Rant 062 / You Aren't Supposed to Eat the Readers' Digest!

After taking German 1 in the previous Inter-semester Special Term, I find that Spanish 1 is easier to learn. I don't know exactly why this is so, since there are many possibilities:
1) Because Spanish is similar to German in some ways, just like Japanese and Chinese,
2) because the tutor looks good, even though I cannot confidently judge her age just by looking at her(I have little first-hand experience with Europeans),
3) because Spanish may be easier than German and English at this level,
4) because Spanish 1 introduces fewer things than German 1.

Now I really believe that the English language may be the hardest of the 3. English alphabets can be pronounced in so many ways and there are numerous irregularities in the language. For example, in English, "A" can be pronounced as "ah", "eh", "er", "ay". In both Spanish and German, it can only be "ah".

Maybe it is because I know too little about these languages compared to English.

But German is still pretty hard due to the conjugations of all objects. Non-living things are always "it" in English, but in German, a glass is female, and dog is male and few things are actually "it". There is no single rule to follow to tell whether an object is male or female, and this can only be learnt through experience. Together with the fact that "a/an" in German must be in the proper conjugation for he/she/it (einen/eine/ein), I find it hard to properly write anything more than a simple sentence.

Spanish has different rules too. Like German, "to be" has a different conjugation for he/she/I/you alone/you all/they. However, there is usually no need to write "I/he/she/etc" in Spanish since the each conjugation already shows which one one is using. Eg saying "I am..." in Spanish is " Yo soy...", but I can just say "Soy...". Convenient, and the memory work here is little. There are going to be more rules to learn, but for now things are too easy.

Pronunciation of the words is never a significant problem for me in these 2 languages, since the few rules there are to govern the phonetics are always constant! As long as I can memorise the pronunciation of all 26 alphabets, all is fine. The only tough one in German is "ch", which is like the gurgling sound you make when you try to get the phlegm out of your throat.

In Spanish, one has to get used to the fact that v is the same as b, and c is sometimes pronounced as th of English the same goes for z in Spanish ( there is no English z sound in Spanish).

Right now I have to make a conscious effort to pronounce v like b during Spanish class, and whenever someone mentions Vivocity I think of it as Bibocity in my mind. I dread the day when this slips out of my mouth...

Anyway, vivo in Spanish means I live (in), as in "Vivo en Sentosa" which means " I live in Sentosa".

And the frequent usage of the sound of "th" is irritating.. Like when I say "page 3, exercise 2" in Spanish, it is " pagina tres, ejercicios dos". I'm really not used to this.







The aerodynamic design of the airplane's wing is absolutely ingenious. Doesn't it defy common sense, all the way till you see the calculations that derive the results?