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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written.

English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time.

(Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)

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> English is such a turd language.

I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)

Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.

Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].

It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.

That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.

1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.

2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiK5BWmKSqE

English is a language borne out of centuries of diversity. Its turdness is its strength.

You’re giving the original poster too much credit. He’s just straight up being racist. If he heard Singaporean English m, ai lah this ang moh would also call it incomprehensible.

> He’s just straight up being racist.

I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult.

> Singaporean English

I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.

English is the simplest Latin based language. This has nothing to do with pronunciation but not even knowing basic words. Or how to communicate. Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated. The Indian English Education system is the same one the Japanese and Koreans use. And they don't know English. The reality is it's like if you learned Spanish in middle school to highschool. That's the average English proficency. Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use. It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages).

It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules.

So, at least by that measure, English is far from being the simplest.

> It's not clear how you measure simplicity

Compared with other european languages the english grammar is much simpler and the number of words needed to communicate is also not so high.

Compared with German, it's complicated. German has only "Past Perfect" and "Past simple" tenses.

English has at least 4.

Whilst it uses a lot of Latin words (mostly via French), English is actually a Germanic language.

I know it comes from the Angles of Angaland.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.

A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).

I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.

It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

There are people who measure language difficulty. The uS state department does it from a US perspective but I’ve seen others

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

Well, I learned it by watching HBO, so it can't be that hard...

Congrats! That's awesome.

Pronunciation and orthography vary in many cases, not simple at all. Unless you already come from a germanic language, then it's relatively easy.

English grammar is very simple to learn if you come from a Germanic language, but I think English pronunciation and orthography is a mystery to all of us.

Even if you know the origins of the word, you still have to guess: facade is pronounced correctly, but the pronunciation of Uranus was apparently left up to a 5-year old to decide. Kindergarten and doppelganger are pronounced the German way, angst and flak aren't. The non-loanwords are somehow as inconsistent, after pronunciation changed but the spelling was preserved (and the other way around). For an unknown word you can come up with reasonable guesses, but they might be totally wrong. The only thing that makes us good English speakers is extensive exposure to English media.

Coming from another Germanic language helps you deal with pronunciation and orthography varying in English?

What's the relationship?

You can just speak it in your native way and you will mostly be understood. But the "relatively easy" was to the language as a whole.

> most things are written in the languages they use

Do you know anything about India or are you merely talking out of your ass? This is patently false—nearly all documents are in three languages: English, Hindi and the state’s local language.

What do you mean by Latin based language?

Or what are the other "Latin based languages" that you are comparing it to?

> Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use

What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.

> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated

Where is the data for this?

> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

And where do you get this data from?

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