No Ive heard english speakers (usually monolingual) say this, especially when I lived in the UK 😅 I stopped complaining about this eventually because I couldn't be bothered discussing it with people lol
for every belief one could have about a language, no matter how absurd, patently false, or outwardly insane it is, there exists at least one native speaker of that language who believes it.
i feel like it is true to some extent. it's just that there are many, many ways to write the same sounds. it is true for all three languages I'm proficient in so I feel like it's simply the nature or written language. the only way to get rid of the different ways to write the same thing is to make a new system but that system will accumulate homophones like an inevitable toxic spill of industry. either you deal with the stress of the system not making sense or you deal with the stress of changing the system all the time.
There are phonetic (or nearly phonetic) languages. I think it has more to do with the fact that English kept getting mixed with other languages that caused this confusing pronunciation.
As a Pole I was shocked when I realised that English speakers put so much pressure on reading books to their children because otherwise people don't know how to pronounce written words. In Polish you just learn some rules and if you can make the necessary sounds, you're good to read a word without ever hearing it 99% of time.
I think Japanese is kind of like that. Apart from pitch accent, most words are read as they are written and homophone problem is real. Though the context is usually enough to understand which word it is. Kanji helps too.
Here's a pretty popular example:
貴社の記者は汽車で帰社した - きしゃのきしゃはきしゃできしゃした - kisha no kisha wa kisha de kisha shita - The reporter of your company has returned to the office by train.
The pitch accent between homophones here is (can be) the same too.
It also doesn't help that accents come into play. "Poem" and "home" definitely don't rhyme for me, so this sketch suggesting "home" should be "hoem" makes no sense from my perspective haha
The tough thing with English isn't just that there can be two ways to write down the same sound (most languages have that) but also that the same sequence of letters can be pronounced differently.
Like how "read"(present) and "read" (past) are pronounced differently despite being written the same
This is why I love learning Spanish. Wish there was a Korean version of this for every time someone says to me "Korean is spelled like it sounds." It's not as hard as English, but you still have to remember a bunch of math equations that sometimes mean nothing depending on dialect/region.
I gave up and start to learn Finnish instead.
For all the ways its difficult as hell, at least we can say it's very phonetically consistent
I lowkey forgot numb was a word at the end and thought he was saying "num" like a number. Too much 上になった
wtf bro no one's ever said that
I based the title on a very well known screenshot of a twitter thread.
I feel like it was a Tumblr thread not a Twitter one but I could be wrong
No Ive heard english speakers (usually monolingual) say this, especially when I lived in the UK 😅 I stopped complaining about this eventually because I couldn't be bothered discussing it with people lol
for every belief one could have about a language, no matter how absurd, patently false, or outwardly insane it is, there exists at least one native speaker of that language who believes it.
this is a theorem.
You would be surprised and disappointed by American stupidity
Yeah, they have
people on Twitter aren't real, I refuse to believe
People joke about Fr*nch, but at least it's consistent
In what?
Inspiring the beheading of the oligarchs who made everything complex to exclude "les parvenus"!
Or as Bourdieu put it "nos goûts son des dégoûts" (for what those we want to exclude do)
This was already interesting, it's like people need laugh tracks and laughing emojis in the post to tell them it's funny
i feel like it is true to some extent. it's just that there are many, many ways to write the same sounds. it is true for all three languages I'm proficient in so I feel like it's simply the nature or written language. the only way to get rid of the different ways to write the same thing is to make a new system but that system will accumulate homophones like an inevitable toxic spill of industry. either you deal with the stress of the system not making sense or you deal with the stress of changing the system all the time.
There are phonetic (or nearly phonetic) languages. I think it has more to do with the fact that English kept getting mixed with other languages that caused this confusing pronunciation.
As a Pole I was shocked when I realised that English speakers put so much pressure on reading books to their children because otherwise people don't know how to pronounce written words. In Polish you just learn some rules and if you can make the necessary sounds, you're good to read a word without ever hearing it 99% of time.
I think Japanese is kind of like that. Apart from pitch accent, most words are read as they are written and homophone problem is real. Though the context is usually enough to understand which word it is. Kanji helps too.
Here's a pretty popular example:
貴社の記者は汽車で帰社した - きしゃのきしゃはきしゃできしゃした - kisha no kisha wa kisha de kisha shita - The reporter of your company has returned to the office by train.
The pitch accent between homophones here is (can be) the same too.
It also doesn't help that accents come into play. "Poem" and "home" definitely don't rhyme for me, so this sketch suggesting "home" should be "hoem" makes no sense from my perspective haha
The tough thing with English isn't just that there can be two ways to write down the same sound (most languages have that) but also that the same sequence of letters can be pronounced differently.
Like how "read"(present) and "read" (past) are pronounced differently despite being written the same
Maybe I should steal this for a classroom game.
This is why I love learning Spanish. Wish there was a Korean version of this for every time someone says to me "Korean is spelled like it sounds." It's not as hard as English, but you still have to remember a bunch of math equations that sometimes mean nothing depending on dialect/region.
"pronounced the same way it's written" is such a silly statement, writing is little images while speaking is sounds, they're obviously different