# Foreign languages: the WTF moment that made you throw in the towel **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 8, 2016, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312 "2016-05-08T17:58:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/41 "2016-05-09T02:52:28Z")
I took Spanish for three years in middle/high school. It was actually just Spanish I & II with I split over two years. Consequently I lost interest in the third year when it got much harder and only just barely passed. What made me go WTF was when I learned how Spanish uses double negatives. So when literally translated a Spanish sentence could be, “I don’t have no money”. When I pointed out to my Spanish teacher the illogicality of this she said, “That’s just how they say it in Spanish”. Being a Math major and knowing full well since 7[sup]th[/sup] grade that -2 × -3 = +6 I found this incomprehensibly difficult to accept. If you say, “I don’t have no money” you are actually saying, “I have money” _ **dammit** _\*!!!\* In retrospect I’ve learned how all languages are never translated literally for reasons like this. And how even in English if you say, “I don’t have no money” there isn’t anyone who would ever interpret the double negative as a positive. _ **But** _, we _don’t_ use double negatives in English, so most everyone _will_ interpret that you’re an under-educated rube… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 7:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/42 "2016-05-09T07:26:42Z")
English spelling and pronunciation are so unrelated that it amounts to having to learn two separate languages, but I still haven’t given up. I do avoid some phonemes which I can’t pronounce and which monolingual morons\* consider it’s ok to make fun of (apparently I pronounce “jail” exactly like “Yale”… so I say “prison”). - It’s never someone who actually tried to learn a second language, with better or worse success. English, Hispanic or Batutuphone, if you insult a foreigner because of his accent I’ll file you under M for Moron. **Hail Ants** , we had to tell one of our ESL teachers to please not use double negatives because “if we use them, we get failed”. “Oh, but in Kansas we speak like that!” “Well, apparently the people who write our tests aren’t from Kansas. No double negatives.” So I suggest you avoid Kansas. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/43 "2016-05-09T08:55:55Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Hungarian has no gender? I guess they got to give some freebies in that notorious difficult language. > > Why is northern Sweden blue though, something obvious I’ve missed? There aren’t _that_ many Finnish speakers up there, and as far as I know Swedish has two basic genders, traditionally and in some cases still three (masculine and feminine have merged in most cases). Sami? Yes. Sami is a Uralic language, like Finnish. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/44 "2016-05-09T09:02:47Z")
Lots of challenges with Mandarin Chinese, but the most appropriate to this thread is that the real spoken language and the formal language that is taught have branched quite a lot. Also there are many terms that are appropriate for written Chinese but rarely spoken. So even if you’ve studied, with a Chinese teacher, such simple expressions as “What are you doing?” and “Otherwise…”, you may not understand when people _actually say these things_ because they will use the colloquial forms which are completely different, and rarely IME taught anywhere. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/45 "2016-05-09T09:28:37Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > But, yeah, English proves that it’s not needed, and every other language would be better off for ditching the stupid idea. IMO. You know what else isn’t needed? Plural marking. English even does without it some of the time: One deer or five deer, it’s the same word. Just get rid of the concept entirely, like Japanese does, and the language will be simpler for it. Except that isn’t true, is it? Japanese can talk generically of cars or train conductors without making irrelevant reference to their number, but that means it’s just that much more involved when you want to specify that there were, indeed, multiple cars parked there, not just the one. It’s a general rule, really: **Changing grammar doesn’t change complexity, just shifts it around.** This assumes _natural_ languages, of course, _all_ of which are “impure” by any standard and _all_ of which evolved by popular usage over millennia. (Corollary: If you think a given natural language is pure and logical, you either have a half-baked conlang or a grossly incomplete knowledge of the language.) Only toy languages have complexity you can simply remove. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/46 "2016-05-09T09:35:57Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > OP: that only holds true in France. Many other Francophone countries use more logical numbers. I.e. 70 / 80 / 90 = “septante / octante / nonante”. I seem to remember reading or hearing (can give no cite – sorry) that this was true of France as well, up to the Revolution of 1789. The Revolutionaries decided – for reasons which presumably made sense to them – to re-name the numbers concerned; and it stuck. As regards the thread’s general heading: the most superb instance of this which I know, comes in Rebecca West’s magnum opus _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_, about the author’s late-1930s travels in what was then Yugoslavia. Mention is made of a town in Bosnia called Donji Vakuf. The second word in the name is borrowed from Turkish – the Turks having spent centuries in charge of the area – a Turkish word meaning “foundation”. The author remarks (am quoting from memory – can’t just now find the book): “Discovering that the plural of ‘vakuf’ is ‘evkaf’, filled me with a very strong determination never to try to learn Turkish.” ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/47 "2016-05-09T10:20:15Z")
> [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](#): > > In middle school, I used to get A’s in French. I enjoyed the lessons. Until, that is, the calamitous moment that Mlle Prendergast, our teacher, revealed that the French words for “seventy,” “eighty” and “ninety” were “soixante-dix,” “quatre-vingt” and “quatre-vingt-dix” (“sixty-ten,” “four-twenty” and “four-twenty-ten.”) > > That was the moment that I decided the entire French nation was _nuts_. The following term, I abandoned Mlle P and signed up for German instead. The Germans, I figured, despite the humanitarian failings in their history, were a rational people who could be relied upon not to perpetrate absurdities such as “quatre-vingt-dix,” and so it proved. > > What inanities, in any language, make you want to tear your hair out? In Irish, you have to use a different tense, and in many cases a different word entirely, if you are counting people rather than things. Also dogs, but only if they are pet dogs; wild dogs are things. In fact, if you want to tease someone about how close they are to their donkey, or their parakeets, you can say they have “duine” donkey, or “beirt” parakeets . . . > **[Numbers in Irish](https://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/irish.htm)** > > How to count in Irish, a Celtic language spoken in mainly Ireland. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/48 "2016-05-09T11:04:18Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Hungarian has no gender? Not an Indo-European language. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/49 "2016-05-09T12:08:49Z")
> [@guizot](#): > > If there is any research that supports this assertion, I’d like to see it. How do you know this? Personal observation. You know, the stuff humble opinions are made of. I’d like to see some research that dispels that notion. Speakers of other languages regularly correct me, which is something I never hear done in English discourse. English speakers won’t even do an immigrant the favor or correcting his faulty English, It seems to be something that is not done, in our culture. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/50 "2016-05-09T12:13:54Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > Personal observation. You know, the stuff humble opinions are made of. I’d like to see some research that dispels that notion. Speakers of other languages regularly correct me, which is something I never hear done in English discourse. English speakers won’t even do an immigrant the favor or correcting his faulty English, It seems to be something that is not done, in our culture. In German it’s actually quite recent, until 10 years ago or so they were much more likely to just look at you like you farted in the middle of a wedding but if you tried to pry out “what did I do wrong?” they’d just backpedal like they were being attacked. I blame it on us immigrants from Southern Parts asking “please correct me, how am I going to improve if you don’t?” because yes, for us it’s a normal thing to do. I have been part of some of these conversations myself. FTR, the Indians were happy to correct the English of their Spanish supervisors (they do correct each other as well). My Brazilian coworker who just moved here from Italy was extremely proud that his children could correct his Spanish after just a couple of weeks here. ---
**Author:** ![Mops](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mops/32/16494_2.png) [@Mops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mops)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/51 "2016-05-09T12:15:31Z")
> [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](#): > > … the calamitous moment that Mlle Prendergast, our teacher, revealed that the French words for “seventy,” “eighty” and “ninety” were “soixante-dix,” “quatre-vingt” and “quatre-vingt-dix” (“sixty-ten,” “four-twenty” and “four-twenty-ten.”) > > That was the moment that I decided the entire French nation was _nuts_. The following term, I abandoned Mlle P and signed up for German instead. The Germans, I figured, despite the humanitarian failings in their history, were a rational people who could be relied upon not to perpetrate absurdities such as “quatre-vingt-dix,” and so it proved. > > … I wonder if longer German numbers made you regret that choice, though. For example, the number 123456 is _one hundred twenty three thousand four hundred fifty six_ in English (sequence 1-2-3-4-5-6) while in German it’s _ **ein** hundert __drei__ und __zwan__ zigtausend __vier__ hundert __sechs__ und__fünf_\*zig\* (sequence 1-3-2-4-6-5). I consider that mental jumping back and forth a PITA when reading out numbers of more than two digits and that’s in my native language. ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/52 "2016-05-09T12:31:52Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > You know what else isn’t needed? Plural marking. English even does without it some of the time: One deer or five deer, it’s the same word. Just get rid of the concept entirely, like Japanese does, and the language will be simpler for it. > > Except that isn’t true, is it? Japanese can talk generically of cars or train conductors without making irrelevant reference to their number, but that means it’s just that much more involved when you want to specify that there were, indeed, multiple cars parked there, not just the one. > > It’s a general rule, really: **Changing grammar doesn’t change complexity, just shifts it around.** This assumes _natural_ languages, of course, _all_ of which are “impure” by any standard and _all_ of which evolved by popular usage over millennia. (Corollary: If you think a given natural language is pure and logical, you either have a half-baked conlang or a grossly incomplete knowledge of the language.) Only toy languages have complexity you can simply remove. When I was studying German in high school, there happened to be an exchange student from Germany attending our school at the time. He would often visit our class to give us a native speaker’s insights, talk about German culture, serve as a conversation partner, et cetera. One day someone asked him, “Don’t you wish that German didn’t have all those genders? Wouldn’t that make it much easier?” Now keep in mind, this guy was quite fluent in English, so he had to be very well aware of how a language could get along without grammatical gender. But his answer was, “No. Without genders, I wouldn’t know how to talk.” Even having experienced a genderless language, his perception was that grammatical gender was quite normal and _necessary_ when speaking German. Based on at least that one bit of anecdotal evidence, you can’t just remove gender and expect native speakers to like it. ---
**Author:** ![Dervorin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Dervorin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dervorin)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/53 "2016-05-09T15:18:03Z")
> [@Sangahyando](#): > > I.e. 70 / 80 / 90 = “septante / octante / nonante”. I seem to remember reading or hearing (can give no cite – sorry) that this was true of France as well, up to the Revolution of 1789. The Revolutionaries decided – for reasons which presumably made sense to them – to re-name the numbers concerned; and it stuck. > [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](#): > > In middle school, I used to get A’s in French. I enjoyed the lessons. Until, that is, the calamitous moment that Mlle Prendergast, our teacher, revealed that the French words for “seventy,” “eighty” and “ninety” were “soixante-dix,” “quatre-vingt” and “quatre-vingt-dix” (“sixty-ten,” “four-twenty” and “four-twenty-ten.”) > > That was the moment that I decided the entire French nation was _nuts_. The following term, I abandoned Mlle P and signed up for German instead. The Germans, I figured, despite the humanitarian failings in their history, were a rational people who could be relied upon not to perpetrate absurdities such as “quatre-vingt-dix,” and so it proved. The Swiss, in their infinite wisdom, have stuck with the much simpler older system and count septante, huitante, nonante and then onwards to cent. And apparently they get mocked for this in France. Life just isn’t fair sometimes. If they had just a bit more sense, though, they would drop the gender and all the irregular verbs as well, but apparently that’s just crazy talk. 😃 I have long been amused by Jerome K. Jerome’s books, and this quote seems apt: > [@Three Men on the Bummel](#): > > In the course of the century, I am inclined to think that Germany will solve her difficulty in this respect by speaking English. Every boy and girl in Germany, above the peasant class, speaks English. Were English pronunciation less arbitrary, there is not the slightest doubt but that in the course of a very few years, comparatively speaking, it would become the language of the world. All foreigners agree that, grammatically, it is the easiest language of any to learn. A German, comparing it with his own language, where every word in every sentence is governed by at least four distinct and separate rules, tells you that English has no grammar. A good many English people would seem to have come to the same conclusion; but they are wrong. As a matter of fact, there is an English grammar, and one of these days our schools will recognise the fact, and it will be taught to our children, penetrating maybe even into literary and journalistic circles. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/54 "2016-05-09T16:09:07Z")
**snerk** That Jerome. > [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](#): > > **Yllaria** , George R.R. Martin would seem to agree with you, as he’s called one of the giants in his novels “Wun-Wun.” He named the character after one of his favorite American football players, whose jersey number is 11. I read an article, once, that opined that Chinese children learned arithmetic more quickly than English-speaking children because the Chinese numeric nomenclature was completely logical, while English required more effort to deal with the vocabulary, slowing the math learning down. Not a journal article and they could have been talking completely out of their hat. Don’t remember any of the Chinese they listed. > [@Sattua](#): > > I studied Swahili as my “non-traditional” language in grad school. Its grammar is a thing of beauty, the apotheosis of agglutination. Elegant beyond imagination. > > Unfortunately, its nouns have fourteen genders. :eek::eek::eek: > [@Nava](#): > > . . . My Brazilian coworker who just moved here from Italy was extremely proud that his children could correct his Spanish after just a couple of weeks here. I know someone who tried to learn Cambodian from in-laws in a small immigrant community in the US. Eventually she gave up on getting more than middling bad at speaking it because she was older and quite gray-haired, and they could not get around the social rule that you do not correct your elders. ---
**Author:** ![TwoCarrotSnowman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/twocarrotsnowman/32/15879_2.png) [@TwoCarrotSnowman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwoCarrotSnowman)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/55 "2016-05-09T18:24:25Z")
> [@Sampsiceramos](#): > > Nobody expects English to make sense, given that the language has essentially developed through a time-tested process of mugging other languages in a dark alley and rifling through their pockets for spare grammar and vocabulary. I haven’t read the whole thread, but I wanted to say that this is Pratchett-esque, which is the highest honour I can bestow on a sentence. Well done. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/56 "2016-05-09T19:16:27Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > Yes. Sami is a Uralic language, like Finnish. > [@MrDibble](#): > > Not an Indo-European language. Yes, I know both of those facts, but wouldn’t it make more sense to establish that gender is more of a Indo-European “thing” not common in other families first? And my point about Sami was that they make up less than 0.1% of the population of Sweden, so it’s odd that that much territory would be covered. Even in the area marked, I think the majority of the population is still Swedish. The light blue in Norway makes more sense, although even there they are less than 1%. > [@TwoCarrotSnowman](#): > > I haven’t read the whole thread, but I wanted to say that this is Pratchett-esque, which is the highest honour I can bestow on a sentence. Well done. 🙂 A guy named [James Nicoll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll) apparently. ---
**Author:** ![UncleRojelio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unclerojelio/32/3160_2.png) [@UncleRojelio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleRojelio)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/57 "2016-05-09T19:31:01Z")
I can’t pin down an exact WTF moment for my Spanish learning experience but I did decide to switch from a major in an BA program which required 2 years of foreign language to a major in an BS program which only required one year (which I had by the skin of my teeth). It required that I take more math classes but I was glad to do that instead. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/58 "2016-05-09T19:40:42Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Yes, I know both of those facts, but wouldn’t it make more sense to establish that gender is more of a Indo-European “thing” not common in other families first? > > And my point about Sami was that they make up less than 0.1% of the population of Sweden, so it’s odd that that much territory would be covered. Even in the area marked, I think the majority of the population is still Swedish. The light blue in Norway makes more sense, although even there they are less than 1%. This is a pretty common form of dishonesty on language maps as a solution to the problem that otherwise, they can’t map as many languages. Edit: Most Indo-European language maps are ridiculously ahistorical in order to include the Anatolian languages. Gender _is_ more of an Indo-European thing. Many languages have different, more-or-less arbitrary classes of nouns. **Sattua** mentioned Swahili with 14. “Gender” is generally used for the IE languages, which tend to have two or three genders. [noun class(-ifier) vs. gender](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Noun_classes_versus_grammatical_gender) I’d disagree that English doesn’t have gender. Both men and women get upset when you refer to them as “it.” I’d argue we have three in the singular: inanimate (“it,” the old neuter), masculine animate (“he”), feminine animate (“she”), and soon none in the plural. (We used to distinguish “waitresses” from “waiters,” but that’s old-fashioned now.) It’s just that when gender matches biology, it’s 100% predictable. Occasionally, ships and cats are feminine (odd, because “ship” was neuter in Old English and “boat” was masculine), but not usually. In fact, I think that’s part of the problem for language learners. If we truly had no gender, we’d just understand that as an extra bit of (to us) unnecessary information to learn about foreign-language nouns. As it stands, though, we get angry at the “lack of logic.” ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/59 "2016-05-09T21:06:33Z")
I took five years of French, earning straight A’s. Learned a bunch of different ways to form the past tense, (in French, passe’ compose’) no problem. Then in the fifth year, our teacher said we were going to start reading French novels. That’s when I found out about passe’ simple. See, in French literature, they’ve got a whole new way of putting things in the past tense, which isn’t what I’d spent four years learning and has, as far as I can tell, no rules. You just have to memorize each verb’s passe’ simple form by brute force. I did it, somehow. But I didn’t take French in college, as I’d planned to. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/60 "2016-05-09T21:29:29Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > Most languages are consistently spoken with greater grammatical precision than English, even by children. A person speaking Spanish or German or French will be corrected immediately if he makes a grammatical mistake while speaking. But many conversational users of English make a grammatical error in almost every complete sentence, and if anybody notices, nobody remarks on it. Americans take it as a grave nitpiick by a pedant, if someone corrects them for saying “I haven’t took no money”. (Many languages are rich in slang words, but using slang is not the same as making grammatical errors.) That’s more of a matter of politeness, not a matter of linguistics. I mean, someone who would say “I haven’t took no money” would almost certainly be thought of as some kind of bumpkin or from the ghetto, and probably also considered to be functionally illiterate. But why correct them in normal conversation? They’re not going to change, and you come across like the biggest pedantic asshole ever. And that’s not limited to Americans; having some French asshole tell you that you asked where the bathroom is wrong is infuriating, and made me want to just go piss in the corner of his restaurant out of spite, instead of finding the bathroom I’d asked him for. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312.md?page=4)