Did you think English was an easy language?
Can you read these right the first time?
The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present. 
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Let's face it, English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England nor French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital, ship by truck and send cargo by ship, have noses that run and feet that smell? 
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
PS. – Why doesn't Buick rhyme with quick?
You lovers of the English language might enjoy this:
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is UP.
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or toward the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends. We use something to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers, and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
We could go on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP; so: Time to shut UP!
Oh… one more thing: What are the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night? U-P
PS: BTW I found this message in my inbox this morning and it gave me a chuckle, thought I'd share it with you. hope it brought smiles to you too..
You gave me a good chuckle. Thanks. English is a hard language to understand and learn. It is no wonder people are always being misunderstood.
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This was funny! I’m glad to see that English is really a hard language. I always wondered how you make the difference between words which sound alike but have different meaning. Now I know: you don’t :)
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OMG you made me sooo dizzy! LMAO! This is great!
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Pearl, that was a great post, it really made me think. It’s nice to see something different. Keep up the great work.
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Emma – When I got this email, I instantly thought I should post it to share with everyone, then stopped thinking its not blogging related but then thought exactly what you say here that blogosphere is so filled with blogging related stuff, its getting to be boring … :) thanks for commenting Emma… tc and stay in touch
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@Lee – Im glad it made you laugh :) you are so right – there are so many expressions that many people don’t understand for this very reason… and communication gaps happen
Simonne – LOL English sure has some very confusing rules
Mig: hope you are feeling better now… take care and I’m coming over in a sec…
Hahah this is confusing me. You can’t think to hard about English otherwise you go insane =) I’m letting the chips fall where they may with my English skills…
Oh, these are fun. I love all the different pronounciations and meanings for the same spellings of words. They always make me wonder what someone was thinking – like why couldn’t we have just come up with a totally new word for the new meaning? Was there a lack of creativity? A limit on the number of words we could have in our dictionary? LOL
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I love this, I’ve seen bits and pieces of it in other places before but never the whole thing. I agree, English is crazy and I don’t see how foreigners can learn it as a second language. Must drive them insane, especially with all the double meanings and regular/irregular verbs.
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Thank you for staying with me guys… and sorry for the late response… hope you are having a nice day
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Having never mastered a foreign language I wonder how others can master English as a second language – I am in awe and admiration at their skill.
On top of all this there are the words pronounced the same but with different spelling – eg two, too to and the owl sound “to wit to woo” or is that “two whit too who???
Now if people ask “what’s UP” with me I will just tell them the asylum is full with other English speakers and I could not get in.
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haha That is funny Sue…
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That was great! I might add that to one of my blogs.
Thanks for posting it!
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thanks for commenting Sarah…
Very much interesting post. English is a complicated language. :-)
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I had to blow a big gasser in the elevator at work yessturday. My boss came in right after, gave me a fierce look and immediately gave me a raise.
English is difficult enough for the English (GB) until you mix it with English (US) example, tap=faucet, boot=trunk, bonnet=hood, footpath=sidewalk, crisps=chips, chips=French fries etcetera, I’m off now this is giving me a headache.
To be a finger isn’t a profession, which is why a finger doesn’t/can’t fing.
What a neat post! My youngest is learning to read, and it makes me realize how much of the language you take for granted.
BTW, I thought that Buick and Quick do in fact rhyme.
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I didn’t have to think English was an easy language. It was all I had, and my mama corrected my mistakes quite severely. Consequently, it seemed easy enough to me.
Spanish was much easier.
Mandarin is impossible (for me). I can’t get the inflections.
I love the complexity and nuances of our language. I love how we spell words with an extra U, and how “Aluminium” is different from the American spelling. I personally believe that the complexity of this language gave rise to a nation of geniuses, the people who put Britain on the map, like Brunel. We have dumbed down our language in recent times, and who have we got to show for it? Pete fucking Doherty? Where is our next Brunel? Where is the next Shakespeare? They aren’t coming out of Britain, I’ll tell you this now. We’re a nation of thick, authority despising jackasses who’s idea of a contribution to society is videotaping people slapping each other.
Rant over ^^ Good post!
The lying Language. Did You Understand that “LB” will be read as “pounds”
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So hilarious! I am going to share this piece with my friends (both native speakers and those who study Enlish as second language). Surprisingly, sometimes the latter have better understanding than the former!
Thank you very much, Pearl!
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Please attribute properly. This was written by Richard Lederer, and nowhere does his name appear on the text you lifted and posted as your own.
There’s more weird pronounciations: “He wanted to record a world record on tape, but when he noticed after a minute that the improvement was only minute, he switched it off.”
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There is one more: Please check the cheque from the Czech.
That’s a good one about the Czech! 3 in a row!
bimosaurus, that never made sense to me either, but I thought it was a throw back from england. Once I visited the mayflour, and they listed the measurements of supplies. The units of measure were really complicated and strange. I think “the lying language” may be a little harsh.
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Man is that embarissing :-)
As it was posting I realized that I typed mayflour instead of Mayflower. I guess I’m more of a baker than a botanist.
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Argh! Then to mis-spell embarrassing. Note to self, start proofreading what you type. At least I spelled botanist correctly.
Mike Scott’s last blog post..Early Cryptonomicon review
LOL, I tried but could not read all of those lines properly the first time. Thanks.
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Hmmmm… interesting huh… i like it… i know how to speak in english but i find it hard.. hahaha really funny.. :)
Who said English was an easy language??? Moi je n’ai jamais dit ca!!! Og det kommer jeg aldrig til at sige…
What about stuff that gets used UP?
The quirks of the English Language…
As a former ESL teacher, this article is especially true in describing the frustrations of the English language….
laughter rhymes with rafter and daughter rhymes with water.
thank you guys for taking the time to stop by and comment! glad you all had fun reading it…
I just stumbled to this page and that was great. I also know of another great English tongue-twisting stumbler of a poem known as “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
Yeah, I started realizing this when I was teaching adult Spanish and English as a Second Language.
Examples:
bank and bank (place where you store your money, side of a river)
laugh vs. light — if laugh is pronounced laff, why isn’t light pronounced lift?
But it’s that way in Spanish too…..
muñeca is wrist and doll… ???? HUH? What is the relation THERE???
There are tons more, but you get the idea…
What a wonderful language!
How dull it would be if all the complexities were ironed out.
english is not a hard language. the most other languages are a lot more difficult.I´m not the best in english,but I´m learning english,russian and hungarian,and speak fluently german and croatian.I can only say that every of the other mentioned language is more difficult
What’s particularly hard about German, as far as I can tell, is that most of the verbs you need on an everyday basis are irregular verbs. The uncommon ones are often regular but the ones that you use constantly are not. Then again, that’s the same for English: to go, to be, to have… all irregular verbs.
Another thing that’s mind-boggling for English native speakers are the three genders in German, and what makes them even harder is that many of them are just plain arbitrary, like door, chair, tree, … all of which come with a (male or female) gender assigned in German, none of which make much sense.
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This is, quite honestly, one of the best posts I’ve read on any blog in years.
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I was able to read all the lines without any trouble. I did have to ponder the meaning of the row sentence, I wasn’t sure if I was pronouncing it right or if there was another use for the word that I was not familiar with, as it stands I left it at row. Truthfully I don’t understand your trouble with up. It’s a wonderful and clearly versatile word who’s many implications help the English speaking populous determine when things need to be brought to attention, increased in temp, secured, or made open.
I could go on and on, in fact I could likely find a logical reason for every one of its uses, one that my generation is keenly familiar with is the 1-up when gaining a “life” in a video game. Furthermore at the end you just use up as many times as you could conceive to, to stress the point that we as English users can use it a lot.
One could make a case that English in all its eccentricities quizzical qualities, is proof in itself that if you can be called articulate that you are a master of the the stupefying and befuddling.
Word.
RMC
I was having trouble getting my son to close the car window, so in the end I said “I want the window up – U P up”.
He looked at me and said, “No I don’t, I P down”. He’s 35 now, and still a smart alec!
For me, as an Serbian, English is difficult to learn, because our language is simple to write and to read. Every voice has one letter. We wrote as we speaks and read as is written. No spell troubles. In some grammatical matters Serbian language is easier to learn, in some are not.
Two points, though I know they’re small compared to the rest of the language: eggplants used to look like eggs (I’ve seen the heirloom plants and the name make so much more sense now). Those purple things are aubergines, and aubergines and eggplants are not quite the same thing. Also, hamburgers are named that because they’re from Hamburg Germany (-er being a German suffix used much like the -er in “New Yorker”, or the -an in “Chicagoan”).
And the main reason English is so messed up is that it doesn’t have a single source. French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian all come from Latin; Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic have been they way they are since the beginning of time, it sometimes seems; while English is a mutt. We get Saxon, French, Gaelic and Norse mixed in with the scholars’ need to throw around Latin and Greek, plus words with the same root will enter usage at different times from sightly different places, and it’s no wonder it’s so dang hard to understand.
Anyway, thanks for letting a history major and etymology fan ramble. It’s a fun post.
As a Speech Language Pathologist for the most concrete language learners in the world, children with autism, I have noticed how hard many words are but this brought a new word to my attention. I guess I only teach the directional meaning intentionally. It would take forever to teach all these meanings.
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check out “up” (and any other word) here–a very cool site that shows the relationships between different meanings of a word:
http://www.visuwords.com/
Up in almost all phrases where it seems nonsensical is. Wake up. Wake. Call up. Call. Think up. Think. Superfluous positivism, as well as slang, at it’s best. What time is it now? What time is it? What is the time?
It (the concept of grammatical error) is simply an improper abuse of slang.
Give it up or give it away? Up, up and away!
The English language doesn’t need to make grammatical sense because the people who speak it are(n’t) morons. Grammatical errors in a sentence, do not, I repeat do not, mean that the word has an infinitive quality. If the definition of a word must alter itself to make sense, then the sentence itself is in err. Up isn’t special, merely vague at best.
Swear words work on the same principle. That is why they are faux pas. Not because they express anger. It is because in a moment of emotional involvement, words leave you, so, sometimes things get thrown in (usually vague terms) that don’t belong.
So if you happen to write something containing ‘it’ or ‘up’ or any other variant of this plague, destroy the sentence. Start again. Unless, of course it is in conversation, you don’t want your characters coming as wooden pompous jerks would you?
=)
English is _not_ hard in comparison to the other languages out there. There are approximately 7,000 current human languages. For instance, in Chinese there are thousands of characters that must be known in order to read the newspaper. Additionally, it is tonal, and one tone can make the meaning of a word change. In Arabic, there are 27 different dialects. If you only know the standard, and you go to Egypt or Morocco, you will notice how the letters are switched around.
Knowing just English is not exactly as amazing, when in most other countries, people can speak three, four, or more languages.
pretty easy but I got tripped up on dessert
English is my native tongue so, of course, it does not seem hard for me. :>)
I am absolutely in love with this! I’m going to post it on my own blog, if you don’t mind, and link back to you of course – it’s fascinating! :D I actually read all those sentences out loud, and no, I didn’t get them all right from the first try :D
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[...] came across this awesome blog post yesterday, which has gotten me thinking about my own relationship with the English language. When I was [...]
Since when is ‘index’ an english word.
English has grown, from many other languages. Many languages have noses that run and the ’smell’ in smelly feet is not the action but the result of smelling.
Granted, many inconsistencies excist. But don’t make your story inconsistent. Inconsistency is the trademark of a language that has developed, not specifically of English.
Of course I still think english is an easy language, that doesn’t make any sense… I’m french but I speak fluent english, I learned it mainly by watching t.v. , You just used the same words but with different meanings, it’s not really hard, most other language do that in a greater extend. try to speak french now, trust me its harder.
I almost forgot the seal that seals the Golden Seal.
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to speak – badly. It is one of the most difficult to speak well. At the Defense Language institute, French is taught in 24 weeks. That is the shortest class length of any language taught there. Shorter than German (37 weeks), any Slavic language (47 weeks) Korean, Chinese and all Arabic Dialects (47 weeks). As a teaching point, someone who spoke English fluently would capitalize the proper name of the language and instead of “most other language do that in a greater extend” would have said “most other languages do that to a greater extent.” So much for fluency…
English is retardedly easy.
[...] English is not an easy language, but I notice that people who learn it as adults are often better at catching these differences. [...]
Well I think English is the toughest language to speak but pleasant to learn and droll to use because if we see a fish in the sea it would create confusion as see and sea. English language helps to make person perfect. So learn English with fun.
To be honost, I was born in Canada, and am 13 years old. I STILL get confused with english, and I have been speaking it all of my life. I always get tongue tied when I try to talk, and it is kind of funny xD. So, no way! English is the hardest language ever! Haha, I always wonder why I attempt to learn a DIFFERENT language, when I already have troubles with this one xDDD.
Haha, this is not meant to offende anyone but English is incredibly easy language to learn.
In 2 years i can speak and write fuently, without any complications or mistakes. No wonder its so widely used, its so damn easy. Any book writen in English just feels so empty.
Also writing down the most complicated bits of English language isnt gonna convince anyone that it’s hard, and its not very likely that anyone will use those phrases anywhere but a book.
If you think English is hard, I’d like to see what you think of Russian or Chinese languages :)
I love this post.
My native language is German, which is also very confusing in its own way. I also speak a bit French, Spanish and Italian and I’m quite good at Latin and Classic Greek. I guess it’s always the same: The more you know, the more you see that you don’t understand certain things.
I’ve been learning English for about twelve years now and I’m currently preparing to take the CPE test. I’m very glad to see I’m not the only one who is sometimes struggling to get through all the small wonders of the English tongue. If you just look at the morphological stuff, English seems to be simple. Take a look at syntax, prepositions and phrasal verbs and you’re gonna need a stiff drink.
I have read this twice and I still find it to be inanely stupid and childish.
And French fries are called such because of the way they’re cooked.
Same with French toast (Which may have come from Belgium, but, Belgium and France are not the same place.)
That’s right, there’s no egg in eggplant…nor is there an aub in aubergine.
I’d just like to point out that while, yes, everything you listed is, in fact, confusing, they are only so because people don’t bother to learn where words come from. For example:
boxing rings are square – “ring” also means “arena”, not just “circle”
nor ham in hamburger – “Hamburgers” are so named because they come from Hamburg, Germany
make amends but not one amend – this is because it is assumed that more than one thing needs to be reconciled in order to fix the situation
slim chance and a fat chance be the same – in the first case, they mean “a slim (small) chance that it will happen” and in the second, “a fat (large) chance that it won’t
As for things like “playing at a recital” vs. “reciting at a play” and “runny nose” and “smelly feet”… these things are called “idioms”. I suggest you revisit the 6th grade… English teachers are very fond of them there. Finally, idioms and irregularities in spelling rules (especially with past-tenses of verbs and plurals of nouns) are found in every language on earth. In fact, differing rules for forming the past-tense of a verb is institutionalized in a great many foreign languages, and is ubiquitous in the older languages (Old English, Old German, Old French, Latin, etc)… meaning, of course, the languages that all current languages stem from. It would be just as easy for a native German-speaker or a native French-speaker to do the same for their own languages.
The only reason that English *might* be more confusing (seriously, have you looked at Scandinavian languages? 20 times worse)is that its rule sets are made from several different origins, not one or two set linguistic traditions as in most languages.
ok this has me quite confused. think i might have to UP my reading skills. ha ha!
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What kind of stupidity is this? Almost half of the times you mentioned “up”, it was used in a consistent way. Some of the others were used in idiomic expressions (like “calling up” a friend), most uses of “up” were just flat out unnecessary and could be expressed with another word or verb.
Whoever said that English syntax is confusing needs to go back to their grammar books. English is my 4th language (Russian my first, Spanish and French my second and third) and I find that English syntax is quite consistent and logical.
Ha ha, as a non-native English speaker for 20 years now, you are making me laugh! It is true: English is not an easy language. But then again, it’s handy when you can speak it.
Ever tried Japanese?
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I used to until I I ended up with many international friends asking me questions about English. Many times all I could say was “i don’t know”. I felt better when I came to Japan and people told me the same thing about Japanese.
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English is a hard language! I think that it’s difficult to learn any language because you tend to try to apply the rules of your native language to the new language. English has a lot of rules, too!
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