
English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) - Tomte
http://antirez.com/news/61
======
irrational
Growing up, speaking US English natively, I never realized how messed up
English is. Then I learned Spanish (and lived in a Spanish speaking country
for 2 years). Wow. Now that is a sane language. Once you learn the alphabet
and a few pronunciation rules you can read anything in Spanish correctly. Try
doing that with English. Ha!

This has become even more reinforced as I've helped my children learn how to
read English. Trying to explain to a child why a certain word is pronounced
the way it is, even though it looks nothing like how we are pronouncing it,
usually falls back to "that's just the way it is" unless I want to try
explaining to them the niceties of Old French/Latin, Old English, Old
Germanic, the great vowel shift, etc. Eh, that's just the way it's pronounced.

There are so many people who already speak Spanish and it is such a nice sane
language that I think it is a real shame that it did not become the universal
language.

~~~
enriquto
As a native speaker of a romance language, I do not find English particularly
insane. It is quite straightforward as a language. That is, written English is
a sane language, and spoken English is a sane language as well. The problem is
that they are two unrelated languages :)

~~~
mwyah
I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a
deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before. I
can make up a word in Spanish and I know everybody will pronounce it the same
way.

~~~
enriquto
> I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a
> deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before.

I do not understand what do you mean here. In spoken English, the only way to
know about one word is by having heard it, so you know how it is pronounced.
Illiterate people can speak perfectly correct English.

~~~
mwyah
That is exactly my point. If you've never heard a word you can never know how
it's pronounced. That's not the case with Spanish where I can make up a word
and everybody will pronounce it (almost) the same way.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Curiously, Polish is apparently spelled phonetically. Know the sound of the
letters, you can read out a Polish newspaper and sound pretty much like a
native speaker.

~~~
HappySweeney
Same with Hungarian (Magyar). Spelling is over by grade 2.

------
zarro
Contrarian perspective here:

English is not my first language, but I have come to deeply appreciate the
idea of a common language that people share so that we can all work together
regardless of where in the world we are.

Knowing more than one language adds lots of value, because each language
offers different modes of thinking and conception. But also having one common
language adds an insane amount of value, because now you can both win by
having the capability to exchange ideas with people that otherwise might not
happen and the opportunity cost is unpredictable.

(Example - German and Japanese teams use a universal language as a common
language to work together on a groundbreaking energy project. That
collaboration might not have otherwise happened due to language barriers. But
if both parties learn a "Universal language" as a collaborative base, we can
all gain advantage from that product of that win-win scenario. )

~~~
bluGill
I think he agrees: a common language is good. However English is a horrible
choice because it is so difficult.

I'm a native English speaker, even though picking a different language would
be worse for me I still agree English is a bad choice. Maybe if we reform our
spelling we could improve - maybe.

~~~
dredmorbius
What's your suggested alternative?

~~~
bluGill
Spanish. A lot of people speak it already (a big bonus), and the spelling and
grammar are reasonable. However I have no particular attachment to it, so if
you get traction arguing for a different one I'll be fine with that.

~~~
narag
Native here. What most extrangers complain about is verbs. For every verb
there are a hundred forms and most used verbs are irregular, so you need to
learn dozens of exceptional forms. We learn all those when we're children so
it's not painful, for new learners... The rest is very easy, specially
pronuntiation, that is a terrible for English, with so many vowels.

Currently Spanish is the second most spoken language, after Chinese. But
English is still first _second laguage_ for most people.

~~~
mdpye
My experience of learning Spanish as a second language was that there are
actually relatively few true irregularities (e.g. ser), and that most of what
our tutors referred to as "irregular" were actually regular in their
irregularity (e.g. vowel shifts like dormir). I even found after a bit of
exposure, I could guess which verbs would take which vowel shifts fairly
accurately.

And there are, what, ~16 verb tenses, ~8 of which are compound (ancillary
verb+participle: easy to learn) and several are very rare in common discourse.

Personally,if I had to pick a universal language based on how easy it is to
learn, I'd definitely pick Spanish!

~~~
narag
Only two are obsolete, the other 14 are commonly used. Oh, and there are two
with a second optional form to compensate :)

In English it's mostly done with mandatory pronouns and ancillary verbs (have,
should, will) and only present tense is different for third person, everything
else is just the same. Of course the pronuntiation and the phrasal verbs ruin
the party.

You must be very proficient already, so you don't realize how many irregular
verbs there are. I won (ex aequo) a competition at school and it was _very_
hard. _Ser_ (to be) is specially pathological, stealing from _ir_ (to go) half
its conjugation, but hardly the only common irregular verb: have, go, say,
walk, want, put, know...

------
gpderetta
As an Italian programmer working and living in the UK for the last 10 and
counting years, I can feel the pain.

I'm at the point that I can have a technical conversation with all my
colleagues without issues, but when moving to more mundane subjects, I have
difficulties following the conversation. As many, I have learned most of my
English vocabulary by reading (I'm at the point that I can read a book written
in English as well as an Italian book, and I vastly prefer to read in the
original language when I can), but that means that I do not know the
pronunciation of most of the words.

Also when going out of London (where 50% of the population is not native and
the natives, especially in professional environments, are used to deal with us
non natives), I really have an hard time understanding the various accents.

~~~
lexapro
How were you able to avoid watching countless hours of English video content
(youtube, netflix, news...)? That's how I learned listening/speaking
(American) English.

~~~
hsivonen
If you are in Italy, Netflix, like TV has dubbed American content.

In that regard, there isn't a single European non-native English experience
but the non-native experience is split between dubbing culture and subtitling
culture.

------
sampo
Funny thing: In my experience people with English as a foreign language all
have a pretty much a common subset, the operational part of the English
language. We non-natives also have an instinctual understanding which words
and structures are more "advanced" and we can tone our language down to
simpler structures when we feel that the audience needs it.

In effect, non-natives are good at communicating in English with other non-
natives.

Whereas native English speakers occasionally mix in "difficult" words and
grammar, thus making themselves less understood in the company of non-natives.
Additionally, while most American accents are easy, many British accents range
difficult to really difficult to understand, even for someone who's spent
decades in international teams speaking English, but mostly with non-British.

I remember one workshop, listening to talks by Chinese, Finnish, German,
Indian, Russian, Swedish etc. speakers. The one native British presenter was
the only one with whose talk I really had to concentrate, and maybe I missed
some of the details.

This can put native speakers (especially those with difficult British accents)
to a disadvantage in international teams. People will not understand
everything they say, but will probably be too shy to ask for clarification.

[https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-
english...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-english-
speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators)

[https://www.ft.com/content/26692848-f59b-11e5-96db-
fc683b5e5...](https://www.ft.com/content/26692848-f59b-11e5-96db-fc683b5e52db)

------
awayyyythrow
I'm relatively comfortable with the English language but I absolutely loathe
having to use it every single day. Whether it's the bland style found in
newspapers, the opaque style found in scientific articles, the fake
let's-pretend-we're-best-friends used by some technologists and younger
journalists, or the long-winded and contrived style used by most of HN and
reddit and technical blogs in general, all of it turns me off. (No offense,
folks, I'm sure I'm no Joyce either.)

I guess it wouldn't annoy me so much if my job and social circles (many of
them involving foreigners who don't speak my native language) didn't require
me to consume so much of it. There's so much subtlety, nuance and "color"
that's lost in a conversation where both participants aren't speaking in their
native language. Even if both are relatively good at it.

Then there's the issue of native English speakers who seem to be only very
dimly aware that other languages exist and think that everyone speaking their
language fluently is a given. (This shapes a lot of current politics, such as
language policing or the whole 'pronouns' issue - I'm mentioning it because
antirez was the center of a controversy for not changing terminology that's
loaded _for Americans only_ ). And many native speakers think the less of
people who struggle with English, even unconsciously.

~~~
bonoboTP
> This shapes a lot of current politics, such as language policing or the
> whole 'pronouns' issue

And then there are languages entirely without any concept of grammatical
gender or gendered pronouns, such as my native Hungarian. So the controversy
doesn't carry over easily to Hungary, at least not in the same form. Of course
someone may explicitly use words like "woman" or "boy" in the unpreferred way,
but you don't have spend extra effort to be neutral/ambiguous. This also makes
translation quite difficult, when a writer relies a lot on he/she to mark who
is speaking in a conversation between a man and a woman. In such cases the
translator has to sprinkle in the names to better keep track of who's
speaking.

------
jimktrains2
Even as a native speaker English spelling is hard. I was working on reading
with my son last night and hit the word "love". Pause, and think about that
word and its pronunciation. Well, he starts la-a-v-eh, and I correct him "the
e at the end isn't pronounced", and later we get to 'make', ma-ah-k, Mac!, And
I tell him, "no, this word has a long a, Ā, eh, because...of the e at the end"
-_-, "but only sometimes."

Then we hit 'night'. Ni-eye-ga..."no, no", I say, "gh" in the middle of a word
isn't pronounced. Luckily the book didn't have "though" and "thought" in it.

English pronunciation and spelling are basically no more related than second
cousins at this point. I can't imagine having to learn to pronounce it simply
by reading it.

That's only the German bit of the language, the French bit is subtly
different, and then the Greek bits work just a little bit differently as well.

Then there are native American loan words, usually as place names, that
weren't regularized (or maybe they were but aren't anymore?). Is there another
word with a gh pronounced like the first pair in Youghiogheny (j ɒ k ə ˈ ɡ eɪ
n i)(yock-a-gain-y)? I think it's probably via Scottish? But I'm not sure.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Blame Daniel Webster for 'formalizing' spelling with his dictionary a century
ago. Froze spellings in time while pronunciation continued to change.

~~~
jhbadger
Noah Webster -- Daniel was a politician. And to be fair, Noah did improve
quite a lot of spellings -- that's why the US spells things like "plough" and
"gaol" as "plow" and "jail".

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Thanks! My elementary school learnin' is fast fading away.

------
akl_bh
I had problems visualising things, when reading it in English. Many years ago,
when I started working on enterprise applications, I would come across terms
like "Provider" which I would read about and then forget. I guess I could not
make simple connection between the technical term "Provider" and the real word
abstract noun. This made understanding simple design patterns or abstractions
harder. A lot of times when you know the literal meaning of a technical word
and can visualize it in your head, understanding the related concept becomes a
lot easier.

------
haolez
In college, some friends and I learned a little bit of Esperanto just for the
sake of it. It was amazing how fast we learned it and were able to have simple
conversations.

However, it’s a mainstream idea that artificial languages are always going to
fail because geographically separated people will create dialects and “ruin”
the language. It’s a bummer, because Esperanto is really useful (and there
might be other artificial languages even better!).

~~~
elldoubleyew
Did the same in thing in college but with Toki Pona. Think Esperanto but even
more stripped down to under 200 words that you combine to express ideas. If
you work hard at it, you can reach an intermediate level over a weekend. My
roommates and I exclusively used Toki Pona for about a month and I would say
we all became very comfortable in the language.

------
big_chungus
> NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound.

Would that I had learned this earlier. Native english speaker, but I grew up
reading voraciously from quite a young age. This meant that though I got a big
vocabulary and context as to the appropriate uses of a word, I would have
difficulty pronouncing them and often come up with something completely wrong.
I'd go and look words up in the dictionary, as taught by my parents.
Unfortunately, I was not aware of the meaning of the IPA symbols, let alone
how to decipher them; they looked to me as foreign script might to another. It
was rather amusing for friends and family, but rather humiliating for me.

~~~
Wildgoose
On the contrary. Mispronouncing a word shows that you learned it through
reading and that is to be celebrated, not mocked. You should simply
acknowledge this fact and make it a badge of pride.

~~~
lozzo
Well said. I am not english but I get by but I struggled when recently used
the word "chasm". I pronounced the 'cha' as in chat. Oh boy, was I wrong. So
eventually, after spelling it out my listener got me. She is my wife and she
smiled. She knew I had learnt it through reading.

------
scoutt
I speak/write ~english, ~italian and spanish, and if I have to arrange them by
'coherence' it would be english-spanish-italian.

>> Italian is phonetically one of the simplest languages on the earth

The fundamental importance of the double-consonant and its pronunciation is
very difficult for non-italians. Same goes for V and B sound differences.

I agree that English for an Italian is a nightmare. Did you know that Italians
can't pronounce the english 'H'? Like in 'hate' they will pronounce 'ate'?
That's for starters. You can guess some text was written by an italian if you
find something like "that task is __an __hassle ".

Spanish is as difficult as Italian, but it has more rules that are useful when
reading/writing (Italians: if I don't know how Modena and Milano are
pronounced, where do I put the accent?), but spanish has also a lot of
exceptions that are difficult to learn and remember.

English is perfect for tech stuff. Short, concise and clear.

~~~
arcturus17
> English is perfect for tech stuff. Short, concise and clear.

As a Spaniard who's also fluent in French, I agree that it's the best of
technical lingua franca of the three. Like the article says, the most
convoluted part about English is its pronunciation ("lead" as in leading a
team vs. "lead" as in the metal - WTF?), but otherwise I'd say it's easier
than Romance languages.

A very interesting conversation has ensued in the comments of the article,
where some Esperanto speakers claim that it would be the best lingua franca. I
don't have trouble believing that a well-engineered artificial language might
solve many of the problems that natural languages present, but in the latter
category perhaps English is one of the least difficult.

~~~
scoutt
I don't find pronunciation extremely difficult (as spanish has most of the
'sounds' already), but in most cases, as the word 'lead', can be parsed easily
according to context.

What infuriates me the most of the english language is phrasal verbs. There is
no rule and no context-parsing, and can mean completely different things.

------
gorbachev
I picked up a hobby about a year ago that has distinct regional differences
around the world with people in different regions doing things quite
differently and communicating almost exclusively in their own languages.

There's enough commonality that you can follow things, but it's pretty hard to
understand the specifics if you don't speak the same language.

I've been using Google Translate to bridge the gap and while the translations
miss all kinds of things, it's close enough that I can understand the
important things and am able to even participate, though not at the level I
can in English.

There are people saying that there are essentially multiple Internets, split
by language barriers. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that argument, other
than it kinda made sense to me, but my personal experience through my hobby
definitely made me realize it's most definitely true.

------
lentil_soup
I don't think it is only English, I find this happens with native speakers of
other languages as well. They fail to accommodate their language to fit the
people listening to them.

I always wonder what it is that prevents people from switching to a more
standard version of the language, is it not obvious the message is getting
lost? is it some sort of pride in the accent? lack exposure to foreigners?.
I've experienced this many times in Spanish, English and German.

~~~
turbinerneiter
Because it's hard. You sound all wrong to yourself. Maybe it's an uncanny
valley thing.

~~~
nmeofthestate
Yep, and talking more slowly with more simplistic language can feel
"patronising" to the listener, which is dumb really, because it's being
considerate to them.

------
Yuval_Halevi
One of the best things I did that boosted my English level was playing WOW at
a young age.

------
sajithdilshan
I though English was difficult until I had to learn German

~~~
bryanrasmussen
They're closely related - like your two uncles, the German is a strict
disciplinarian that it is hard not to find offputting, the English is quite
enjoyable and chummy, but erratic, whimsical, and so apt to go off on flights
of fancy that after an enjoyable conversation you are not sure what was really
said.

There has never been an enjoyable conversation with the German uncle.

on edit: damn these English typos!

~~~
sajithdilshan
German might be a strict disciplinarian, but mostly illogical when it comes to

* Articles (Der, Die, Das) which you need to know correctly in order to form a correct sentence with nominative, akkusative and dative objects. * Plural of the nouns (maybe after a while you would get a feeling of it, but not as easy as adding an 's' to the end of the noun like English)

You just have to remember a lot of stuff :-(

------
galfarragem
Knowing a language is not just being able to read/write but to be able to
talk. It's a completely different level: you pass from 'turn based' to 'real
time'. To learn languages nothing beats immersion and is even more difficult
when you lean toward introvertion. You don't need perfect grammar but you do
need to be able to "tame" the language.

~~~
UserIsUnused
It's not about real time, is more about sound, lot's of people are not used to
the sound of words, and if you are from a place whose native language
pronounces the letters very differently, you won't adapt easy. It's not
timing, as people's brain might even change to english as base when writing
and it's immediate, not translating, but when you can't understand well the
sounds, than conversations go south really fast.

~~~
pfortuny
Yes, you are right.

But that can be learnt. Studying phonetics, despite its theoretical aspect, is
essential to know how to pronounce but, also (and most importantly), what
sounds to expect. Only when you try and make them do you realize what you
should be "expecting to hear". Otherwise, sound becomes simple noise.

Accents are, of course, an aggravant and a difficulty: for this you need
exposure.

------
lolc
I have gained some fluency in three foreign languages and I can now say I'm
not surprised by the long tail anymore. Gendered nouns or inconsistent
prepositions are only the start of it. If you get angry at arcane
pronounciation rules, what are you going to make of the huge body of phrases
found in every language? Learning any language well takes a lot of effort. And
initial tribulations like pronounciation don't affect the overall effort much.

The international version of English is shaping up even without a governing
body. And I do expect children in traditionally English-speaking countries
having to take classes in it to make themselves understood. It would be nice
if some warts could be removed in the process. But no authority with enough
pull exists. We'd need a WEO setting standards and nobody wants that badly
enough.

------
golergka
One advantage that English certainly has is a very rigid, predictable sentence
structure. I come from Russian - a language where words can be rearranged in
many possible orders while being not only grammatically correct but also
stylistically valid (also with slightly different accents and meaning). The
fact that putting words in different order is just a mistake (and not
originality) was completely alien to me, but now I enjoy it a lot, because it
makes the language so much easier.

And prononcuation of English is, of course, a special hell - but one that you
very quickly get over with, once you start systematically watch movies and tv
series with subtitles instead of dubs. And what other language has as much
movies, tv series, music and videogames other than English, through the whole
20th century and up to this point?

------
arijun
I'm someone who's experienced the reverse issue--I'm a native English speaker
who's moved to a non-English speaking country. Interestingly, in the tech
scene here anything written is still done in English, to the point where
people will give lectures in the local language using English slides.

I'd echo a lot of the sentiment antirez has; it's harder for me to be my
extroverted self here, and reading complicated documents is hard enough that I
often ask someone else to translate them to English. But I expect those issues
to go away after a while of living here.

I think that the key to solving these language problems is exposure. Many
Scandinavians that I've met attribute their countries' strong grasp of English
to not having dubbed movies--they _have_ to watch it in English with
subtitles.

------
anotherevan
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English
is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on
occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

— James Nicoll

------
tom_mellior
> The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues
> communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically.

Is this a fact? I wasn't under the impression that there is a general problem
of communication among UK/US/Canada/Australia people. Maybe with some of the
more extreme Scottish accents? Or former African colonies with very thick
accents?

In any case, the comparison with Italian is moot if the issue is with
foreigners learning the language. It's great if all Italians understand each
other's accents, but this doesn't say anything about whether learners of
"school Italian" understand Sicilians. Or whether foreign learners of the
"school dialect" of German would understand my Eastern Austrian.

------
Tade0
I spent four years in Italy and during my time there I found that I could
speak very simple, yet passable Italian just by substituting English words for
Italian ones - from an eastern-European perspective up to a certain level the
grammar was pretty much the same.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Italians in general were hesitant
to speak English, with the notable exception of my 74 year old neighbour, who
picked up some phrases specifically to communicate with me.

Some of my friends back in Poland often express frustration with the fact that
they had to learn English, since they don't see it as something strictly
related to their work.

------
DictumMortuum
Native greek speaker. Learned english before becoming an adult, as most people
do here, because the greek language is mostly useless if you are doing
business with foreign parties (e.g. tourism or multinational companies).
Learned italian as an adult. I agree with antirez that pronunciation isn't
difficult, but there are some challenges to a non-native speaker.

------
nmeofthestate
The writer ends with

>My long term hope is that soon or later different accents could converge into
a standard easy-to-understand one that the English speaking population could
use as a lingua franca.

I suspect the opposite has happened and will happen.

When populations become fluent in English they decide that their accent is a
valid way of speaking English, so stay hard to understand to other
populations.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I dunno, we already have a concept of Stage Voice (or Youtube Voice), where
the accent spoken is different than the speaker's native accent for the
purpose of being more widely understandable. It doesn't seem such a stretch to
suggest that English settle on one accent to serve this purpose in every day
life as well. And hey, learning a new accent is significantly easier than
learning a new language.

~~~
nmeofthestate
Maybe this is a specifically English thing, and not an issue in your native
language (assuming you're not a native English speaker), but the idea of
putting on an accent carries a LOT of baggage.

I think it happens to the extent that people will sometimes tailor/'round off'
their accent and vocabulary depending on context. But people are attached to
their accents - it's part of who they are - and having to put on somebody
else's accent in certain contexts is not something that most people would be
okay with. The idea that, for example, I would affect a, say, American accent
if I was making YT videos, is completely crazy. Let alone in everyday life.

------
dang
A thread from 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10641246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10641246)

Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314628)

