The worst thing about English...

I figure this would be a nice little place to rant about our frustrations when it comes to grammar and spelling and all the technical stuff.

For me it's the exceptions. Follow all the rules straight, get it all right and then boom! Nope. There's an exception to that rule. I before E, except after C.


How about you guys? What spelling/grammar/quirk gives you the worst brain ache?

Now. My friend and I were talking about times when you face the inability to express something in just one word in English. Yeah.

So. In Tamil, we say 'எத்தனாவது' or 'ethhanaavadhu' which roughly translated to 'which in this series' or, to put in this way 'Which-th' in the way of 'n-th'.

ETA : Google translate being awesome, translated it to : TO Ethanol.

Tenyo wrote:For me it's the exceptions. Follow all the rules straight, get it all right and then boom! Nope. There's an exception to that rule. I before E, except after C.

Except if it's the word 'protein', which doesn't have a 'c' in it!

English, y u b so confusing

American English vs. British English.

O.O' I'm never doing it completely right, I've read too many books from both sides of the sea. Sometimes I write sombre, program, honour, or realize. -headdesk-

I can also never pronounce Protestant or Communist. :/

My love for English is as pure as a 6th grade crush. In some cases Russian is a little more efficient (see Lava's post about the inability to say certain things as one word), but English is just beautiful. I have not a single bad thing to say about it.

Well English is my native language, so I've never experienced the horror of "learning" it. But I have to say that verb conjugation can be... weird.
I am. I was.
You are. You were
He/She/It is. He/She/It was.
We are. We were.
They are. They were.

Swim swam swum.

That sort of stuff. At least it's fun

I can say that I have spent all my life learning English, and I am still no where near finished learning it -_-

My second language, Choctaw, is something that I learned in a meer two years.

I find the lack of gender conjugation good as you don't have to remember two spellings for many words. Though, I'm pretty sure the diversity in spellings for different sounds and the other inconsistencies and lack of definite rules on many conjugations would be very annoying.

Rough, lough, plough, through, slough, though, hiccough, cough, thought, thorough. Ten different -ough sounds.

Tenyo wrote:For me it's the exceptions. Follow all the rules straight, get it all right and then boom! Nope. There's an exception to that rule. I before E, except after C.

hmmm... that's weird

How about words that sound the same? Those annoyed the heck outta me when I was younger.

Where, were, we're.
There, their, they're.

Etc, etc.

Frustrating. x.x

How you can have: pronounce

and pronunciations. I dunno how many times I've said: pronounciations P:

I have a tendency to pronounce everything wrong. Not the word, I'm just not good with pronunciation. I also have a larger vocabulary of read words to words I've heard, so I don't know how to pronounce some of the words I've read. In particularly bad cases, somebody will say the word and I won't recognize it as the word I read. That doesn't explain my inability to distinguish the 'th' sound from the 'f' sound in many words. I could tell the difference between 'the' and 'fe', but not between three and free, or thirst and first.

British vs American spellings too :C

(I'm on the side of the Brits. We are totes the best)

Oh, yes. I read fantasy, though, so for me a torch means a torch not a flashlight.