There is the word 'go' in the title, but this is unlikely to be related much to 'go', for I simply intend to lodge a complaint, and it is just personal and quite uncommiserative, so you may very probably soon feel uninterested in what I have written.

It soon becomes a month the period for which I studied in a place called the university or universiteit. Where the education takes place is Holland, but somehow fortunately all the classes are in English, which is mainly why I have come here.

English is such an 'interesting' language. The more you get to know about, the more shitty it appears to be. Everything is totally screwed up. Let me explain this 'everything' quite in detail as much as I can.

1. The pronunciation; why is thare allmoest no rellation between the spelling and the pronnunciation ov werds? Whut an iddiot descided that the spelling must be remaned the same az it ov a thouzand eres aggo. No singgl wun wuud(would) reed 'premise' az 'premmis' when thay happen too see this werd for the ferst time. Whut ar the alphabets ment to be when thay wer ferst made by greeks and romans? Wuud thay be happi too no that in the far advanced fucher 'night' and 'knight' haz the same sound and 'though', 'toe', and 'row' rimes? Hou proud thay wuud be ov thare wunderfuul invention.

2. Well, not in English but in Korean, 60 percent of the lexis has a Chinese origin. This provides a lot of convenience in understanding and learning Korean vocabulary because every words originated from China consists of one or several syllables that comes from a fixed set of approximately 1800 syllables each of which has its own and usually one dominant meaning. I said 'syllable', but they are actually 'letters'. Still, it does not matter because they work fine as 'syllables' each having a particular meaning and monosyllabic pronunciation with some logical rules for word construction, and every native Korean speakers do naturally learn these 'rules' and can guess the meaning of a word seen for the first time to an acceptably accurate extent by also 'naturally' having the information of the set of syllables to an acceptable extent and joining the syllables' meaning in the new word according to a rule to produce a certain meaning of the whole word. Each word rarely has more than two meanings and usually just one, so people do not get confused on which meaning this word has in this context. I don't think I have to explain about this with respect to the English language, whose dictionary consists of twenty volumes.

3. Grammar? Actually this part is what I like with English. It is simple comepared to other languages and of course to Korean. I think Korean is one of the most syntactically complicated languages.

4. This is I think quite everything I can think of English's screwed-upness. It does not seem to be so many as much as what I actually expected, but this sufficiently explains my stress of dealing with and learning English.

Mathematics is... so beautiful! especially after trying to cope with the horrible messiness of English words. I do appreciate the clearness of numbers. Besides, my mind was not like this even just a few months ago, but now I do like math than anytime before.

Go is a hobby to have for my whole life. I always play it with Crazystone in my phone giving her several stones when there are like 10~20 minutes spare time.

As usual, my writing gets shorter as it goes closer to the end. Thanks.

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Wait, please.

#1.) Agree.
#2.) There are word roots that you can study for English words, but it's certainly less clear than learning hanja.

I agree about math.

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be immersed

By the way, what is your feeling on learning Korean words that don't originate from hanja? Do you feel you have intuition on the meaning of such words when you see them for the first time? Sometimes I feel this way, but sometimes not.

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be immersed

1) English spelling usually has nothing to do with modern pronunciation. Some spellings date from a time when the English spoken would be almost incomprehensible to modern day speakers. Others come from the languages the word was originally borrowed from (though this may be rather a long time ago so word may not exist or be spelled the same now in that language, or more annoyingly, no longer have the same meaning as it once did. Some European languages share this issue, some don't. It depends usually whether there have been spelling reforms recently. (I think the hardest thing for most English learners is that English spelling tells you little about where the stress is in the word)

2) Welcome to European languages. Wait until you get to issues like "hanged versus hung" in English (or why do we have two past tenses for the same verb? We don't, there used to be two separate words but now there is one for the present tense but the past tense forms retained a distinction between them, though this is fading so don't expect native speakers to obey this distinction).

3) English grammar is kinder than most European languages but it can get quite tricky in places still. Adjective order is something I've seen throw non-native speakers but hearing native speakers screw it up is very rare. "Look at the red, big car" should sound appalling. It's not complicated though to be fair.

4) There are far worse languages out there. Believe me.


Unfortunately, regarding 1) which is the biggest issue and something that bothers native speakers, there is no one authority on English to force through spelling reform. Versus say the case in France where there is. Or with Irish that did a massive spelling reform 50 years ago and removed the worst of the confusion (though it can still be difficult).

Adjective ordering is an interesting topic in English, and I've spoken about it with my wife a little bit. My theory, which may be wrong, is that the more specific adjectives come last. In your example, "red" is often a more selective adjective than "big". There are many big things, but maybe fewer red things. If we add something like "spotted" to the mix, there are even fewer spotted things, so it should come last (i.e. "big, red, spotted car").

However, now that I think about this example, I'm not so sure, because "spotted, big, red car" also sounds OK to me. *shrug*

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be immersed

Actually, one thing that annoyed me as a kid, in some words (e.g. radius) we form the plural using the rules of the original language, where as with others we don't, e.g. baguette. Also, sometimes we try to keep the original pronounciation (most common in the sciences and medicine) e.g. pneumatic, where as we completely ignore it with other words, e.g. Paris.


Hmm. Yeah, English is something of a mess.

Colour comes after size. So does temperature, a hot small coal versus small hot coal. Similar to how me saying "I'm sure you're tall and big!" sounds pretty odd. (I've had to retype several examples because my fingers kept typing them in the correct order, to give you some sense of how ingrained this is in me! )

As a side note, there have been publications about the validity of "World Englishes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Englishes), and how they vary from "standard English".

One argument is that there are more "non-native" speakers of English than native, so the English adopted by various social groups, while different than what you'd find in a standard English grammar textbook, has its own patterns and is just as correct from some viewpoints. For example, if all speakers in China "broke" certain rules from "standard English", but followed a common set of grammar rules (different than those from standard English), this variant of English could be argued to be just as correct as "standard English".

So while we're talking about "English" and its rules here, there is not only one version of English. There are several, each with their own patterns and nuances, which may be best understood only by the given social group that uses the given variant.

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be immersed

You guys have issues.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

On the other hand, English is the only language in which the words go in the order that you think them

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Occupy Babel!

No, Certainly.

어젯밤 늦게 저녁 먹는 중에 친구가 우리집에 방문해서 반갑게 맞이했다.
Last night late dinner eating while friend my house visit so happily greeted.
(Last night, while I was having my late dinner, my friend visited my house so I happily greeted him.)

친구가 어젯밤 내가 늦게 저녁 먹던 중에 우리집을 방문해서 반갑개 맞이해주었다.
Friend last night my late dinner eating my house visited so happily provided greeting.
(My friend, last night, while I was having a late dinner, visited my house so I happily greeted him.)

어제 친구가 우리집을 방문해서 반갑게 맞이했다. 그때 난 밤 늦게 저녁을 먹고 있었다.
Yesterday friend my house visited happily greeted. At the moment I night late dinner eating.
(Yesterday my friend visited my house so I happily greeted him. At the moment I has having a late dinner in night.)

어제 저녁먹고있는데 그때가 밤에 늦은 시간이었거든, 마침 친구가 방분해서 반갑게 맞이했어.
Yesterday dinner eating the time night late time, well friend visited so happily greeted.
(Yesterday while I was having dinner, the time was late in the night, well, my friend visited so I happily greeted him.)

어제 밤늦게 저녁먹고 있는데 누가 온거야. 해서 보니까 친구가 왔더라고. 반갑게 맞이했지.
Yesterday late night dinner eating someone visited so look friend has come happily greeted.
(Yesterday, in night having dinner, someone visited, and that was my friend. I happily greeted him.)


The second lines show the literal translation of five Korean sentences with all the same meanings in some different structures. The last two are quite informal. Anyways, you would clearly see that the order of words in English can be unnatural for someone like me with a clearly distinct first language. The word order in English is not the order that I think in.

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Wait, please.

1) Why not do a spelling reform in English? In dutch, german, or french, my understanding of the language is extreamly shallow but I can still read the sentences because they have a quite regular phonetic system. Why can't English be so?

2) Well, yeah

3) I never think of such order when I use multiple adjectives, but do people actually care when adjectives are used in a 'wrong' order? and how about saying 'the red and big car'?

4) Sure.

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Wait, please.

1) This is impossible as who decides? Do we reform to American pronunciation? British? Indian? Irish? Do we have different spelling in every country? Which dialect gets to be the prestige dialect in each one? Etc.

3) "The red and big car" sounds like the kind of English my 3 year old daughter might speak. Normally (in my dialect) you would never use the "and" there intentionally. You would say "The car was big and red" though. If you use adjectives in the wrong order it'll sound very odd to me. I wouldn't correct you on it unless you had asked me to correct your mistakes though (as opposed to a mistake which makes what you're saying ambiguous or incoherent).

I studied physics in Holland from 1970. Colleges were in Dutch but the textbooks were English. I think that is the way it should be. I understand you are from the far east so welcome in "my" Amsterdam. Colleges in Dutch wont be very practical for you. If you need some advice from a dutch guy with some knowledge of universities, mathematics, go and amsterdam please let me know. English is a difficult language. I can speak it without thinking but I am sure I make many mistakes in grammar, idiom pronunciation and clumsiness. Even about the last sentence I am not sure wether I should replace "I" by "to". probably both are correct.

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I think I am so I think I am.

Really? It caused me to flinch.

Adjectival order, culled from Wikipedia and other sources

Opinion or judgment -- beautiful, ugly, easy, fast, interesting
Size -- small, tall, short, big
Age -- young, old, new, historic, ancient
Shape -- round, square, rectangular
Color -- red, black, green, purple
Nationality/Origin -- French, Asian, American, Canadian, Japanese
Material -- wooden, metallic, plastic, glass, paper
Purpose or Qualifier -- foldout sofa, fishing boat, racing car

"Spotted" is a tricky one, but I would classify it as a color or a material. It definitely cannot come before "big"

There are some inconsistent ones. For example, everyone would say "big stupid dog" but "stupid little dog".

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Poka King of the south east.

By "you" do you mean a native English speaker ?

For all the roughly 6,500 non-English spoken languages in the world,
with different word orders than English, how do you know in what word order
their respective native speakers think ?
( Maybe you're a linguist and know a lot more than us amateurs; if so, please enlighten us. )

I'm sure hyperpape was just making a joke, hence the .

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Dusk Eagle, Thanks!

MJK, pronunciation isn't even consistent in English. Brass is pronounced as in hat or shaft depending on what part of the country you come from



Of course, if you use the adjective "spotty", it could equally be a judgement and come before size