If you live... on Earth... then you've probably had to take an English class.
And the majority of those people who've taken an English class have done so to
learn English as a foreign language, because English is the de facto international language
in this timeline - which is too bad, because English is really hard actually!
Now, I'm not trying to tell everyone to stop using English as an international
language or anything; I know one YouTube video isn't going to change
all that (my 50k YouTube subscribers haven't given me a God complex yet).
Nor am I saying that English is any harder than most other languages.
But I wanted to make this video to help English native speakers empathise with
English learners and maybe help them understand why people of different linguistic backgrounds
can sound so "weird" when speaking the language so many people in this world take for granted.
First of all, do you know how hard English is to pronounce? Seriously!
Let's start with the dental fricatives, THose sounds with the tongue on the teeTH. I'm
pretty sure there's like... not a single other language in the world that has these sounds?
Okay, actually they appear in quite a lot of languages - but they're still pretty rare overall!
Speakers of, for example, German or Dutch, are likely to replace this phone with /t/ or /s/ - and
the German use of /s/ and /z/ instead of these is where "zis accent viss zese sounts" comes from.
I mean, these sounds are so stupid that even those who use English every day don't
want to pronounce them! In the UK, 12% of native speakers use /f/ instead of /θ/,
and in some places, like India, the dental fricatives are practically non-existent.
Which makes sense! because they simply don't occur in most major languages on
the Indian subcontinent. For that matter, they're not in French, Russian, Japanese,
Persian... they're not in Mandarin Chinese...
And speaking of - you know what else doesn't appear in Mandarin Chinese? /v/.
That's why you can sometimes hear Chinese people saying things like "wague" instead of "vague",
or find learners mixing up when to use /v/ or /w/.
All these stupid vowels! I mean, you're telling me "it" and "eat"
are completely different words? Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?
/z/, /t͡ʃ/ /dʒ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ - for Chinese people, all these sounds have to be learned,
or substituted with something that's easier for them to say.
But to many learners of English, this is nowhere near the hardest thing about its
pronunciation. Because even once you've got your head around all these phonemes,
you still have to put them together into syllables.
Let's take a nice, normal, easy language like Japa-
Like, like... Japanese! I'm simplifying here but we could say the maximal syllable
structure in Japanese is CVN. This means that the most complicated a single syllable can get
is a consonant followed by a vowel and then a nasal coda, like in san (さん) or hon (ほん).
A lot of Polynesian languages have similarly restrictive phonotactics. Hawaiian syllables,
for instance, can only go up to CVV, with the MOST
complicated syllables being a consonant followed by a long vowel or diphthong.
Do you know what the maximal syllable structure of English is? I'm not sure
you want to know! It's disgusting! This here is a representation of the word "strengths".
This is the extreme case, but in general English throws consonants together like a
toddler playing with Legos - and that makes it really hard to pronounce for some people.
That's what your stereotypical Japanese accent comes from, with a word like "break",
which ends in a non-nasal consonant remember, being broken down into "bu-re-ku".
The English language actually also has some pretty difficult grammar. An
example of this is the phrase "an example of this", or the phrase "the English language".
What's the point of these words here?
These are articles, words which mark identifiability - whether
the referent of the noun phrase can be identified in a given context or not.
But like, what that actually MEANS is kind of unclear - like it's even debated among linguists.
And if someone said "English language has hard grammar, example of this is..."
you'd still get what they meant. You just think they were from... perhaps, Russia.
Because, see, most of the Slavic languages,
though in the wider scheme of things pretty closely related to English, don't have articles.
This leads to speakers of languages like Russian or Ukrainian either just forgetting to use "the"
or "a" when they have to, or mixing up which one they should be using in a certain context.
Even in a sample of essays written by Russian university students of
English over 15% of all instances of the word "the" were incorrect. It's hard.
And you know what else is hard? The English tense system.
Speakers of Swedish, French and German, who all have just one present tense in their
native languages, can't always know when to use "I do" or "I am doing" - especially when that
second construction can sometimes (seemingly randomly) be used for the future as well.
And sure, Italian and Spanish verbs have these two present tenses too,
and are generally harder - but English is no saint either!
Look at the present perfect, present perfect continuous,
past, past perfect, past perfect continuous and past continuous,
along with all these random constructions you just have to learn when to use!
And speaking of THESE random constructions... what's up with that whole "do" plus a verb
thing... you know like "I do go", the emphatic present, sometimes called a third present tense.
It's kind of a cool little feature, isn't it,
being able to emphasise that you really DO think something, contrary to what others might believe.
But then, suddenly in the negative it's compulsory?
Unlike normal Indo-European languages, where you add a negative particle like "non",
"nicht" or "नहीं", in English you add the verb "to do",
bang on an "nt" to the end of that, and put the original verb in the infinitive?
Thereby - "she doesn't speak" rather than the much more logical "she speaks not". And then
to complicate things further, some verbs DON'T get negated like this: "I mustn't",
"I'm not", "he isn't", "I won't", "I can't" - it's kind of ridiculous.
And then the verb "to have" takes a "don't" negation when it's used on its own, like "I
don't have a pen" - but a "not" negation went used as an auxiliary, like in "I haven't got a pen".
The thing is - that's not even the worst of the tense system.
The worst thing about our tenses... is the fact that we have tenses.
Bringing this back full circle to speakers of Mandarin Chinese,
some languages simply don't change their verbs based on when the action took place.
And it can be harder for speakers of those languages to use tense properly!
I mean, to be fair, if you've already specified that you did something "yesterday",
it can feel a bit pointless to have to do all this conjugation business.
"Yesterday I went to the village",
and "yesterday I go to the village" aren't any different in the information they convey.
Get rid of the articles, since Chinese doesn't have those either, and replace the /v/ with
/w/ - and you get "yesterday I go to willage". The stereotype of Chinese people speaking English.
I really don't want to give the impression that these features
of English are bad. Articles and tenses are useful; a unique phonology is cool.
But to a lot of people, these can also be difficult. Learning languages is hard,
not just for you, not just for English speakers - for billions of people.
So just try to remain conscious of this when interacting with "foreigners",
or anyone learning English.
Conscious. Con-ski-ows. That's a weirdly spelled word. Actually
what's with "for-ei-gners", and "un-i-que"?
Hey, I think there's something up with English spelli-