509
"Pronounce" by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
(www.smbc-comics.com)
Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
Hover tooltip text:
Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
Bonus panel:
RSS Feed: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rss
I hate danish numbers because I flip letters/numbers a lot when I speak in English so Danish is just turbo fuck-you mode of numbers sucking ass.
And yea it does come out as ... noise vaguely masquerading as "important sounds". At least Norwegian was like "lol wtf are out doing get those shitty letters you don't even say out of here nerds". Swedish .... Swedish scares me. I hate when there is Swedish in Danish movies because I can't hear Swedish and read Danish without my brain melting.
Yeah, but I’m used to that, it’s the same in German (and it sucks, especially for people with dyslexia), no, what I meant is the way they actually count.
You know, like 99 in French is „quatre-vingt-dix-neuf“? „4 (times) 20 (plus) 10 (plus) 9“.
Which I always thought the most idiotic way ever to come up with counting? Until I learned about the Danish…
Ever wondered why 50 in Danish is „halvtreds“? Because „halv tredje“ means… „half-third“? Which is 2 1/2.
Are you sitting? „Halvtreds“ is short for „halvtredsindstyve“, which literally means „half third times twenty“.
2 1/2 * 20 = 50 🤡
Same with 70, 90…
Yeah the mathing bits I knew were from something older, the entire equation I don't remember offhand. French has been mostly repressed.
I'm more upset about time verbage being absolutely fucked and ... crap I think it's 30 minutes... into the hour instead of before? It's so confusing and I get it backwards constantly because who fucking counts time like that even.
Like half til 6 (or however you say it idk) is 5:30 and not ... 6:30 or some asinine BS. I will take strange ye olde numbers over that shit any day. I just default to 24 hour time because I absolutely cannot be assed and it's very dumb. I've explained it very poorly but hopefully it makes sense lol. And they use quarter/half past like please... please stop, just tell me weird numbers.
Hah! Yeah, I understand, but I’ve been hearing this in spoken English as well, „half seven“ instead of „half past six“, though in school I was taught only the latter existed.
It’s like this in German as well, and it’s also regionally different, but once you get it it’s actually nice:
In most parts of Germany (and where I grew up) and in Standard German you tell time (literally) as:
Six, quarter past six, half seven, quarter before seven, seven.
In the south of Germany it’s: six, quarter past six, half seven, three quarter seven, seven. This never made sense to me, until…
… I moved to East Germany, where it’s: six, quarter seven (!), half seven, three quarter seven, seven.
Imagine my face, I never even had heard of this before I moved there 😂
I immediately picked this up because it rolls off your tongue way easier in German than the standard way. And it’s mindblowingly logical. I love it:
You just need to imagine an hour as a cake: one quarter of seven, half of seven, three quarters of seven, seven. Genius.