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Language difficulty rankings (Europe) for an English speaker[W:165]

You're referring to phrases typically used in AAVE. And just so ya know, AAVE is a completely grammatical dialect of English, and there is nothing wrong or sloppy about it. It just doesn't function in exactly the same way as SAE. All dialects are different. It's always fashionable to throw stones at the dialects of the "lower classes," but linguistically, it is just as developed as any other form of the language.

Keep in mind English itself was once a peasant's language too lowly for the ruling class to bother with. That's why all of our military jargon is French.

AAVE? I'm not familiar with that term. What's it mean? Oh yeah, another is right. My autocorrect is broken so it happens.
 
Talking about pronunciation, I think french is the easiest one.

Like French, Germans words you only need to read to know how to pronounce them. But unlike French, there are way too many way to write a sound you have to memorize.

Talking about grammar. English and French are very easy to learn. English because there are less rules and French because it is very logic. German has also a very logic grammar so it is not difficult to learn them, but there are way too many rules that takes longer memorize and remember how they work together.

Talking about writing I think French is the easiest one. I have problems with writing even in my own native language that is Portuguese, but I never had problems writing in French.
 
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Interesting. I would however not say that Arabic is hard to learn.. should be put in the same category as eastern European languages and Greek. Once you master the letters, then you have gone a long way.. and it is mastering the letters that is the problem.

I like that German is its own category.. German is a funny language, with its sentence structure.
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I don't know about Arabic writing and grammar, but it seems to me that Arabic is much harder to pronounce correctly than Eastern European Languages. I can't do the Arabic "R".
 
Why? There are likely even more regional dialects, accents and vernaculars in Britain than there are anywhere else in Europe.


No, I think Italy holds pride of place. But even Sweden with its mere 10 million, has a wide range of regional accents. Though some have become blurred my wife can usually tell the origin of most people by their voices. Even I have a few distinctive Uppland pronunciations.
 
The chart is messed up. It has most of Great Britain and Ireland classified as 0 when some sections should be at least X, I mean have you ever walked around London or Glasgow?
 
Talking about pronunciation, I think french is the easiest one.

Really? The French habit of having silent letters at the end of words that precede a word beginning with a consonant made pronunciation tricky for me.
 
It was a joke but American English changes things both in pronunciation and spelling that differs from the rest of the rest of the English speaking world.

You mean like calling something liberal that would be the opposite anywhere else?
 
No, I think Italy holds pride of place. But even Sweden with its mere 10 million, has a wide range of regional accents. Though some have become blurred my wife can usually tell the origin of most people by their voices. Even I have a few distinctive Uppland pronunciations.

Same in Germany. I can place most people to their area of origin and often hear that they have lived in other towns. I’m not as proficient with East German sounds. There I find I haven’t had enough practice and can only pinpoint the Leipzig vs Dresden or Berlin but not between towns closer together. It is most challenging in areas bordering foreign countries. The language changes village by village on both sides as the two mutate into each other.


But you can often pull the same trick with foreigners speaking your language to some extent.
 
Interesting. I would however not say that Arabic is hard to learn.. should be put in the same category as eastern European languages and Greek. Once you master the letters, then you have gone a long way.. and it is mastering the letters that is the problem.

I like that German is its own category.. German is a funny language, with its sentence structure.

You seem to be right concerning Arabic. My cousin and his wife learned it rather quickly and said it was much easier that German or French.
 
No, I think Italy holds pride of place. But even Sweden with its mere 10 million, has a wide range of regional accents. Though some have become blurred my wife can usually tell the origin of most people by their voices. Even I have a few distinctive Uppland pronunciations.

Oh, yeah, same thing w/Norge, and the unique geography of fjords separating people into lingusitic differences.

Same thing with CH, where part of my family comes from with it's steep and deep valleys.

"Have you heard how that clown from over the next ridge speaks? Incomprehensible, the peasant!"
 
Really? The French habit of having silent letters at the end of words that precede a word beginning with a consonant made pronunciation tricky for me.

The silent letters at the end of the world has nothing to do with the preceding word (unless if there is a liaison which makes them pronouncing letters).

The rule is very simple. D; P; S; T ; X; Z; are the 6 letters that are silent at the end of the world. There are few exception which are most worlds borrowed from other languages, or proper names.
 
A dead giveaway on how hard English is is the number of people who only know english and have spent their entire life speaking nothing but english yet can't even use their own language properly. And I'm not talking super anal things, I'm talking about people who say "I seen that" or "you don't know nuthin". There's no reason an adult english (as a first language) speaker doesn't know to use the word "saw" or that double negatives are generally frowned upon.

Those are two examples of super anal. Double negatives are exceedingly common in casual English. The idiocy comes from those who try to tell us that a double negative equals a positive.

When Mick Jagger sings that he can't get no satisfaction, he isn't stating that he does get satisfaction.

That is anal and incredibly stupid. Every English speaker, even the anal ones trying to pass off such nonsense knows that a double negative almost never means a positive.

In English speech, in situations like "I seen that", the have/'ve is often virtually unvoiced. It doesn't mean that people don't understand the use of "have-has/'ve-'s + PP, it's simply that as speech speed increases more phonemes get flattened/unvoiced.
 
Those are two examples of super anal. Double negatives are exceedingly common in casual English. The idiocy comes from those who try to tell us that a double negative equals a positive.

When Mick Jagger sings that he can't get no satisfaction, he isn't stating that he does get satisfaction.

That is anal and incredibly stupid. Every English speaker, even the anal ones trying to pass off such nonsense knows that a double negative almost never means a positive.

In English speech, in situations like "I seen that", the have/'ve is often virtually unvoiced. It doesn't mean that people don't understand the use of "have-has/'ve-'s + PP, it's simply that as speech speed increases more phonemes get flattened/unvoiced.

So you think it's acceptable to use double negatives...and I'm the stupid one?
 
Edit - English is pretty cool, I must admit. Find me aother language where you can use the same word 4 times in a row in a sentence without it being absolute nonsense.
Lol.
Reminded me of this:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity and the usage of homophony and homonymy. Equivalent would be: Buffalo from Buffalo whom other buffalo from Buffalo bully [themselves] bully buffalo from Buffalo.
 
So you think it's acceptable to use double negatives...and I'm the stupid one?

I know it's fine to use them in many dialects of English. I know that they are used in all forms of English; Conversation, Fiction, Academic, News.

I know that, with your reply, that you aren't familiar with Corpus Studies or grammars like The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the authors of which point out that the abysmal ignorance of those who don't understand "double negatives".

I know that those who rail against them are ignorant of English grammar when they suggest that double negation means a positive.
 
I know it's fine to use them in many dialects of English. I know that they are used in all forms of English; Conversation, Fiction, Academic, News.

I know that, with your reply, that you aren't familiar with Corpus Studies or grammars like The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the authors of which point out that the abysmal ignorance of those who don't understand "double negatives".

I know that those who rail against them are ignorant of English grammar when they suggest that double negation means a positive.

Do you really, and I mean REALLY think that when i hear a double negative I actually think they mean a positive? Of course not! Doesn't change the fact that it's improper despite your...whatever it is you're doing here.
 
Do you really, and I mean REALLY think that when i hear a double negative I actually think they mean a positive? Of course not! Doesn't change the fact that it's improper despite your...whatever it is you're doing here.

I didn't say you did specifically. I said that has been the prescriptive take on it, which, as you admit, is totally wrong. So if these prescriptive idiots are wrong on the grammatical aspects, might they not be wrong on the language, not to mention the grammar.

You are aware that English has litotes which make use of double negation, are you not?.

"improper" is not a sign of one who does language study, it's a sign of language ignorance. As I said, if you look at corpus studies, you will find that double negation is used in all of English - SPEECH, NEWS, ACAD, FICTION.

And language scientists don't term it "improper" because it isn't. It is informal, like most of our speech but informal never means "improper".
 
I didn't say you did specifically. I said that has been the prescriptive take on it, which, as you admit, is totally wrong. So if these prescriptive idiots are wrong on the grammatical aspects, might they not be wrong on the language, not to mention the grammar.

You are aware that English has litotes which make use of double negation.

"improper" is not a sign of one who does language study, it's a sign of language ignorance. As I said, if you look at corpus studies, you will find that double negation is used in all of English - SPEECH, NEWS, ACAD, FICTION.

And language scientists don't term it "improper" because it isn't. It is informal, like most of our speech but informal never means "improper".

So then at what point does it become improper? Can i just massacre the language and call my hackjobs "informal"?
 
So then at what point does it become improper? Can i just massacre the language and call my hackjobs "informal"?

Yup, you and English language speakers do it all the time, have done it all the time, as do the speakers of other languages. The only way language can change is from the speakers of a language. So, rather than "improper" a better description might be "new", "untested".

We all hear these new things from younger generations which piss off the oldies but that makes no difference to language.

But of course this doesn't apply to double, triple, ... negation. This has been around for a long long time. Many language and dialects make use of multiple negations. English just has adopted other forms. Neither is right and neither is wrong, it's just how certain languages work.

Double negation is fine for informal English just as many other things are fine for informal English.
 
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