What irritates you the most with your own language?

(American) English: Inflammable vs flammable vs non-flammable.

Ambiguously used words like "biweekly". Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.

Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.

How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as "hundred-five-and-eighty" (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.

It's not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language...

If you write "of" instead of "have" or "'ve" you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.

Incidentally, when did people start saying "on accident"? It's by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.

With that out of the way... English isn't a language, it's five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.

Edit: With regards to OP, "a cookbook" and "to cook the books" are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD

The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.

That second example is..... Wow.

In French they fucking have the same word for "no more" and "more", and only differs in pronounciation of the last letter:

"J'ai plus de pommes" pronounced as "j'ai plu de pommes" means "I have no more apples" (nobody says the "ne" particle)

"J'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" pronounced as "j'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" means "I have more apples (than you)"

Which is even worse because usually last letter is not pronounced, so that makes it an exception to the rule

Not my native language, but the one I speak the most is (American) English.

So many homophones-words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling such as knight/night, altar/alter, ail/ale, isle/aisle/I’ll.

Also homographs-words with same spelling but different meaning and/or pronunciation like minute, bass, capital, wind, moped.

So confusing for people trying to learn English and also for people that actually speak it

The four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Akkusative with their accompanying articles. It makes learning German as a second language a nightmare and even native speakers struggle with it a lot.

What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.

I hate that it's an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like "once".

But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it's not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.

"Do you mind ..." has been mis-answered for so long that yes means no. It's hard to explain because written down, yes/no have different meanings, but when speaking to someone it depends on tone, context, and body language.

"Do you mind if I take that seat"

"No" "Yeah" depending on tone can both mean, "I'm fine with you taking that seat". Most people will add on to make the intention clearer like, "Yeah, go ahead" but not always. Absolutely crazy.

Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask "how are you?" or "what is your name?" without using the other person's gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our "you" is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).

Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.

My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It's quite difficult to understand the written form if you've only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.

To compare it to English, it would be like saying "Where are you?" to someone over the phone, but then having to send them "Wherefore art thou?" as a text.

The word "colonel"

English having no consistent spelling, grammar or pronunciation.

The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn't like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like "should'a" is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4

We are English speaking and as someone raising a kid it's really difficult at their age to teach and explain all the words that are spelled the same but can sound different. She loves to learn so I try my best. I wrote a sentence down that she likes to show people and read to them just to start but always asks why it is the way it is.

"My daughter liked when I read her a book the other day so I make it a habit to read 1 book a day with her"

That's the sentence she's practicing. There is a lot more to get through though.

German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date.....we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!

"-sts" and "sps" et al

e.g. ghosts, frosts, wasps, clasps, flasks, basks.

Just a stupid sound.

Inconsistent sounds for the same spelling, as in: tough, cough, through, thorough, bough, dough.

All those stupid English place names: Cholmondeley, Leicester, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.

German here, we have the exact same issue. It's driving me crazy.

I speak Spanish and being 100% honest about it i love it, the only shitty thing is the fact that the dialects vary a lot (also i kinda hate the tilde).

In Dutch, the proper way to say it's e.g., 8h30 is "half nine".

Makes it extra confusing when they say the same in (British) English for 9h30. So short for half past nine.

You wouldn't pronounce €8.50 as "half nine Euro".

Even worse: the correct way of saying 8h40 is "10 past half nine".

Any number higher than twelve is said the wrong way around, for example instead of ninety-two we say two-and-ninety.

Kids split words in American, too; or they join the words. We see examples like:

• Incase
• aswell
• shutdown (wrong as verb)
• backup(wrong as verb)

Or wrong splits:

• back up (wrong as noun)
• under stand

Or just plain dumb:

• emails
• till (instead of 'til)

I wish I could say it was better in English, but we're being dragged down with them.

(English)

So many people treat the letter S like it's special, regardless of why it's there.

Instead of Gus's, they'll say Gus' when they are talking about a possession of the singular Gus.

If the S is part of a name, it doesn't activate the plural-possessive rule for dropping the S after the apostrophe.

Burns's poems
Samus's starship
Kass's theme

In English, lack of second-person plural, aside from a dozen regionalisms: y'all, yinz, youse, etc.

No distinction between inclusive & exclusive 'we': if I say "we've got to go now", do I expect you to come?

Unnecessarily generated pronouns. I know 'they/them' has been used for individuals for ages, but I still find it awkward. I wish we just used one set of ungendered pronouns for every specific person.

In general I think Spanish is a well formed language without (or at least not much) crazy shit.

But I still don't know why we have the same fucking word for weather and time. While using the same word for different meanings is ok, these two are ridiculously common concepts used a lot and it's not hard to get into situations where it's hard to know which is which. Absolutely stupid.

dutch: our accent is the absolute worst thing.

When Swedish translators try to create a Swedish name for an English character it always ends up sounding silly. Batman was named "läderlappen" (the leather patch) for example.

Yesterday I heard that they translated Pennywise the clown as "clownen Snåljåpen", which I guess gets the literal meaning across but also makes him feel like more of a stingy old man than an actual villain.

OP, I appreciate the examples. Thanks to them, I see what you mean, and agree.

Briefly, I was thinking “I don’t want to read a word that’s as long as a sentence, no wonder people break things up”, but that wasn’t what you meant at all.

For English, what irritates me is not knowing what to do with possessive apostrophes, especially if the word already ends in “s”. I know I’ve gotten it wrong many times, but oh well.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying "this Wednesday" on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, "this whateverday" refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it's past or future. "Next whateverday" refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

"This Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

"Next Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

The main problem I have with English is that spoken English and written English are two different languages. Inflection and emphasis and even volume aren't carried by the Latin alphabet. We can do things like this sometimes but even that is limited.

I mean, how many of us have had English teachers tell us we can't write essays the way we speak.

Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you've encountered a classic "sær skrivingsfeil". (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called "særskrivingfeil", "sær skrivingsfeil" means "odd/weird writing error" and is itself a mistake of the "særskrivingsfeil" type.)

Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you've mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don't love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don't love it there is a perception that the langauge is "limited" or "boring". I'd love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I've come across aren't very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I'll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook's series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I'm talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn't put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren't as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that's what the genre "sounds like". I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.

English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.

In Russian to say "I saw a video" sounds like "Ia VIDel VIDeo" which just sounds stupid too. Everytime I say it I have to rollback, find a synonym, and repeat the sentence in less stupid way

Oh no, the most I’ve dealt with a similar problem is knowing when to use porque vs. por que in Spanish. I still don’t know

All the French that's embedded in it. Stupid Normans making it sound weird if I go to a restaurant and order pig.

Actually, I find the french and double dose of viking influence quite fascinating. English etymology is a wild ride!

So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name. In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.

UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.

I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care. I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.

We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.

There are some good things. The time forms can be pretty fun to use.

All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.

Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.

It's becoming more common in English for people to say "whenever" when it should just be "when." It's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear it used wrong like that

In German, the formal address is the same as the third-person plural, just capitalized. This can lead to ambiguities when talking.

The fact that it can be read so many different ways depending on the accent. I have a different accent than those around me, and it's inevitable to feel expectations violated.

Apparently people also find it funny when I say the word "envelope". "Hey it's Leni, say envelope" they might say, maybe with me responding "guys, I'm not a freaking circus seal" like Jango Fett has a secret pet in denial.

English.

When we use a new loan word that we already have a word for.

When companies refuse to regionalize products for American English despite our having far more native English speakers than the next three countries, two of which gave English as a secondary language. None of them is England - they're in 6th place.

The absurd number of accents and dialects. Fortunately the Internet is helping grind away at this part. Standardization helps prevent misunderstandings.

Amazon has a fantastic course on languages that I've almost completed and it blew my mind. Just seeing it laid out, how languages evolved over time.

Chief chivalry chameleon

All borrowed ( swiped? ) from French, as French changed. So we snagged the terms in mid-evolution :)

Did you know Hyrogliphs are sounds, to be read aloud just like the Roman Alphabet?!

“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”

Interesting idiom in English: To cook the books

This means to do dishonest accounting and make it look good for auditing. Might be two sets of books or similar fuckery.

I assume that "Koke boker" means to cook books physically on a stove or in an oven. But the way you stated it I might mis-interpret it to be dishonest accounting.

Why the fuck are the weekdays called "Second", "Third" and so on? Pretty stupid honestly.

I love that English has a way of marking nouns/verbs in a sentence but I hate that when written it's completely erased (although sometimes a comma can help) "The old man the ship" threw me for like 5 minutes before I realised that man can be a verb.

English's acceptance of old world spellings and superfluous letters. Everything should be spelled phonetically and consistently, and we should change the alphabet to get rid of confusion. Here's my suggestions:

1. Everything is spelled phonetically. No exceptional letter rules, and names are included.
2. Vowels change sound with an accent, not a silent e or modifier. So Kate is now Kāt. Vote is Vōt.
3. C can always be replaced with an S or K, so now it makes the CH sound. So cat is kat, chase is cās.
4. X is bullshit and doesn't mean anything, so we'll use the Mayan version and now it makes the SH sound.
5. Y can always be replaced with an i or e, so we'll go old English and now it makes the TH sound.
6. The -ed and -er sounds don't need the E. It doesn't do anything.
7. Double letters are unnecessary , so now the vowel sound of U,(ū) makes the oo sound. The original sound is now ēū, as in kēūkumbr.
8. G is now a vowel. Put a line on top for the J sound.
9. Since j is now unnecessary, it makes the French J sound, or DZh. We don't us it much but it's nice to have.
10. Since ū has changed, it can now replace W, ūic kan bē asīnd ā nū soūnd låtr az nēd bē.
11. Z is on thin fucking ice, but for now it'll replace soft s' where it's used. Or ēūzd, if ū ūil. It will be the difference between prōnoūns and prōnoūnz.

So naū anē budē kan prōnoūns anē ūrd imēdēetlē, and nō ūun ūil sā unuyr nām rong. Yis haz Ben mī Ted Tok.

Hmm, could probably use a long a letter. Tok doesn't feel right. Maybe the French ê?

I'm not sure about the NG sound. Maybe J is also a vowel, and G accented is NG? I'm open to suggestions. Sugjestxunz.

Edit: also dates. It should be YYYY/MM/DD. Categories should always go from least to most specific.

On that subject, even though it's not language specific, we should have thirteen four week months with names that make sense. Every date of every year is the same day, planning ahead and due dates are simple. It makes 364 days, so new years day and leap year are extra special holiday days, nobody works or buys anything. If you have an emergency on one of those days, and can't make it til Sunday the first, yo either call an acquaintance who can help, or lose and die. Sorry mate. Buy three days worth of food on Saturday the 28th of Thirtember. Hope the power doesn't go out. Or move the free day to July, which is now called September.

Honestly English has a lot of little things that I don't like about English but I can only imagine how you make the distinction between "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" and "prinsessepult i vinkel" when speaking and does that phenomenon effect other speaking situations at least with my home state our accent involves giving up on pronunciation halfway through the word so you can just listen for when centince has definition and transitions to mumbling to hear when one word ends and the other starts

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I kind of wish we didn't have gendered pronouns in English. So much fuss when we could just be using the same words for everyone like some other languages.

The words "funnily" "reasonableness" and "impactful".

Even though they're apparently all real words, they are clunky and make one sound unintelligent when there are more elegant synonyms available like "comically/humorously" "reason" (no idea why it needs the "-ness" to be a noun when it already is) and "significant".

English is not my native but I hate how they just assemble bunch of words together to make a single adjective out of it, and you can't know that until the very end. It gets obvious how stupid this is if I replace all whitespace with commas.

A desktop, computer, environment.

Air, missile.

Air, plane.

Pocket, record, player.

Water, beer, pong, table, thong. Okey I made this one up

My native language is English.

What irritates me most is the whole thing. The language is so incredibly contextual that it is a pain in the ass once you learn something less contextual. It seems deeply infected with all the parts of English/American culture that I hate. It feels like you cannot just say what you mean, you have to dance in circles and obscure the point. Theres no need for it to be so complicated.

It is not tied to a certain language. But I fucking h when I rhyme words by acciden

Spanish has genderneutral terms and they are not the default, people are trying to move away from defaulting to masc pronouns but it's been hard to get everyone on board