If you’ve learned to speak fluent English, you must be a genius!
Pursue at your leisure, English lovers. Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn:
- 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.
- After a number of injections my jaw got number.
- 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?
There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France (surprise!).
Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. Quicksand works 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 two geese, so one moose, two meese? 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? Is it an odd, or an end?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? 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.
P.S. 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.
Reader Additions
mic PhedUSA: Why do we drive in parkways, and park in drive ways?
Heinz: If quizzes are quizzical, then what are tests?
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Reader’s Choice!
Like this joke? Here’s another one!
Tags: china, china jokes, chinglish, english, language
1 October 2006 at 6:08 am
interesting play of words.
but i can read the englihs language still!!!!!!
1 October 2006 at 7:32 am
ok. interesting.
Really liked the “If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?” part.
Good job.
Will be visiting often.
2 October 2006 at 4:28 am
I don’t want to throw a spanner in the works or anything, but “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is grammatical.
2 October 2006 at 10:23 am
hey det.
i must say your buffalo thing is absolutely correect. keep up the exelent grammar!
3 October 2006 at 7:52 am
Hey YS,
I made it over to your blog eventually!
I love it – many more visits from me coming up.
Be safe!
xx SP xx
27 December 2006 at 9:19 pm
Buick doesn’t rhyme with quick?
28 December 2006 at 3:05 am
you’re absolutely right.
i think i’ll change it then.
thanks a lot!
28 January 2007 at 8:16 am
[...] to enter a woman. Even a foreigner if dressed as a man.” Like this joke? Here’s another one! Explore posts in the same categories: language, [...]
23 March 2007 at 9:31 pm
Oh my fallin’ arches …no wonder my head was spinning in Grade III – why I almost failed my BLOCKS!!!!!!
23 March 2007 at 10:57 pm
English isn’t hard at all… these things will come naturally after one gets the basics down. Out of all the languages I know, English is probably the easiest..
25 March 2007 at 6:31 pm
Isn’t it crazy that in spite of all of that, English is still the lingua franca of the modern world? (and yes that was deliberate)
Most of those were stupid as advertised, but some of them have perfectly good reasons behind them, and others only apply in american english. It’s not a form of English, it’s a form of laziness.
So all go and learn Lojban
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
It’s the perfectly logical language where everything makes sense and nothing is ever ambiguous.
Good luck writing poetry in it. No great work of literature can exist without linguistic ambiguity. Imagine shakespeare without the beautiful double meanings.
Or the bible, the best selling book of all time. Not one sentence of that can only be read in one way. Seriously. Once you go back to the hebrew it all gets very confusing.
It is these sorts of things that make the english language great.
26 March 2007 at 2:27 pm
haha… ok. yes my friends talked to me about Lojban before.
it’s a very useful language… but the average time taken to learn it is about ++ 3 yrs
26 March 2007 at 9:13 pm
why do we drive on a parkway, and park in a driveway??
27 March 2007 at 1:43 pm
HAHA! Gd one! Shall add it in…
27 March 2007 at 9:14 pm
Sorry, but it made me laugh so much, when I was going through the comments left. The funniest one which made me laugh was groso! Err…You kinda spelt English wrong!!! Lol
29 March 2007 at 11:55 am
perhaps it was intentional… ?? what a parody
3 April 2007 at 12:13 am
If quizzes are quizzical, then what are tests? :/
3 April 2007 at 3:09 pm
haha… we’ve got another good one here
1 July 2007 at 12:09 pm
I think dove is incorrect, if a bird was to dive into a pond, you would say it dived into the pond rather thatn it dove into the pond. At least thats what you say in England.
And did you hear about the thing that is apparently from Cambridge? You konw, the tnihg wrehe tehy do tihs?
10 July 2007 at 7:28 am
oh my goodness,twisting my head..
22 July 2007 at 5:39 am
Chinese is still WAYYYYY more confusing
12 August 2007 at 5:08 am
Great Blog, keep up the good work!
23 September 2007 at 2:09 pm
[...] the world speak english? [Version 2] Due to overwhelming response from the blogosphere for this post, it’s time we have Version 2 of this [...]
1 October 2007 at 7:07 am
Well I think that some take this a little too seriously. Well done, made me laugh. It is so nice to wake up, switch on laptop and read something that will cheer my whole day up.
Thanks
Ian
29 March 2008 at 2:30 am
Naah, English is an easy language. Sure it has a couple tongue twisters, but… in Chinese, every sentence is a tongue twister.
1 September 2008 at 11:49 pm
I would cry if I had to learn English.
23 September 2008 at 2:12 pm
i learned English for 2 years and it was so easy
6 February 2009 at 2:01 pm
english is english
this is enough to say
8 June 2010 at 7:41 pm
hello my name is imane ilove study english please ican’t speking english hard
27 August 2010 at 3:29 pm
This is a GREAT list!! I teach English to kids, and it’s amazing how we forget the weirdness of so-called phonetics in our language! This should be up on the walls of every U.S. classroom!
19 April 2011 at 1:29 pm
The best part of the comments is reading posts absolutely riddled with spelling and grammatical errors from non-native speakers claiming English is oh so easy to learn.
30 June 2011 at 8:12 am
Congrats…… you have solved the riddle.
Why are English cultures superior to all other cultures?
Allow me to rephrase that… why can weight lifters lift heavier weights? Or why can runners run faster, or why can chess players out think?
Yes you now know why speaking any language aside from English should be ablished. The answer is Evolution.
English is the most evolved language and is spoken by the most evolved minds. English is the language of man.
25 December 2011 at 10:57 pm
kelakar…
[...]why can’t people from all over the world speak english? « hairlarious
[...]…
15 December 2012 at 11:20 am
The beau gave a fine bow to the girl with a bow in her hair while standing on the ship’s bow.
23 December 2012 at 4:20 pm
Bycott this language. Why do we need english as prime language. Your own language should be sufficient enough. If english people want to become local – they should learn other languages and not the opposite.
5 January 2013 at 11:27 pm
To be honest, as a foreigner, English was extremely easy to learn. Verb conjugations are minimal in complexity and nouns are not gendered. Pluralization, by and large, is simple. At first I struggled with contractions and past tense (what to use when); but there really isn’t that much to learn there.
The biggest difficulty in the language is that words are not pronounced they way they are spelled in many cases.
Try learning German or Russian and you’ll be welcome to true hell.
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