Is English the most logical language?

[Feef]

To be fair, he's also (rightly!) using traditional characters, and while I dislike simplified, I do accept that 图书馆 is probably easier to read on a screen if you're unfamiliar than 圖書館

Edit : As for hand written, they may be larger, but good luck figuring anything out if you've not grown up doing it yourself!

 

[FoxEye]

To be fair, he's also (rightly!) using traditional characters, and while I dislike simplified, I do accept that 图书馆 is probably easier to read on a screen if you're unfamiliar than 圖書館

Edit : As for hand written, they may be larger, but good luck figuring anything out if you've not grown up doing it yourself!

Given your last sentence, it must be possibly one of the hardest languages to learn, then? For non-natives looking to learn a language in adulthood? (Everything is so much easier when you're a child...)

 

[Mr Jack]

Update on the apps.

Only Duolingo has let me progress beyond the first few days of lessons without a subscription so that's the one I am using at the moment.

I tried learning some word lists but it had no structure to it so it didn't suit me.

You will never, ever properly learn a language from these apps, or from word lists, or anything similar. At best they'll get you slowly and painfully up to a level where you can actually start learning the language properly. Ditch them. The only way to properly acquire a language is through contextualised input - the same way you learned English. You need to hear the language in context. Watch YouTube videos, films, cartoons, etc. in Polish; find children's books in Polish, etc; have your girlfriend explain things to you in Polish.

 

[Feef]

Given your last sentence, it must be possibly one of the hardest languages to learn, then? For non-natives looking to learn a language in adulthood? (Everything is so much easier when you're a child...)

I'm not sure why you'd use reading other people's handwriting as a measure of how difficult a language is to learn? I get handwritten forms sent back to me every day by other (supposed) English speakers at work, and can't decipher them half the time. I certainly wouldn't expect any non-English speakers to understand them, as they're often just scrawls - likewise for Chinese, or any other language, if you don't already know what you're looking for (or have grown up writing in a similar way), it'll often be indecipherable.

 

[Raymond Lin]

@danlightbulb

learn the most common words, someone else tried it recently (in 7 days) and here is her experience.

 

[SheepBeast]

How the heck do people read those characters? I have to press my face up against the screen - they're so tiny! I imagine in hand-written form they're much larger?

Haha, it can sometimes be an issue on lower resolution screens, but generally if you are proficient with the language then it's quite easy to do it even when they are tiny and some of the strokes are kinda pixellated together. Think about it like how you can solve captchas pretty easily even when the letters are really screwed up.

In some contexts information density is an advantage, like on warning signs etc. You can communicate a whole English sentence with just a couple of Chinese characters sometimes.

To be fair, he's also (rightly!) using traditional characters, and while I dislike simplified, I do accept that 图书馆 is probably easier to read on a screen if you're unfamiliar than 圖書館

Hell yeah started with simplified many years ago and then one day began to incorporate traditional too. Never looked back. I can still read simplified without any trouble but when I actually think about the characters they don't make any sense, they're like random squiggles.

 

[!bluetonic!]

Is there a way to modernise the English language?

Just starting with months, that OCTober isn't the 8th month in the year.
Chick and Chicken make sense. A chick is a baby chicken.
Therefore a cow is the baby and a Cowen is the adult?
Cwimming Sertificate or Swimming Certificate suggests there are too many similar sounding letters in the alphabet.
Gloucester should be spelt Gloster?
Don't get me started on Towcester!

I always thought sign language would harmonise everything. Surely the sign for e.g cat would translate from any language into the same sign, but apparently not.

 

[Angilion]

Is there a way to modernise the English language?

That's been tried, more than once. It doesn't work because English isn't a deliberately created language with a single governing body that has the power to enforce its rules. American English is the closest to doing so, with a few changes in spelling a while back.

Creating a simpler, more consistent language has also been tried more than once. The attempt that failed least was Esperanto.

Just starting with months, that OCTober isn't the 8th month in the year.

But it was when the ancient Romans first attached their names to the their months in their calendar, which is where we get the names from.

Chick and Chicken make sense. A chick is a baby chicken.

Why does "chicken" make sense? Why does removing the last syllable make sense as a way of indicating an immature version of something?

Therefore a cow is the baby and a Cowen is the adult?

Maybe it would be if English was a deliberately created language with a single governing body that had the power to enforce its rules.

Cwimming Sertificate or Swimming Certificate suggests there are too many similar sounding letters in the alphabet.

But 's' and 'c' don't always sound similar. It's only a soft 'c' that sounds like a short 's'. If the use of the same letter to represent two different sounds (hard/soft, long/short) is the problem, the easiest solution would be to adopt accents or some other form of marking to indicate pronunciation. As some languages do. Of course, that would cause a lot of pointless conflict in English because of regional variations in pronunciation. For example, would the Absolute Dictatorship Group of English command all English speakers to pronounce 'bath' with a short 'a' or a long 'a'? Either way would annoy a lot of people. What purpose would that serve?

Gloucester should be spelt Gloster?
Don't get me started on Towcester!

Placenames are a particular mess in English due to multiple languages and many changes over time being involved. Changing the spellings could be done. It's been done before, many times. But who'd give the orders and what would happen to people who disagreed and what purpose would it serve?

I always thought sign language would harmonise everything. Surely the sign for e.g cat would translate from any language into the same sign, but apparently not.

People are people. So the same things that apply to oral languages apply to sign languages.