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Letting the dishes sit in the sink overnight

13 (14.1%)

Kissing a boy without wanting to boil her lips off

11 (12%)

Hugging without Hyperventilating

56 (60.9%)

Being "Normal."

2 (2.2%)

Sex, of course.

10 (10.9%)

Total Members Voted: 80

[Carl-E]

Other than foreign, they DO follow the "sounding like A" part of the rule.  In fact, neighbor and weigh are in the little rhyme...

Here are a few other exceptions to the rule: either, eider, ageing, protein, and absenteeism.  I'm sure there are a lot more!

Absenteeism and ageing don't count, they're root words ending in E that have a suffix beginning with I added on. 

But the others, yeah - interesting...

So now's when we throw our hands up in the air and agree that English is a fucked up language, right? 

Right? 

[Dliessmgg]

Only the details are fucked up. There's worse, like German or French.

[Binary]

Worse still, Russian. Three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter (what possible logic is there to 'passport', 'document' and 'bread' being masculine, 'newspaper' and 'Russia' being feminine, and 'building', 'radio' and 'letter' being  neuter?)

Oh, but it gets better. Six, count 'em, six 'cases' for nouns - nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, prepositional and instrumental. The case of a noun indicates the role that it plays in a sentence. In English this is done using word order, in Russian by altering the ending of the noun. So you don't just learn a noun, you have to learn all the possible additional endings it can take (and of course these also depend on the gender or whether it's plural). There are four types of regular declension, but also a whole set of irregular exceptions.

God, I hated Russian. Barely scraped a pass at school, never used it again.

[Penquin47]

German has the same three genders.  While I only got as far as four cases of nouns, that doesn't mean the other two don't exist in German.

Latin has three genders and six cases of nouns.

Greek has three genders.  Dunno about cases, haven't got that far in Rosetta Stone yet.

Why I study languages: because it's FUN!  (This is not sarcasm.  I studied German, French, and Spanish in school, and am studying Greek and Latin on my own and thinking about either picking Spanish back up because it's useful or starting Irish this summer.)

[Binary]

Irish is easy. Memorise the simple phrase below and you'll be able to cope in a surprising number of situations.

WHALE OIL BEEF HOOKED

[Lyrical]

Absenteeism and ageing don't count, they're root words ending in E that have a suffix beginning with I added on.  But the others, yeah - interesting...  So now's when we throw our hands up in the air and agree that English is a fucked up language, right?

Hey, the "I before E" quote doesn't say anything about root words, but there are plenty more exceptions within the root word as well.  Anyway, English is consistently inconsistent.  From what I understand, the tonal languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, tend to be the most difficult to learn to speak correctly.  I know a smattering of different languages, but I'm not really fluent in any but English.  I admire the people who manage to learn another language as an adult!

IsItCold, I remember something about that, too, but not the exact wording.  He's not as in-your-face as Pintsize about it for sure, but he did seem sexual/romantic in that story arc. 

[daryljfontaine]

EDIT: NVM apparently cannot read thread titles.

D

[Dliessmgg]

German has the same three genders.  While I only got as far as four cases of nouns, that doesn't mean the other two don't exist in German.

German has four cases, but nobody knows how to use them correctly or when you can use two with slightly different sentence structure or when there's a special old word that needs an exception. It got worse with the reform around 2000 where nobody knew what was correct afterwards and now you can use what was correct before and after, but the new stuff is advised. That leads to some mixing both. Bleh.

[ecstaticjoy]

Looks like she's gonna spill that coffee!!

[ndperfesser]

Dental records. Fillings are not genetically predestined. Also, this is last week's thread.

[Tuitsuro]

WHALE OIL BEEF HOOKED

Ah, that took me a minute.

[Kugai]

WHALE OIL BEEF HOOKED

Ah, that took me a minute.

Me too. 

And as the Upper Class English say,  AIR HAIR LAIR

[ecstaticjoy]

yes, yes, yes <33333333333

[Akima]

From what I understand, the tonal languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, tend to be the most difficult to learn to speak correctly.

Technically Japanese is not a tonal language, unlike Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai etc.

Obviously I'm not the best person to ask about the difficulty of learning Chinese (usually Standard Mandarin) as a second language. It is classed as one of the most difficult for English-speakers to learn, but I'm not sure that it is the tones that give most trouble. The CSL people I've talked to found the tones simply came with practice, and Mandarin grammar is in many ways far simpler than English. It is the writing system that seemed to be the big hurdle... as it is to Chinese people too! I sometimes wonder if the fearsome reputation of Chinese is partly an artifact of a general foreign-language teaching tradition that over-emphasises written language because it is easy to test.