My-life-is-a-constant-battle-between-wanting-to-correct-grammar-and-wanting-to-have-friends..jpg
Oof. Someone in an english speaking discord group sent 2 words of (slightly incorrect) french and I spent the next 30 minutes typing, erasing, and talking myself out of explaining that some verbs are transitive and others are not. Anxiety is such a waste of time lol.
Spanish is written how it sounds, but can have funny accent related mistakes, like "inglés" means English, but "ingles" is a crotch; an "año empañado" might be a "tarnished year", but an "ano empanado" is a breaded anus.
French is overloaded with sound alikes. I have this example you can drop into google translate and it will speak aloud for you:
Quote
le garde de guerre garde guère les gars du gare de Gard qui garaient la charette gâchée
But Mandarin takes the cake. Chinese has a limited number of syllables and distinguishes them by stresses and 4, 5, or more tone patterns - rising, falling, falling-rising, high, neutral, etc. Most words are made up of 2+ syllables to make identification a bit more distinct, but the sound alike nature is part of why Chinese has a reputation as difficult to a foreigner. Another example google can speak for you, I wrote it to use all the characters spelled "shi" I knew at the time:
Quote
在都市课室中，即使世上最诚实、懂事、会解释十首诗歌的士，也未必是最多认识拼音是“shi”的字的士
Mine might have a lot of "shi" characters, but it pales in comparison to a famous poem written using
only characters spelled shi,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den Quote
The poem is coherent and grammatical in Literary Chinese, but due to the number of Chinese homophones, it becomes difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover all the words of the poem. The poem is somewhat more comprehensible when read in other varieties such as Cantonese, in which it has 18 different syllables accounting for tone differences, or Hokkien, in which it has 15 different syllables.
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