Ask Lemmy

So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name. In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.

UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.

I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care. I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.

We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.

There are some good things. The time forms can be pretty fun to use.

All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.

Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.

All the French that's embedded in it. Stupid Normans making it sound weird if I go to a restaurant and order pig.

Actually, I find the french and double dose of viking influence quite fascinating. English etymology is a wild ride!

English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.

It's becoming more common in English for people to say "whenever" when it should just be "when." It's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear it used wrong like that