I have no idea why you do this, but if I wanted to do this in german the line would probably look like:

sie / ihr / ihre / ihren / ihrem / ihrer / ihres

That's a problem in poorly translated games for example where a variable (usually a name of a character or item) is embedded in static text and the programmer didn't think of more than two cases...

Also see: http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/german-articles-because-fuck-you-thats-why.jpg

Why do Germans love David Hasselhoff?

Because he made the wall come down. He says so at least...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgRJjLkYApI

Glad I never enrolled on those German classes, would've been way over my head. Simpler languages for me..

Pretty sure Bush Sr took credit for that. :P

Either way I think they were both wrong.

Now I'm all for replacing English with Finnish.

I would guess that people would only choose one or two forms of the corresponding pronoun (or perhaps article, if that makes more sense in the language in question) rather than listing every form, and people who speak the language would generally understand what's meant.

Of course, this brings up another question I have: Does it make sense to use the Neuter form when referring to a person, particularly if the person's gender is non-binary? (That form is something we don't have in English, so it's common for such people to prefer they/them pronouns (in other words, pronouns that are usually considered plural).)

Another question: In some languages (particularly romance languages like French and Spanish), nouns have grammatical gender (for example, according to Google Translate, in Spanish "table" is female but "desk" is male), and it seems reasonable to say that some nouns have different genders in different languages. For those who speak at least two languages of this sort, do you ever confuse the gender of nouns between the different languages?

Like English?

Excuse me, but English is *not* a simple language. I haven't had to learn it as a second language, but English is messy, with all sort of bizarre rules. For example, there's the wierd rule that i goes before e, except after c (but, of course, there are exceptions). Then they're are homophones, where you have words that sound the same but are spelt differently; it is very common, even among native speakers, for the wrong homophone to be used. (One thing to note: if we were to replace that last 'n' in "homophone" with a 'b', we end up with an entirely different word; it's the same part of speech, but it isn't even close to the same in meaning.)

English has all sorts of weird exceptions to its rules, and I would imagine that a foreign learner of English would have serious trouble with them. Is that accurate?

People speak Finish where I live and a lot of the street signs are in Finish.

I have no idea why I mentioned that. :P

Let's talk about pronunciation vs spelling...

You probably remember learning how to spell it, and that is in my opinion the most difficult aspect of English, although this may depend on which languages you've previously been exposed to. English spelling is a bit of a mess, seemingly very conservative, leading to numerous spelling rules living side by side as words enter the English language from various other languages. As a result there are numerous ways of spelling the same sound, and you often have to learn how to spell a word by rote memorisation, rather than being able to figure it out by how it sounds. There are also a lot of words in English, but this is less of a problem as most aren't used in daily speech. As far as grammar is concerned (which I tend to find the trickiest aspect of a language, save possibly from making certain sounds) I find English to be fairly simple.

Homophones are present in every language I have studied, and the same goes for radically changing a meaning of a word by changing a single letter.

When it comes to the 'weird' rule about whether i goes before e except after c, there's such a plethora of exceptions to this rule that the rule itself becomes rather useless. Basically, you'll just have to learn how to spell the particular word.

If we are to talk about weird rules in English, there are the informal "rules" regarding the word order of adjectives.

EDIT: Changed 'root' to 'rote'.

Why do Germans love the greatest actor of the 20th century?
Is that a trick question?

Not at all. Or rather, not necessarily. Having exceptions to rules seems perfectly normal, happened with every language I had to learn. And frankly, there don't seem to be all that many rules to begin with. Out of the languages I had a peek at, English grammar is by far the simplest. So in that sense it is a simple language. The pronounciation is a hot mess, I give you that (though generally I find it quite manageable, to be honest) and the vocabulary is extensive, but in terms of learning the language, neither is a big deal, really. As long as you have the basic structure down, you can learn a lot by osmosis, context and deduction.

Not sure if this will come as a surprise to you, but the biggest challenge to me is actually punctuation. Either there simply are no discernable rules or no one - at least online - gives a toss about applying them.

Of course, this might not be down entirely to the English language itself. It being the lingua franca around these parts as well as being fairly closely related to my native tongue is certainly skewing my perception. I'd imagine if I was Korean, the whole affair would be different.

Sidenote about homophone/homophobe: those are not a bother, either, but I find that to be an interesting case of perception. As far as I can tell there aren't many compound words in English, if any at all. Meanwhile my native language clearly has a fetish for them, so seeing them as a construct comes naturally - i.e. recognizing the phobe as an entirely different word in there, not just a different letter. So this is actually not a big deal, wheras other things a native speaker wouldn't see a problem with might be.

Are you sure you don't mean "rote memorization"? (I could see memorizing roots a way to learn to spell words in some languages, but I have a feeling you used the wrong homophone.)

Some languages, like Spanish and Japanese kana, are phonetic; the characters indicate exactly how the word is to be pronounced (until you run into a word like "todxs", which is one I actually have encountered). (Japanese kanji is different; the symbols indicate meaning rather than sound (most of the time), which means a kanji might be pronounced differently in different contexts, or two kanji might share a pronunciation.)


I just remembered another case of words looking similar, but have entirely different (in fact, opposite) meanings:

* In discussions about autism, the term "neurotypical" is used to refer to people who are not autistic.
* I have seem some (autistic?) people describe themselves as "neuroatypical" (notice the extra 'a' in there?),which clearly means "not neurotypical".
* Since the two words differ by only one letter, it can be confusing if you don't notice that extra "a", and it is easy to not notice it.

It seems that there's actually quite a few compound words in English. For example, "policeman" (though often the gender neutral phrase "police officer" is used these days), "firefighter", "freshman", and many other compound words are used from time to time.

That's because this is not a real word, but an attempt to either trying too hard to be politically correct, or to make a political statement while purposely ignoring that masculine plural happens to include feminine as well.