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Comment by gnuvince | Hacker News Reader

Native French speaker here, I think going from "I don't know the language" to "I can hold me end in a conversation" is easier in English than in French. French has a richer set of verb tenses, while with English you can go a long way be knowing present, "<present> + ed" and "will + <present>". You also don't need to understand why a chair feminine and an oven is masculine (hint: there is no reason).

One thing I do think French has over English is ease of pronunciation; although not completely regular, most letters have one pronunciation (unless they have an accent, which gives them a different, but clear pronunciation). If you know the phonemes, French gives you a much easier time. Try reading this [1] out loud for kicks. I probably got 90-95% of that right, but even after 15+ years of speaking English, I still got caught by a few words.

[1] http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...

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I was having the same expectation in French, hoping to survive with only present, passé composé, future proche and "en train de" and avoid more complex things :) And it will probably be enough, if I'd master them, but I still don't remember tons of verbs, words and the pronunciation, oh my god.. As an Italian it shouldn't be that difficult, many things are almost the same, and in some situation it is (e.g. reading it) but the pronunciation is not easy and false friends are everywhere, so most of the time I don't know if I'm saying something that is sort-of French or I'm just mimicking French by removing some vowels and consonants here and there from Italian words...

To be fair, the reason why only 90% of English speakers would get every word in that poem right is because there's a lot of very uncommon words in there. 'Sward' or 'phlegmatic' are not things I've ever heard used in casual conversation. I'm pretty well read, but I have never heard of Terpsichore before today. Similarly, Arkansas is an American peculiarism - I wouldn't expect a non-American to get that one right, same with Islington being a UK peculiarism. Probably should have left names out of the poem, because names have a ridiculously wide allowance for pronunciation.

It's also interesting that the poem writer has a particular accent: Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Where I live, grieve and sieve rhyme, and neither rhyme with any verson of 'live' (though they do rhyme with 'leave'...). To me, sieve is 'seev', to the author, it's 'siv'.

The poem is very, very well put-together, but I think that the uncommon words and names should have been left out - the rest of the words (most of them) are pretty common, and most native English speakers that occasionally pick up a book should be able to get them.

The problem is that lack of diacritics - I was travelling through Vietnam and found it funny that they used so many diacritics where English needed none... then I realised English definitely needs them - for example, how do you pronounce 'wind'? It depends on context. If you're talking about air movement, it's pronounced differently to rolling something up on a spool...

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