• hansl@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Yes! I’ve made that comment a lot; French is easier to learn than English because you only need to learn how to pronounce syllables, while in English you have to learn every single word. It’s insane.

    • isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of … English, but omfg did it not gel with me.

      • Gork@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah the general lack of gendered nouns is one of English’s better traits, even if most of our words are bastardized words from other languages.

      • yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.

        When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.

        It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.

        You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.

        • isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah. It’s funny because I am learning Danish eight now and it makes infinitely more sense than French ever did but I think it’s because, at least to me, it’s much closer to English and a lot of it is “well we do it just cause?” and my brain is like “oh cool great! I know how to cope with that”.

          Whereas learning something that is so structured like German/French it feels very overwhelming I guess in that sense. I don’t feel like I have to think about Danish because it feels very ‘normal’.

    • yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Lol. Spoken and written French are so different they’re basically two different languages…

      • Jomn@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        French is still pretty consistent once you know the syllables. If you give me a word I don’t know, I’ll still be able to pronounce it correctly. You can’t expect that with English.

      • magikmw@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        As a two year Duolingo slave I can attest french is in fact 3 languages in a coat.

        There’s written french, official spoken french and then the soup everyone speaks because nobody cares about proper speech rules.