Is English the ideal 'Lingua Franca'?

Pronounciation and grammar is a bit overrated imo. Part of the problem with how school teaches languages is the ridiculous over-emphasis on grammar and spelling - they force you to memorise and repeat all these formulas like robots and bust your ass for misspelling a word. You never really get the chance to actually speak the language and many times they force you to learn absolutely useless words like "ironing board" or something even stupidier.

Every foreigner will, almost, always have an accent and that is not really too big of a deal. Grammar will eventually get to you the more you speak. In the behinning it does not really mater if you say "yesterday, I eat a ice cream" instead of Yesterday, I ate an ice cream. People will understand you anyways.

 

That's why, although I studied German at school and institute, I now can not even ask him "how much time" or "how to get to the library" Now in English, which I have never studied specifically and whose grammar I do not know , A couple of times he explained to foreigners in the center of Moscow how to get to the right place He learns here the vocabulary, which is typed because of many years of work with computers and a set of typical phrases from American movies.

 

Ah, guess it is a universal thing then - school just haven't got a clue on how to teach a language. If you look at these "word frequency lists" many of the words school teaches does not even reach top 800. They force you to learn and spell utterly useless words. Words barely any native speaker knows. Lol.

I have learned some Italian entirely by my own solely by listening to the language alot (knowing basic French has surely helped) and I actually speak much better Italian than my friends who took it in high school.

 

Honnestly, some people who lived for dozens of years in France don't reached that ability to speak that good french. It's particulary true for Japanese or Chinese people. I met three russian guy, one had on some point a heavy accent, but the two other had a really good abilities when they were sometime in France for the first time.

It seems their is some language with a lot of phonemes like russian and some other languages extremly poor in phonemes like italian or french. I think that the russian have a small advantage, who is reinforced by a lot of good work.

 

A great way of learning a language is to first look at a word frequency list of the language in question (easy to Google, there is one for every and learn the language to be found) and try to learn the 100 most common words, making sure you know which they are and what they mean.

Then you have to expose yourself to the language; listen to music, watch YouTube, pay attention; try to see if you recognise anything and try to pick up new words.

Thirdly, immitate the language alot - just speak made up-jibberish just to make your mouth used to the phonetics. Lastly, try to find someone to speak it with. Internet is a great place for this.

When you think about it, this is pretty much how a baby learns a language and it is thus the most natural way of doing it.

 

That is also it's strong point.
English would be resented by China and Russia because of nationalism - by everyone adopting a language that is not tied to any nation, it takes away that friction.

 

Quite Orwellian tbh.

 

That is why you use the system the UN and the US-USSR Hot Line used.

The translator of Country A does their own translation into Language B. That way they are catching the differences in syntax and meaning as it is their own language, and putting it into proper context.

When a diplomat is giving a speech in the UN, their own translator is doing the translation into Esperanto. Being their native language they are expected to be able to catch anything like the "think-feel" example you gave and provide the correct word. The problem with a diplomat relying upon their own translator to go from a second language to theirs is that they might miss these nuances (or even particulars of the way the other person talks).

60 years ago, a common word for something being really good was "cool", then about 20 years ago it became "hot". Also about 20 years ago something "bad" became really good. Most non-native translators have a hard time keeping up with such rapid changes in a language.

 

Well, no language is static and therefore needs to be regularly spoken so that it can keep up with the times and develop naturually. I.e. have a soul and cultural rootedness. Esperanto lacks this and that is why the intetest learning it is so small. I never even hear anyone talk about it. Even bloody, friggen Klingon seems more popular than Esperanto.

 

Everyone needs to learn Ithkuil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

Then we will be able to accurately convey the slightest shades of meaning! I wonder what will be the intelligence of the child for whom such language will be native?

 

People learning English at a higher level would be at least as well served. English has a rich vocabulary that is simply not learned by most people. Just as well, I suppose, since such vocabulary is often for expressing ideas that the common rabble (and the so-called president, I might add) tend not to bother with in the first place!

 

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Isn't the English vocabulary like 50% French and 50% Germanic/Norse?

 

Time to bring back Latin.

 

Good point.

Btw. French is a horrifying language for foreigners to learn and more or less impossible if you are not exposed to it on a regular basis. All those irregular grammar rules and other kinds of crazy rules are just plain awful. I think you did this on purpose just to make your language impossible to learn and so that you can have something to complain about, you snorty and arrogant pieces of froglegs.

"Hon hon. Oh là là, les étrangers sont très bête - ils n'apprenent jamais la langue Française bien que c'est très facille. Hon hon hon. "

 

Even for french it's a horrible language to learn.

 

At least you are exposed to it from birth and that of course helps alot.

I like French because it makes you sound intelligent. If you want to sound intelligent all you need to do is throw in a French word here and there. You will probably appear very pompous and pretentious. People will hate you for it, but nonetheless you will appear intelligent.

 

I think our most basic words, such as "I", "think", "our" and "most", tend to be Germanic. Our four-letter words as well. But then the higher concepts are of other derivations. Something happened in jolly old England that both supplemented and outright replaced a lot of the older Anglo-Saxon tongue.

 

As in, French as a certain je ne sais quoi. Sounds a little different from saying it has a certain ich weiß nicht was! Modern English pronunciation is also heavily influenced by French, such that we treat consonants the way the French do more than how the Germans and Scandinavians do. Downside, I think, is that it makes it harder for English speakers to pronounce German words (without proper effort to learn).

 

It's always surprising for a french to see

Ironically, some England king like Richard Lionheart spoke exclusively french. French literature of middle age is in an important way composed of text wrotten in England, because the french prefered to writte in latin.

French would not be that difficult it they weren't all those silent letters and strange orthography. Before the 18th century, french didn't had fixed orthography, and it was fixed by people who had huge knowledge in latin or greek and wrotten the word in function of their latin or greek origin, not to make them simple.

 

It's The English Grammar System, not whose word ​

German and French oy noun gender, cases and all those adjectives
have to be in such agreement with their noun

My father could speak five languages. French, German, Russian, Spanish and English.
English the fourth language he learned means to me, his brain was wired for all
that Clutter Grammar that English abandoned.
And in lieu of clutter grammar English made word order and prepositions more important.
English speakers are renowned for being the least willing to learn a foreign language.
Maybe because it is more difficult for an English wired brain?

It ain't if the word came from German or French.
We gots a whole new grammar system unrelated to either.

Moi

r > g

Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.​

 

French is too complicated for non-French people as its verb structure is based on Latin. I always wanted to ask native French speakers how they could memorise all irregular verbs, which I could not do after 4 years in college. English comes naturally with me and I had no problem with writing term papers in English. English is largely derived from Old Norse, an ancient Viking language, which is why it's so simple.

 

They do not have to memorise, it just comes naturally for them. Unlike English that only has one article (the) Swedish has two (suffixes -en and -et) foreigners often choose one randomly and rarely get it right, but native speakers have no problems at all with this. If asked to explain how it works, we can't. We just know because we know lol.

But, yeah I can relate to what you are saying. I took French from 7th grade all the way til I graduated high school and never learned to master those darn irregular verbs. Absolutely atrocious.

 

I have tried at least three times to learn French and just cannot make heads or tails out of that ######### language! English is so much easier.