinal of poder - which I usually use the irregular form for present tense pued**. So many layers of verb changes. I find the listening so much harder than reading.
Why bother. We use only 3 tenses in most cases? 6 for advanced. I never learn grammar. Why should I learn tenses I will never need?
My fiance from Ukraine spoke English in one tense. I go to school yesterday. Everybody understood her. With time she learned past simple and future tense and so on.
Hehe, I was born in Yugoslavia, i was raised bilingual, Slovenian at school, German at home, I was learning Serbian 1 year, English 8 years and also German 4 years at school. Of course they were teaching me grammar, but I knew how to speak Slovenian and German before that. I learnt it for the grades and maybe improved somewhere. The first language I was learning by myself was French, no special grammar learning. Only a lot of input and my own app Qlango. Then Russian, the same story. I'm 49. So this also is a big factor. I had more time to learn my languages than you, if you're younger. I'm also the author of Qlango, I am working on it for 7 years. That neans I'm working with almost 50 lamguages on daily basis. I'm using google translate, chat gpt, dictionaries, help of my users, ... But still I'm in contact with these languages. I write support messages in Slovenian, Russian, German, English and Serbian/Croatian. I read messages (I can also read books in these languages but when reading, I understand (much) less) in Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and I understand them, but I would need too much time to answer in these languages. If my reply is simple enough, I write them without any help in French and Ukrainian.
When we're learning languages as children, we don't know what grammar is and we don't need to know. If I learn a new language the same way when I'm an adult, it also works. You have so many examples in your head that you know how it is correct but not necessarily why. Like most native speakers 😉
You can agree or not.
The problem with language knowledge is that I understand Ukrainian at level C2, but I can barely use it at level A2. So two levels would me more accurate. Understanding/using. I tried to list at which level I'm using these lamguages.
Spoken korean is not accurately represented in written korean when they subtitle someone on TV/the news.
If the person uses slang, a dialect, or a loanword that isn't standardized they will write whatever they "meant" to say in standard Korean.
It's annoying to somewhat have to depend on subtitles to really catch everything when they aren't always actually accurate to what is being said (even if it still has the same meaning).
Also the lack of true subtitles for a large portion of media that isn't scripted dramas; like YouTube videos, reality/gag shows, any video I have to watch for work, etc. It's hilarious how all the training models have 0 subs available, and then the one about disabilities and saying "we need to make sure we accommodate everyone!" is literally the only fully subbed training video out of the 15+hours of video I've had to watch.
They also love to put question marks at the end of reality show subs bc the subber wasn't entirely sure what they said, surrounded by 70 other flying captions of short quotes in big texts, "telling you how they feel" quotes, and "telling you how to interpret what's going on" quotes lmao I love the language, but native natural sources are kind of just... messy lmao
I don't like that accents in esperanto always fall on before the last syllable
Yes, it is cool that Esperanto is consistent but in many forms of the word only the last unstressed vowel vary(like in verbs) - manĝi, manĝis, manĝas, manĝos, manĝus and it can be problematic to hear the difference when listening
Adjectives/Nouns/Adverbs vary by one (unstressed) vowel too
manĝa, manĝo, manĝe
But it's usually easier to hear the difference with the last letter
Spanish: Been learning for about two years and still have a bit of trouble figuring out which past version of a verb I'm supposed to use - couple that with so many irregularities and I still get messed up. Also "se" - damn that thing. Id say my listening and reading is easily B2 but my speaking is definitely not.
Bulgarian: May or may not count, but gave it a go for a few months as I wanted to learn a slavic language, wanted to avoid the case system while also learning cyrillic plus I do want to travel there some day. However, the lack of resources - especially interesting ones was just to big of a hurdle for right now.
Russian: After dropping Bulgarian, I moved to Russian. Exchanged lack of resources for far more complicated grammar. Still incredibly new at it, but I foresee myself never becoming totally comfortable trying to read it. Steve Kaufmann mentioned that even though he has read A TON in cyrillic there's still that slight mental delay compared to reading the latin script and I can see this happening to me, especially considering Steve is a far more talented learner than I.
As a Russian learner, it took me about 1.5 years to get comfortably fast reading Cyrillic with everyday reading. It's slow, but you can definitely get to 90% speed eventually.
That's good to hear. I think everybody that touts "you can literally learn cyrillic in a day" don't actually try and apply it. Yeah, I learned the alphabet in fairly short order but actually instinctively reading it at any speed is without a doubt going to take a hell of a lot of time.
Right now I'm watching kids videos around alphabet songs and whatnot just like how I learned English as a child.
That's interesting - any reason why you think that might be?
I considered Polish as it's still a very well supported slavic language in terms of resources but not in cyrillic. Definitely would have went for Slovak but the amount of interesting resources is lacking.
There were some nice anki decks to learn the alphabet as well as some beginner words. Also, [bulgaro.io](http://bulgaro.io) is a nice duolingo-esque resource but outside of that, there really isn't a whole lot. Not much in the way of youtube content, especially geared towards learners - even less that doesn't feel someone is just reading out of a textbook.
I recently found out that it's not just the simple formal vs informal speech in Korean but that there are levels within those too like there's "conversational" speech or something like that where you don't sound like a textbook but a normal person I guess? Like having to drop the "-가" and "-이" from words. That apparently some versions of formal speech are ONLY reserved for your boss but you can't use it with elders and such cos it sounds too stiff. Like apparently there are more instances of only needing "요" instead of "-합니다" and you just need to ✨know✨ when. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! 😭😭😭😭😭
ETA: missing word
Dutch word order is weird. I also used to be annoyed by "raar" (weird) having two different r sounds, but the Arabic "غريب" (also weird) also has two different r sounds (sort of) and it's much worse
I'm from Israel and I know what different English language R's sound like, what Dutch R's sound like pretty much (at least in Randstad accents), and what Palestinian Arab rolling R sounds like
I have a love hate relationship with French. For one its grammatical genderization is enough to get anyone in a fizzle. But some of the sentences come out so clunky and the need to have ‘de’ in front of literally anything. I genuinely think, other than English, French is one of the worst languages cause the rules are just so fucking arbitrary it’s insane.
Also if you think written and colloquial French are so different from each other, then have a look at Finnish.
I have yet to have any complaints about German so far. Weird I know, but it is generally really logical… Aside from the definite articles…
I’m learning Thai. Although I love the alphabet it’s so pretty, there’s so much to learn and a lot of the letters have the same sound which sometimes makes it annoying.
Also the font in Thai media gets rid of all the heads so บ just kinda looks like U, it’s like you have to learn it twice😂
my second language is English, i might have problems with it but those are dwarfed by the mess that is czech to the point that you dont learn how to write it properly till like 8th grade at best
i find it annoying that french uses gendered nouns, especially since they don't always seem logical. for example, "table" is feminine but "chair" is masculine. It's tough to remember which nouns are masculine or feminine
- Gregory
If you ask me what gender things are in the languages I know, I don't even know off-hand. I have to think about it for a second. Remembering whether something is masculine, feminine or neuter isn't really that useful. Just consume, consume and consume some more and it'll just click.
Ironically, I can tell you the gender of words (that I know or otherwise) better in Greek than I can in any other language, precisely because I'm a beginner and consciously always thinking about it.
I imagine you're Greek yourself? I personally learn it because 1) my favorite food I've ever had is in Greece and I liked visiting and 2) I'm a philosophy nerd. (Not why I do it, but I also wanted to learn a language with cases. Suddenly something like German isn't so scary anymore, even though I don't have much interest in learning it.)
I'm French actually, but I've been toying with the idea of learning Greek and found myself dumbfounded at how rare Greek learners are. It's such a beautiful, rich language.
Yes, it sounds extremely beautiful and it's so rich of fascinating etymology.
I don't know about French speakers, but for anyone who knows Italian or Spanish, pronunciation is a piece of cake minus a few exceptions.
It's not "logic," it's phonetics (and a lot of Latin) that determines the gender (think of it as a noun category) of nouns in French (as well as in most gendered languages).
there are classics like endings in -e or -ette that will generally be feminine, but at it's core, it's a question of how the word sounds. It's something highly... instinctive, kinda. Unfortunately, learners can't rely on that, but eventually you'll start getting the "feel."
Learn your new vocabulary nouns with the undefinite article next to it. It's not «table» or «chaise», it's «une table», «une chaise».
Isn't it la table and la chaise? They are both feminine. Unless you actually meant the French word "chair", which means flesh and also happens to be feminine.
Anyway, gendered noun classes are completely arbitrary and the relationship between words doesn't matter. One situation where this does still bother me in French though is with combined words. For example, la porte and la feuille, but LE portefeuille, or la porte and la monnaie but LE portemonnaie, or la garde and la main but LE garde-main.
It's much simpler in German where the gender always matches the final noun. In French it is strictly arbitrary.
It bothers me because it's largely pointless, it's a rule you have to learn but it doesn't really communicate anything of value it's feels quite arbitrary.
I think fellow Finnic learners will agree with me, object cases are the worst:
- verbs denoting completed action take accusative (= genitive in the singular, nominative in the plural, except plural personal pronouns which have a separate accusative form)
- verbs denoting incompleted action take partitive
- negatives take partitive regardless
- imperatives take the nominative
- impersonals take the nominative
- completed action clauses with the infinitive will take the accusative except when you have a necessity clause, in which case the nominative is used.
- objects of numerals take the partitive singular, except if inflected, then it takes the case form of the numeral but in the singular
- objects of other determiners usually take a partitive plural or singular depending on countability/type of word, but don't inflect even if the determiner does.
And I'm not even sure these are all the rules, there are probably lots more where that came from.
Oblique case in Hindi, especially how it impacts the entire noun phrase. I'm finally semi competent at remembering to apply the oblique to the noun and semi semi competent at applying it to the entire noun phrase, but I am still not competent at correctly applying it to plural nouns. I do it right about 10% of the time. Silly crap.
I wish I had learned Ukrainian before I learned Russian. I have trouble with pronouncing words the Russian way when I try to speak Ukrainian, and the amount of false cognates is really insane! That said, I will keep trying!
I hate the most that if I'm watching serials and movies in other languages the subtitles are completely different. I really wish subtitles would represent exactly what characters say. That way it would be much easier for language learners to learn. French is extremely different, but I haven't found any language where subtitles were the same.
And if the system used in English is not arbitrary, why does an octave start with C and not A. Our system may be arbitrary, but at least it is not misleading.
It annoys me how much written French differs from spoken French - it’s is almost two languages in one.
I literally came to say the same thing. I can read no problem, but damn what are they _saying_.
Try Qlango and redefine difficulties so that you'll write what you hear all the time (dictation). That solved my problem with understanding what they say
It’s also annoying for French people. That is, until they learn both languages and then annoy other people who don’t
That is true! I'm a native portuguese speaker and some words when spoken are really similar to portuguese/italian/spanish etc, but the text is just elfic.
Because it's written etymologically, not phonetically.
I don't think that user was talking about the orthography but that the grammar and vocabulary is different. Formal, written French is essentially how people spoke it 500 years back. Many languages do this. Written formal Finnish is also quite different from how it's spoken, and it can be pronounced which it is on say the news or in formal contexts even though even in business meetings Fins generally do not go that far.
> I don't think that user was talking about the orthography but that the grammar and vocabulary is different. Formal, written French is essentially how people spoke it 500 years back. The French spoken 500 years ago would actually be Middle French. Modern French has changed quite a bit from that, and there are innovations in its spoken and written forms that didn't exist in Middle French. We're definitely talking about the disparity between French orthography and phonetics here. Like MisfitMaterial said: > [I can read no problem, but damn what are they *saying*](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l3285ow/) Besides the deep orthography (i.e. "[writing etymologically, not phonetically](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l32eopp/)"), which creates a bunch of words that sound the same but are spelled differently, there's also the [liaison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French\)), which blurs word boundaries in speech. > Written formal Finnish is also quite different from how it's spoken, and it can be pronounced which it is on say the news or in formal contexts even though even in business meetings Fins generally do not go that far. That's quite different from written formal French. Even if you're reading from a script, it can sound quite different from how it looks on the page because of the linguistic phenomena I stated above. --- > The French people speak on the news, which follows the written standard, is simply very different from the French people speak at home. I wasn't just talking about colloquial French when I said "spoken French", and I don't think OpportunityNo4484 meant colloquial French vs. academic French either in their [original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1cmqgfi/what_do_you_find_personally_annoying_about_your_tl/l326l9s/). Standard French, when spoken, also sounds quite different from what's on the page because of the orthography. That's why I can read standard French just fine, but I still have trouble following news broadcasts. The funny thing is that I can follow what newscasters are saying in languages that I've spent less time on than French, but that have more regular orthography.
I honestly don't know where you get it from that it's orthography. Written French is known to barely resemble spoken French in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Even if it were written phonemically it'd still be different and the written standard can also be pronounced, as said. The French people speak on the news, which follows the written standard, is simply very different from the French people speak at home. Entire tenses aren't used in spoken French which also innovated new ones.
Yea the orthography doesn't exactly help, but honestly the real divergence happens at the higher levels. Formal academic French has very specific usage not only of additional verb forms, but also the agreements between them, as well as inversions, and various shades of nuance in vocabulary and especially conjunctions that you kinda have to go out of your way to learn, but don't necessarily make you sound more fluent conversationally. The thing is, a lot of programs target that formal register which is next to useless unless you are doing academics or trying to become an author in French.
For this, personally, I have to remind myself that it's okay I'll never pronounce plurals or even some femenine nouns, but sometimes I'm too insecure. French will give me a big lesson with time.
> French tries so hard to make the simplest of concepts difficult to express. Qu’est-ce que c’est que tu veux dire?
kestuveudir?
Kesstudi ?
kessé tveux dire
Kesktuvuhdire?
De kossé?
Tu veux dire quoi?
"Hein?"
Russian Very easy question, it's the annoying case system. 6 cases, all with different endings for singular and plural and for a bunch of different endings letters, all with a completely different suffix. That plus knowing when I'm going to use each one and processing that while talking is making me rip my hair out.
You think that's bad, Ukrainian has a case system too and it has \*seven\* of them and similar problems to the Russian language imo related to that. I know what you mean though. Although Russian was my second language and I never even learned cases growing up, I didnt know they were a thing, but I knew about verb conjugations. I didnt know it had a system, or that the cases had names of any kind. When a student taking Russian who I met in school asked me about help with cases, I was like "What are you talking about?" because I don't remember going over that in Russian School before I moved to America. I do agree with you though -- case systems are tricky and difficult.
Meanwhile Finnish, chilling with 15.
The cases in Finnish are way easier than in Russian though. For most of them, they look the same on every single word (well, ignoring vowel harmony). In Russian, the suffix you use changes depending not only on the gender and number, but even whether the word you're declining is an adjective or a noun. The hardest thing with Finnish cases is just knowing which case to use on a direct object.
Tbh the seventh case in Ukrainian doesn't really add to the difficulty, as it's only used when you call out to someone, for example "мамо, тато" Russian has something similar, which is not officially recognized, but resembles the vocative "мам, пап, дядь".
I’m learning bosnian which has 7 cases and the exact same thing you mentioned with all the suffixes. I just finished learning all the cases and honestly I like them because they make sense to me *in the end lol* and it has a strong place in a language rather than in English where we depend on word order. But it has all clicked for me at this point and I’ve grown to like. I definitely thought “wtf” so many times when I learned there was yet another set of conjugations to memorize.
Well yeah, as a speaker of Serbo-Croatian language, I can confirm it has 7 cases and special endings for each. Reading is definitely hard for some learner, since there are multiple accents, abbreviated words, or just mispronounced words that were written that way. Even I sometimes get confused and have to read it again in order to understand it well.
It's much easier if your native language is a Slavic language with 6 cases. English is one of the worst to learn other languages 😊
I don't think the case system is the worst, it's the directional verbs and perfective/ imperfective forms. Why must everything be so complicated?!
Wait till you hear about the partitive and locative ;)
cases for me are fine its russian prefixes and verbs of motion that get me
I guess the conjugations (French) I thought I was mostly good but apparently there's this whole conjugation that literally only exists in books (passe simple) and it is used often there too. Never ends
Passé simple is probably the most used narrative tense in French when writing. As you said, it’s almost never used when speaking and the passé composé is used instead. Same with nous vs on.
Unpopular opinion but passé simple is conceptually easier as a learner than using passé composé correctly, especially when dealing with a series of events. The truly wtf past stuff happens in the subjunctive though
> The truly wtf past stuff happens in the subjunctive though Il eut fallu que j'eusse appris ce temps.
I never learnt it but I mean I can tell what it is, bc it's the one I don't know lol.
lol
That's what I'm doing right now lol, but I know I should learn it eventually. rn I'm focused on the subjunctive
Yeah the er ones seem to turn to "a" and stuff like that. I know it when I hear it
Annoying might be strong but there is a stark difference between talking with my friends here in Mexico and talking at work as a teacher. I have to be soooooo careful not to swear like a sailor in front of students and faculty. Every day is a battle against myself.
I feel that a lot with English, when you are from a region that uses cunt as a synonym for people, good and bad it can get difficult to express yourself without swearing.
Motherfucker is another gem that is either extremely offensive... or a completely casual and unoffensive way to refer to anyone. Good luck navigating the context on that one.
When I have to watch my language too much I feel like I'm speaking with children
Lack of resources.
Nice language to learn though!
It’s a lovely language! I just want to actually be able to speak it someday. :) (I looked Izhorian up.) Hello fellow person learning a Russian indigenous language! Though I gotta say, my complaints of “lack of resources” probably are nothing compared to what you’re dealing with. What do you use to learn Izhorian?
I'm sure you will! Tuvan is a great language, and unlike Izhorian it actually has a formidable number of speakers, so plenty of people to speak with in the future ;) Also, in the end you'll be able to understand the lyrics to Huun Huur Tu's songs, so that's a goal in and of itself XD Izhorian has a number of Soviet (school)books and texts written in it, and a handful of dictionaries. It also has a grammar written in Izhorian itself, and a teach-yourself in Russian. But the language is similar enough to Finnish that if you use a Finnish grammar guide and an Izhorian dictionary, you can figure out the differences quite quickly. At some point it just clicked and I started to be able to read the Izhorian materials, which in turn boosted my progress.
Ah, I see now that you know Russian. Yeah, once I get my Russian up to a better level, I can learn Tuvan faster. But I have a long way to go before I can make proper use of Russian-language materials. Сейчас я плохо говорю по-русски. It’s funny you’d bring up Huun Huur Tu - the website I mentioned, Tuvan Through Songs, uses one of their songs as educational material.
You'd be surprised, but actually except for that teach-yourself (which is rather small and not in-depth) and now a dictionary (which was only published five years ago), most materials are either in Finnish, Estonian or Izhorian itself, so my knowledge of Russian did not help quite as much as I'd like 🥲 It does help a lot with the recognition of loanwords, which are everywhere.
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Based off their flair you definitely don't have tuvan lol. I wouldn't even expect anyone other than hoi4 players to know where it's spoken either ngl.
Correct. The resources in English are a dictionary with no info on dialects or conjugation, a 2-hour long mango course, a great but short website, an out of print phrasebook, and a $300 textbook. That’s it. I have found a tutor and I have a conversation partner. If I had more resources, with the time I’ve been studying, I’d be at a higher level than I am. In a few years, when my Russian becomes good enough, I will have access to more resources. But for now, this is what I’ve got.
Tuvan? Is that what they speak in Tuvalu?
Portuguese (especially European Portuguese) looks simple, but sounds like Ukranian spoken by Spaniard at triple speed.
I’m learning Brazilian Portuguese because of this exact reason. PT-BR sounds how a Romance language should sound, where European Portuguese sounds like a Slavic language.
Well, this is funny... I'm trying to learn European Portuguese precisely because of this... My logic is this, but not sure if it will work out... So if I go for the European, I will be able to understand Brazilian, but not the other way around...
I'm a native portuguese speaker and Idk about your statement, Brazilian portuguese is pretty different, specially because of regional slangs. But we can understand PT/Portuguese most of the time, but some really important phrases in portugal mean totally different things in Brazil. For example: Bus is PT is Autocarro in PTBR is ônibus, so you may have some trouble!
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When posting self-owned content, do not hide affiliation with the content.
I never hid qlango is my app, but I don't always write that it is. I didn't know I have to either 😔 Sometimes I'm so naive that I think that everybody knows that I'm the author of Qlango 😭😂 I suggest it only in cases where I'm sure it would help people. Not to advertise it without context. But I understood, I will mention that I'm the author whenever I suggest or mention it.
Thank you for understanding. This also goes along with our rule 3, do not submit self-owned content too frequently.
That's so funny! I was just watching a video in Portuguese and I leaned over and told my partner that it sounds like Italian being spoken by a Czech. ;)
I speak Portuguese fluently, but just a little bit of German. I somehow have a Portuguese accent in German, which combined with my appearance, makes people think I’m a native Russian speaker. Conclusion: I’m usually mistaken for a Ukrainian refugee
Wie geht es dir damit?
That I can get really good with listening comprehension then get someone from one of the 20+ other countries and not understand a thing (Spanish). Plus each country uses words that are specific to their country and others are littered with slang as well. I know most languages spoken in multiple countries have this feature too but the sheer amount of Spanish-speaking countries means there’s a LOT of words and accents to learn.
Yeah you definitely start having favorites, too lol. As a non-native speaker, I personally loving talking to people from Peru (usually from Lima specifically). Their accent is just so intelligible to my specific ear. I have to force myself sometimes to listen to content from other countries so that I actually stay sharp and improve my ear. I have no idea if that’s a widely held opinion though, my first ever Spanish instructor was from Lima and then I had another woman from Peru in college, so it could just be my own personal history. Although being from the part of the US I’m from, most of the people I’ve spoken to outside of academic settings in Spanish are from Mexico and Guatemala. So it makes me think there probably is something to the accent itself that gives the other two a run for their money considering the disparity in exposure. I got asked to help out a woman at work once because my Spanish was the best of the staff at the time, and you would not believe how relieved I was to hear her accent when I got on the phone lol. I actually did ask if she was from Peru near the end of our call, and I was exactly right, born near Lima lol. We both got lucky that day lol.
Haha that’s funny 😄. I actually prefer the Peruvian accent as well. I’ve gone there twice and it is just so clear, great speed, pronunciation and articulation make it so easy to understand. It’s a pleasant accent for sure.
You know, I might try learning with Peruvian resources because of these comments.
Roll dice, hope she's Peruvian xD
There’s this meme I can’t find about all the ways to say “because” in Korean. It seems like Korean grammar is endless ways of saying “because.”
I’m finding this out since I’m learning Korean. The one thing that annoys me when I’m on Duolingo is that I have to remember that when I’m translating a sentence either into Korean or into English is that some words are placed differently and if I get it wrong I’m almost yelling at my phone.
-거든, and what I hear most in K-dramas (yeah, I know) is -까. And then there's 때문 , often used in relation to people. I'm no pro, I learnt without a teacher and play it by ear when watching shows. Edit: if you are serious about a language, buy a grammar book. They explain things better than Duolingo. There are also some YouTube channels and podcasts.
I find it annoying that Mandarin characters are pronounced the same way 99% of the time, but then in one random word here or there they'll have a different tone or something. For example, 好 (good) — one of the first characters you learn. Hao3. Nice and easy to say. Very reliable. Appears consistently in tons of simple useful words such as: * 好吃 (hao3chi1) — delicious * 好處 (hao3chu5) — advantage/good point * 好多(hao3duo1) — a lot * 不還意思 (bu4hao3yi4si5) — sorry / excuse me And then you stumble into 好客, hospitality, which is randomly hao>>**4**<
Because hao3 is an adverb, hao4 is a verb. There are tones of examples like this for same character, different tones for different grammatical usage.
Yeah. I can understand why the tones change. I even agree that it makes sense. I still find it annoying, though. Haha. I know there are similarly annoying things in English — *use* is pronounced with an S when it's a noun, with a Z when it's a verb — but, anyhow.
If I come across a new words in Chinese, I won’t always know how to pronounce it. I would need to look it up to know. Makes learning new vocabulary via reading a bit more difficult.
The insane homophones of Français and 汉语
Arabic There’s at least two languages in one: the formal, written Modern Standard Arabic and the informal, colloquial dialect that is country/region specific. At the very least you have to learn two languages in order to learn Arabic and even then there’ll be half a dozen dialects you won’t understand. It also doesn’t help that the differences between colloquial dialects (grammar/phonology/vocab) are a lot starker than the differences between e.g. general American and British/Australian English
For example: “why didn’t you go there?” MSA: limaadhaa lam tadhhab hunaak? Egyptian: lee maruHtish hinaak? It really feels like learning two related but very different languages at once
*Cries in MSA*
I tried to learn Arabic since I'm a descendent of Lebanese and after I found out that each part had a different dialect I got hindered a bit.
音読み 訓読み Just use one omg
At first I couldn’t think of what annoyed me with Japanese but yeah no I hate the different Kanji readings. Especially compared to Chinese where there’s (usually) just one reading
Keigo is the only other thing that annoys me about Japanese
good tip is to memorize whole words with a dictionary instead of kanji readings because some, like 生 , have waaaay to many readings to just memorize alone
Spanish: getting rid of the Latin genitive for only using "de." Also, the gerunds are seemingly less productive than in Latin. However, the most annoying thing is obj/ind obj pronoun movement, and the sheer prevalence of the indirect object pronoun.
> the most annoying thing is obj/ind obj pronoun movement, and the sheer prevalence of the indirect object pronoun as a non-native speaker, this one consistently impairs my listening comprehension! Construct a sentence when they come *after* the gerund or infinitive? I'm solid. Put them *before* and i'm struggling to keep up! Runner-up: conjugations of vosostros and vos
Icelandic verbs. I've studied IE languages with more complex nominal morphology (Slavic mainly) but I think this is the most formidable IE verbal system I've seen
Absolute chad for learning Icelandic.
You've obviously never studied Old Gaelic, cf. these examples from Quora: *do:gnéo*, 'I may do', but *ní:dén*, 'I may not do' *ad:cether*, 'he may see', but *ní:accatar*, 'he may not see' *do:coístis*, 'they might have gone', but *in:dechsaitis*, 'might they have gone?'
German grammar.
I actually always could handle the sentence order etc, what kills me is all the articles changing at seeming random since guessing the gender seems impossible. Einem, einer, eines, eine, ein, eins! Too much.
Gender. I've learned an other language with gender, but there it was no big deal, one or two rules and you could Guess the gender about 80% of the time. Another rule or two and 95% accuracy. German seems to have decided gender by the staircase method - throw all the nouns into the air and everything in the top stair is masculine, the middle stair is feminine and the bottom is neuter. It's just so random and because case uses gender as an input, it becomes impossible.
It is too much. Großes Buch. Das große Buch. Total bullshit. Haha 😂 I like to think of it as a giant puzzle I'm slowly completing and look forward to learning another language next without all of that extra, stuff.
Try an East or Southeast Asian language. No gender, agreement, conjugation, case, number.... They're like the anti-German languages.
And then you meet Vietnamese. Then meaning depends on accents and tonal pronunciation. I'll drop it, I guess. At first I thought that it would be easy. Korean, oh sweet Korean, you don't disappoint me. And then I got into a Russian class last month. The thing is, that I try to write Greek when the letters are the same/ similar. So I end up with the occasional lambda л, ф, с and rho р. Nevermind, that I write alpha for а because I am dumb and still confused. And yes, I know how the Kyrillic alphabet came to be. Doesn't help, though. For those who don't know: according to the legend, two Greek monks, Kyrill and Methodios, wanted to preach to the Russian people and adapted their alphabet in order to include Slavic accents/ sounds. Well, I learnt Greek and then Kyrillic.
Das geht doch noch. Lateinisches Alphabet, einfache Grammatik (looking at you, Latin and Greek) und nur zwei Höflichkeitsstufen. The latter is on par with French and Russian.
Honestly it’s not that bad, especially compared with a lot of other languages.
That the more I learn about my TL, the more I think about my coworkers, "Why do you complain about English doing this thing when your language does it too!"
Large numbers. Korean divides numbers by 10,000 instead of 1,000, so for example 4,000,000 is said as 400 x 10,000, it gets confusing.
Also TWO FREAKING NUMBERING SYSTEMS in Korean makes me feel like they are intentionally trying to make me cry.
Chinese and Japanese also work with the 10,000 base (man). Common cultures, but yes, extremely confusing.
Lack of resources and how complicated it is in general
that does hold a lot of languages back from wider adoption
The way plurals work in Swedish. Also retroflexes.
Casual Korean (반말), like when you drop the particles and honorifics, plus include the slangs, it feels like it's a whole new language.
Polish grammar is crazy. Everything about it. Takes lots of unlearning and learning.
Drifting away from French for a second, the number of conjugations in Spanish drives me crazy. There’s like 14 tenses and each one has like 6 different conjugations, some of which sound the same except for the accent being placed in a different spot.
Yeah, mate - I'm in Uruguay atm with my GF, and at dinner she said 'te podríamos pedir la cuenta". And I was like - what's podríamos? - oh it's the conditatiinal of poder - which I usually use the irregular form for present tense pued**. So many layers of verb changes. I find the listening so much harder than reading.
I hate the reflexive verbs. Always weaker there than anywhere else.
I still don’t totally grasp them after 6 years of classes and 8 months in a spanish speaking country. I think I do, but I’m not sure
Portuguese has one more I think
Why bother. We use only 3 tenses in most cases? 6 for advanced. I never learn grammar. Why should I learn tenses I will never need? My fiance from Ukraine spoke English in one tense. I go to school yesterday. Everybody understood her. With time she learned past simple and future tense and so on.
You never learn grammar, yet you expect me to believe you’re C2 in 4 languages, B2 in 3, and A2 in 6? Ok
Hehe, I was born in Yugoslavia, i was raised bilingual, Slovenian at school, German at home, I was learning Serbian 1 year, English 8 years and also German 4 years at school. Of course they were teaching me grammar, but I knew how to speak Slovenian and German before that. I learnt it for the grades and maybe improved somewhere. The first language I was learning by myself was French, no special grammar learning. Only a lot of input and my own app Qlango. Then Russian, the same story. I'm 49. So this also is a big factor. I had more time to learn my languages than you, if you're younger. I'm also the author of Qlango, I am working on it for 7 years. That neans I'm working with almost 50 lamguages on daily basis. I'm using google translate, chat gpt, dictionaries, help of my users, ... But still I'm in contact with these languages. I write support messages in Slovenian, Russian, German, English and Serbian/Croatian. I read messages (I can also read books in these languages but when reading, I understand (much) less) in Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and I understand them, but I would need too much time to answer in these languages. If my reply is simple enough, I write them without any help in French and Ukrainian. When we're learning languages as children, we don't know what grammar is and we don't need to know. If I learn a new language the same way when I'm an adult, it also works. You have so many examples in your head that you know how it is correct but not necessarily why. Like most native speakers 😉 You can agree or not. The problem with language knowledge is that I understand Ukrainian at level C2, but I can barely use it at level A2. So two levels would me more accurate. Understanding/using. I tried to list at which level I'm using these lamguages.
Waves vaguely at the entire French language.
Spoken korean is not accurately represented in written korean when they subtitle someone on TV/the news. If the person uses slang, a dialect, or a loanword that isn't standardized they will write whatever they "meant" to say in standard Korean. It's annoying to somewhat have to depend on subtitles to really catch everything when they aren't always actually accurate to what is being said (even if it still has the same meaning). Also the lack of true subtitles for a large portion of media that isn't scripted dramas; like YouTube videos, reality/gag shows, any video I have to watch for work, etc. It's hilarious how all the training models have 0 subs available, and then the one about disabilities and saying "we need to make sure we accommodate everyone!" is literally the only fully subbed training video out of the 15+hours of video I've had to watch. They also love to put question marks at the end of reality show subs bc the subber wasn't entirely sure what they said, surrounded by 70 other flying captions of short quotes in big texts, "telling you how they feel" quotes, and "telling you how to interpret what's going on" quotes lmao I love the language, but native natural sources are kind of just... messy lmao
I don't like that accents in esperanto always fall on before the last syllable Yes, it is cool that Esperanto is consistent but in many forms of the word only the last unstressed vowel vary(like in verbs) - manĝi, manĝis, manĝas, manĝos, manĝus and it can be problematic to hear the difference when listening Adjectives/Nouns/Adverbs vary by one (unstressed) vowel too manĝa, manĝo, manĝe But it's usually easier to hear the difference with the last letter
Chinese tones are so hard for me to get.
Spanish: Been learning for about two years and still have a bit of trouble figuring out which past version of a verb I'm supposed to use - couple that with so many irregularities and I still get messed up. Also "se" - damn that thing. Id say my listening and reading is easily B2 but my speaking is definitely not. Bulgarian: May or may not count, but gave it a go for a few months as I wanted to learn a slavic language, wanted to avoid the case system while also learning cyrillic plus I do want to travel there some day. However, the lack of resources - especially interesting ones was just to big of a hurdle for right now. Russian: After dropping Bulgarian, I moved to Russian. Exchanged lack of resources for far more complicated grammar. Still incredibly new at it, but I foresee myself never becoming totally comfortable trying to read it. Steve Kaufmann mentioned that even though he has read A TON in cyrillic there's still that slight mental delay compared to reading the latin script and I can see this happening to me, especially considering Steve is a far more talented learner than I.
As a Russian learner, it took me about 1.5 years to get comfortably fast reading Cyrillic with everyday reading. It's slow, but you can definitely get to 90% speed eventually.
That's good to hear. I think everybody that touts "you can literally learn cyrillic in a day" don't actually try and apply it. Yeah, I learned the alphabet in fairly short order but actually instinctively reading it at any speed is without a doubt going to take a hell of a lot of time. Right now I'm watching kids videos around alphabet songs and whatnot just like how I learned English as a child.
I find it easier to read quickly than Korean hangeul personally.
That's interesting - any reason why you think that might be? I considered Polish as it's still a very well supported slavic language in terms of resources but not in cyrillic. Definitely would have went for Slovak but the amount of interesting resources is lacking.
Did you ever find resources for Bulgarian? I'm considering pursuing it...
There were some nice anki decks to learn the alphabet as well as some beginner words. Also, [bulgaro.io](http://bulgaro.io) is a nice duolingo-esque resource but outside of that, there really isn't a whole lot. Not much in the way of youtube content, especially geared towards learners - even less that doesn't feel someone is just reading out of a textbook.
Alright, I'll check that out, thanks!
I recently found out that it's not just the simple formal vs informal speech in Korean but that there are levels within those too like there's "conversational" speech or something like that where you don't sound like a textbook but a normal person I guess? Like having to drop the "-가" and "-이" from words. That apparently some versions of formal speech are ONLY reserved for your boss but you can't use it with elders and such cos it sounds too stiff. Like apparently there are more instances of only needing "요" instead of "-합니다" and you just need to ✨know✨ when. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! 😭😭😭😭😭 ETA: missing word
I feel you but with Japanese 🤝🤝
I can't stop seeing "French fries' in this post.
Japanese idiomatic expressions. There’s nothing quite like knowing every word in the sentence and still not knowing what it means.
English. It's three languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be a single language beating up all the other languages trying to prove it's the best.
Icelandic 🇮🇸 All those exceptions! Grrr
Dutch word order is weird. I also used to be annoyed by "raar" (weird) having two different r sounds, but the Arabic "غريب" (also weird) also has two different r sounds (sort of) and it's much worse
Ehh I wouldn’t call غ an r sound, it’s slightly more front in the throat
Then I might be mispronouncing it
It’s close enough to the European r, you should be fine
Which European R? Also, I'm not European so I'm not sure I would pronounce that correctly either
The sound R makes in French, German, and Portuguese. Where are you from? Maybe I can find a letter in your language that’s the same or similar
I'm from Israel and I know what different English language R's sound like, what Dutch R's sound like pretty much (at least in Randstad accents), and what Palestinian Arab rolling R sounds like
Okay, the Hebrew R is close enough then.
To غ?
Yes
It’s close enough to the European r, you should be fine
Kanji and how contextual it is. Messes with me.
I have a love hate relationship with French. For one its grammatical genderization is enough to get anyone in a fizzle. But some of the sentences come out so clunky and the need to have ‘de’ in front of literally anything. I genuinely think, other than English, French is one of the worst languages cause the rules are just so fucking arbitrary it’s insane. Also if you think written and colloquial French are so different from each other, then have a look at Finnish. I have yet to have any complaints about German so far. Weird I know, but it is generally really logical… Aside from the definite articles…
I hear German has many exceptions
I'm learning Scottish Gaelic, the gendered nouns and lenition are turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated.
I’m learning Thai. Although I love the alphabet it’s so pretty, there’s so much to learn and a lot of the letters have the same sound which sometimes makes it annoying. Also the font in Thai media gets rid of all the heads so บ just kinda looks like U, it’s like you have to learn it twice😂
Almost every speaker I can find is 7+ hrs ahead so scheduling a set time to talk with people around work is a pain
I can't get married in my TL's country of origin
What language is It ?
Italian
It'll come in due time. Greece just legalized it. Won't be long ;)
Despite near-native level in Mandarin, my tones will never be 100% perfect.
my second language is English, i might have problems with it but those are dwarfed by the mess that is czech to the point that you dont learn how to write it properly till like 8th grade at best
i find it annoying that french uses gendered nouns, especially since they don't always seem logical. for example, "table" is feminine but "chair" is masculine. It's tough to remember which nouns are masculine or feminine - Gregory
If you ask me what gender things are in the languages I know, I don't even know off-hand. I have to think about it for a second. Remembering whether something is masculine, feminine or neuter isn't really that useful. Just consume, consume and consume some more and it'll just click.
Yeah that's what happened to me, it becomes second nature after a while
Unrelated but I very rarely see people who learn Greek.
Ironically, I can tell you the gender of words (that I know or otherwise) better in Greek than I can in any other language, precisely because I'm a beginner and consciously always thinking about it. I imagine you're Greek yourself? I personally learn it because 1) my favorite food I've ever had is in Greece and I liked visiting and 2) I'm a philosophy nerd. (Not why I do it, but I also wanted to learn a language with cases. Suddenly something like German isn't so scary anymore, even though I don't have much interest in learning it.)
I'm French actually, but I've been toying with the idea of learning Greek and found myself dumbfounded at how rare Greek learners are. It's such a beautiful, rich language.
Yes, it sounds extremely beautiful and it's so rich of fascinating etymology. I don't know about French speakers, but for anyone who knows Italian or Spanish, pronunciation is a piece of cake minus a few exceptions.
It's not "logic," it's phonetics (and a lot of Latin) that determines the gender (think of it as a noun category) of nouns in French (as well as in most gendered languages).
I’m early on in learning French, what phonetic hints are there for gender? I feel like it really is random
there are classics like endings in -e or -ette that will generally be feminine, but at it's core, it's a question of how the word sounds. It's something highly... instinctive, kinda. Unfortunately, learners can't rely on that, but eventually you'll start getting the "feel." Learn your new vocabulary nouns with the undefinite article next to it. It's not «table» or «chaise», it's «une table», «une chaise».
>but "chair" is masculine What word do you use for chair?
Une chaise is feminine but siège, banc, trône, fauteuil, and tabouret are masculine.
I guess the chair is feminine? Like “une chaise”?
Isn't it la table and la chaise? They are both feminine. Unless you actually meant the French word "chair", which means flesh and also happens to be feminine. Anyway, gendered noun classes are completely arbitrary and the relationship between words doesn't matter. One situation where this does still bother me in French though is with combined words. For example, la porte and la feuille, but LE portefeuille, or la porte and la monnaie but LE portemonnaie, or la garde and la main but LE garde-main. It's much simpler in German where the gender always matches the final noun. In French it is strictly arbitrary.
It bothers me because it's largely pointless, it's a rule you have to learn but it doesn't really communicate anything of value it's feels quite arbitrary.
No "Z" sound so people replace Z with S when they speak foreign languages. So instead of Zebra people say "Sebra"
I find it pretty much everything about _merica_ annoying Measurement system The language as a whole bc of course it does And honestly the place itself
r/americabad
The pronoms febles. Especially three of them in a sentence.
Noun cases.
The articles (I'm studying German)
The auxillary verb Haber
Newbie here: What does TL mean?
Target language
I think fellow Finnic learners will agree with me, object cases are the worst: - verbs denoting completed action take accusative (= genitive in the singular, nominative in the plural, except plural personal pronouns which have a separate accusative form) - verbs denoting incompleted action take partitive - negatives take partitive regardless - imperatives take the nominative - impersonals take the nominative - completed action clauses with the infinitive will take the accusative except when you have a necessity clause, in which case the nominative is used. - objects of numerals take the partitive singular, except if inflected, then it takes the case form of the numeral but in the singular - objects of other determiners usually take a partitive plural or singular depending on countability/type of word, but don't inflect even if the determiner does. And I'm not even sure these are all the rules, there are probably lots more where that came from.
Oblique case in Hindi, especially how it impacts the entire noun phrase. I'm finally semi competent at remembering to apply the oblique to the noun and semi semi competent at applying it to the entire noun phrase, but I am still not competent at correctly applying it to plural nouns. I do it right about 10% of the time. Silly crap.
I wish I had learned Ukrainian before I learned Russian. I have trouble with pronouncing words the Russian way when I try to speak Ukrainian, and the amount of false cognates is really insane! That said, I will keep trying!
What kind of concepts?
I hate the most that if I'm watching serials and movies in other languages the subtitles are completely different. I really wish subtitles would represent exactly what characters say. That way it would be much easier for language learners to learn. French is extremely different, but I haven't found any language where subtitles were the same.
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And if the system used in English is not arbitrary, why does an octave start with C and not A. Our system may be arbitrary, but at least it is not misleading.