Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct
Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.
Examples:
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“Ananas ringer” means “the pineapple is calling” when written the wrong way. The correct way is “ananasringer” and it means “pineapple rings” (from a tin).
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“Prinsesse pult i vinkel” means “a princess fucked at an angle”. The correct way to write it is “prinsessepult i vinkel”, and it means “an angeled princess desk” (a desk for children, obviously)
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“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”
I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!
Ambiguously used words like “biweekly”. Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.
Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.
Parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway is also a good one.
Norwegian is more accurate. “Biweekly” means “annenhver uke” (every other week)
It does here too. It’s not an unclear thing, just not used all the time so people don’t remember.
Biweekly is every other week, fortnightly.
Semiweekly is twice a week.
How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as “hundred-five-and-eighty” (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.“Hundre-og-åtti-fem”
The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.
Don’t get me started on read, read, and red…
That second example is… Wow.
These are all real examples. Here’s a picture of someone posting that they want to give away a princess desk
Last sentence, “godt brukt”, means “well used”
Princess fucked at and angle. Well Used.
I mean… It still fits?
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In French they fucking have the same word for “no more” and “more”, and only differs in pronounciation of the last letter:
“J’ai plus de pommes” pronounced as “j’ai plu de pommes” means “I have no more apples” (nobody says the “ne” particle)
“J’ai plus de pommes (que toi)” pronounced as “j’ai plus de pommes (que toi)” means “I have more apples (than you)”
Which is even worse because usually last letter is not pronounced, so that makes it an exception to the rule
Simply emphasise the last letter more.
But the last letter is silent.
Yep.
In some Caribbean Englishes, the pronunciations of the words “can” and “can’t”, which are opposites, differ only in vowel length: kyan, kyaan.
Oh, same problem as flammable and inflammable.
My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It’s quite difficult to understand the written form if you’ve only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.
To compare it to English, it would be like saying “Where are you?” to someone over the phone, but then having to send them “Wherefore art thou?” as a text.
“Whither” (to where) might be a closer fit than “wherefore” (why)
skill issue
The four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Akkusative with their accompanying articles. It makes learning German as a second language a nightmare and even native speakers struggle with it a lot.
Ah man, I think cases are great! I learned Russian in college, which has six cases, and they can be used to express so much with so little. English used to have them, you can see remnants in the apostrophe ‘s’ when denoting possession, and I’m bummed they went away.
I’ll give it to you that they’re a pain in the ass to learn, but once you get the hang of them I think they’re super neat!
Edit: they also allow for variable sentence structure which can be super fun and, again, express a lot of meaning just through text (at least in Russian, not sure if that’s the case in German).
What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.
I hate that it’s an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like “once”.
But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it’s not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.
English having no consistent spelling, grammar or pronunciation.
Spelling and pronunciation were actually standardized and spelling technically still is. The problem is that the standardization is from a previous version of English with different pronunciation.
Same as the norwegian “hjerne” and “gjerne”. They are pronouced the same, but the first is “brain” the secon is “yes, please”
“Hjort” and “gjort”. Also pronounced the same, but the first one is “deer” and the second is “have done that”.
Easy
The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn’t like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like “should’a” is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4
We got a governing body that decides what is correct or not when it comes to our two written languages, bokmål and nynorsk. They do not control speach and what is “correct” to say. I recent years the younger generations (I’m millenial, so not young any more 😢) have began merging two sounds, the sj- /∫/ og kj-sounds /ç/ with only the sj-sound. They can’t even hear the diference. This results in funny situations for us who can hear and pronounce the different sounds when used in words.
Kjede, pronounced with /ç/ at the start, means chain (can be used to describe various types of chains).
Sjede, pronounced with /∫/ at the start, means vagina.
The younger generation pronounced both words with /∫/ at the start. This makes the word “kjedekollisjon” not mean “chain collision” any more, but “vagina collision”. “Halskjede” with a /∫/, suddenly means “neck vagina”, not “necklace”. And so on. Language is fun.
I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.
I speak Spanish and being 100% honest about it i love it, the only shitty thing is the fact that the dialects vary a lot (also i kinda hate the tilde).
coño!
I live in the north of Mexico, sometimes when I speak with people from the center I need to look up words that they use
German here, we have the exact same issue. It’s driving me crazy.
We are English speaking and as someone raising a kid it’s really difficult at their age to teach and explain all the words that are spelled the same but can sound different. She loves to learn so I try my best. I wrote a sentence down that she likes to show people and read to them just to start but always asks why it is the way it is.
“My daughter liked when I read her a book the other day so I make it a habit to read 1 book a day with her”
That’s the sentence she’s practicing. There is a lot more to get through though.
Along the same lines, through, thorough, throw, tough, thought, though. Just the slightest variation of spelling. English makes no sense.
German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date…we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!
The funny thing is, that most of the world uses commas as decimal separator and comma is the preferred decimal separator by ISO. But instead, in English speaking countries, the period is used as the decimal separator. Actually it comes from the original decimal separator, that was used in the British Empire called
⟨·⟩. When they were changing units to metric, ISO didn’t recognize interpunct as a decimal separator, because it was too similar to the multiplication sign used in other countries. So after some debate in the UK, they’ve adopted the period, because the US was already using it. From the British Empire, South Africa instead adopted the comma.
I did not know that. Very interesting, thanks. Not so fun fact: Switzerland, although German speaking, does not use the comma. Also their keyboard Layout is all over the place with German French and Italian influences.
Any number higher than twelve is said the wrong way around, for example instead of ninety-two we say two-and-ninety.
In the Welsh language we say the number of tens then the number. One - Un (pronounced een) Ten - Deg Eleven - Un deg un - one ten one
Three - Tri Thirty - Tri deg - three ten Thirty-one - Tri deg un - three ten one
