Monolinugal people thinking that the pronounciation of some rare words is the big issue when learning languages...
Dude, try memorizing the correct grammatical gender for every single noun or every single exception to regular declinations. And that's just for a medium-difficulty language like German.
You know how there's simple English versions of news articles? The same thing exists with German. And the language in these Simple German articles is more difficult than the regular English version.
English is THE easy mode language of the world, which is why e.g. pretty much anyone in Europe defaults to it if they are speaking to anyone who speaks a different native language. Like, if someone from Austria speaks with someone from Ukraine, they will use English.
The term, yacht, originates from the Dutch word jacht (pl.jachten), which means "hunt", and originally referred to light, fast sailing vessels that the Dutch Republic navy used to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries.
I'm so glad that fucking was censored (although not really at all censored, since I can clearly still see the word), I would have been offended if it wasn't.
That's because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question "when you boat go water?" is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.
Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn't incentivise you to learn. It's something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.
I think people from places that use idiographic languages that have to be transliterated probably actually have an easier time with English orthography than people whose language uses a Roman script and is pronounced phonetically. People who are used to puzzling through the layer of abstraction/obfuscation that sometimes ambiguous transliterations will have can see that English orthography is almost always substantially different than its pronunciation.
TL;DR: it's easier for a Chinese person to learn to read English aloud than a person from Romania, but the European would have studied it in school either somewhat or a lot
Welcome to mandarin.
How many ways can you write the same sound?
The answer is yes.
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
When I learned that the proper pronunciation of the word queue is basically a letter q followed by a bunch of silent letters, I had to take a break for a while. I enjoy the sound of English language, so that kept me going afterwards, but I am still salty.
I can hear a word in Spanish and immediately know how to spell it. I can read a word in Spanish and know how to pronounce it. We can only dream of doing that in English.
As a person who learned English as an adult, u can tell you that the word that gave me the most trouble early on was "weather". I mean these sounds are impossible!!
I was gonna mention the silent k, h, e but then I remember french. They have like 50% silent letters at random. I remember how flabbergasted I was to see millefeuille written the first time.
As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"
Not exclusive to English, but English definitely has a ton of things that just follow no pattern (even by root language, though if you know that, when it was borrowed in, and what vowel shifts it did/not have, you might have a chance).
This did immediately make me think of "Simone Giertz" from Sweeden whose name's pronunciation sounded like 'yecht' to me.
I remember when I was a kid and we started learning foreign languages in school. My class got divided into two halves, ones that study English and other that study German. Few month later I was walking down the street with my classmate and he went like:
Oh, so you're studying English, huh? What does DUHR mean?
What?
DUHRR
Oh, you mean door? It's spelled do-o.
Bro, there's an R in there and two O's. DUHR. Even I know that, and I'm not even the one studying English. If door was do-o, then would you spell TOH DOH as "to do"?
Little did the bro know... I hope he at least got German well enough, AFAIK there's little bullshit like that