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English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#31

Post by jacquesm »

angry-hacker wrote: post #27
petke wrote: post #16

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…

For some reason, I thought every country subtitles movies/tv-shows that are not produced in their own language. When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.

Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too.

The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#32

Post by farmdve »

petke wrote: post #16

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…

I am one of those who "learned" English from watching cartoons as a kid. Mainly, Scooby-doo(the one from the 60s) without any subtitles or dub.

But like you said, it's not 100% perfect, nor is it even 80%, neither orally nor in writing.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#33

Post by jacquesm »

tokenadult wrote: post #22

One of the great benefits of the Hacker News community compared to most online communities is that Hacker News is truly international. We are blessed here with comments by participants from all over the world, many of whom did not grow up speaking English. But English is the common language (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, as the Greeks would say) here, so learning English is an interest of many Hacker News participants. I had to…

> But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in phonetics.

I had one very clear example of that at one time: The difference between the Polish words for switching something on and switching something off.

włączyć -> to switch on

and

wyłącz -> to switch off

When you see them written here they look very different but when you hear them in spoken Polish conversation they're all but impossible to tell apart (at least, to me!).

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#34

Post by pizzeys »

I think this fact (and he's obviously not wrong, though I don't know if I'd label it a secret - everyone knows this about English, I thought?) is inevitable from any language which gains the reach English did, or at least, gained the reach English did at the time English did... whether it would be different now we have global communication all the time remains to be seen I suppose.

How do you have a language spoken by so many wildly different people, who bring in their own vocabulary with each generation, and not end up with irregularity in spelling and pronunciation?

English is a mongrel, certainly, but that is a product of it being so widely 'deployed', not an inherent feature of the language. Sure, Italian is regular. Italian also doesn't have germanic roots all over the place mixed in with the latin and chinese and whatever else.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#36

Post by delecti »

ekidd wrote: post #15

I sympathize, because I occasionally try to pair program in French, and yeah, it can be a struggle—and French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the silent letters. But if you're having trouble with listening comprehension, there's a fairly rapid way to improve that seems to work for many people: Watch lots of TV. A couple of years ago, I started buying DVD box sets in French, and just watch…

> French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the silent letters.

I would argue that French is far more consistent, which is really the helpful part. Patterns of letters in French pretty much always work the same, whereas in English you don't have that luck. The "ough" part of words in English is a good example. There's a joke that highlights that. "Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/594168269759623168?l...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#37

Post by aquadrop »

xanderstrike wrote: post #21

As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across). I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like I…

I think Spanish, English and Portuguese are broken languages (French less, because France dominates it) because they were spread during era of colonial empires and now there a big countries which use it as main language, they have evolved since.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#38

Post by metafunctor »

xanderstrike wrote: post #21

As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across). I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like I…

English does not have a simple set of rules for pronunciation or dictation. Spelling bees don't exist for most languages, but it's a thing for English.

So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually difficult language in this respect.

Understanding different accents of spoken English is sort of beside the point, I think.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#39

Post by codelike »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #23
petke wrote: post #16

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…

> Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.

Although when you compare the English that Austrians and Germans speak (I'm from Germany) to the English of Scandinavians and Dutch people, the latter are noticeably better than the German-speaking countries. So the argument probably has some merit.

Edit: At the same time, Scandinavians, the Dutch and Germans/Austrians all have a language that is more closely related to English than the Romanic or Slavic languages.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#40

Post by pizzeys »

bshimmin wrote: post #20

Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me: Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton. I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the diff…

Watching? Reading it is even worse! :D (UK here not American, though.)
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