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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)

#101

Post by lovboat »

lovboat wrote: post #87

I am also learning English, don't know whether my suggestions or corrections are appropriate. Also, sometimes I watch a TV series in which police is trying to solve a 50 years old closed case. What I find interesting is how sad the life of that people are, never a joke, sharp sound, short sentences, never a smile. Perhaps, it is a mirror of a society. In Spain the eyes of people are full of life, the doom is outside…

I must apologize, I think that surely people lives must not be so doom as in that series, but I find it difficult to watch a film in which people are really happy enjoying life. I can adventure an hypothesis: That many people has so high a goal that they never can reach that high mountain, hence is no wonder films are about killing criminals, war films, or enjoy life in prison.

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

#102

Post by cjsthompson »

robochat wrote: post #78

As an Englishman living and working in Paris for a few years, my eyes have been opened to the difficulty of working in another language. I used to be a little bit dismissive of foreigners who hadn't completely mastered English but now I realise that they were almost fluent. On the other hand, I haven't really managed to master French at all. His observation about becoming introverted in a foreign language is somethin…

It's easier to learn english than french.

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

#103

Post by toyg »

foggy80 wrote: post #94

The only country where English is the native language is the UK.

Wrong: the only country where English is the native language is England. Wales, Scotland and Ireland were taught the language at the point of a sword.

Worse: English is a somewhat arbitrary set of different local dialects with heavy Icelandic and Scandinavian influences, and formalized by French and German ruling classes. Many things it might be, but hardly "native" of any given region.

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

#104

Post by lovboat »

lovboat wrote: post #101
lovboat wrote: post #87

I am also learning English, don't know whether my suggestions or corrections are appropriate. Also, sometimes I watch a TV series in which police is trying to solve a 50 years old closed case. What I find interesting is how sad the life of that people are, never a joke, sharp sound, short sentences, never a smile. Perhaps, it is a mirror of a society. In Spain the eyes of people are full of life, the doom is outside…

I must apologize, I think that surely people lives must not be so doom as in that series, but I find it difficult to watch a film in which people are really happy enjoying life. I can adventure an hypothesis: That many people has so high a goal that they never can reach that high mountain, hence is no wonder films are about killing criminals, war films, or enjoy life in prison.

Another hypothesis I can adventure is that my karma will be soon below zero, at this moment I have six (6) points, not a big deal to me.

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

#105

Post by Certhas »

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…

In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible).

In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.

You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html

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

#107

Post by bad_user »

perakojotgenije wrote: post #68
xixixao wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0] The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they…

Nope, I think the reason that user "petke" has mentioned is correct. I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but here it is: I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). S…

In Romania, my country, we are also not dubbing movies, although there is a trend for that when it comes to cartoons for little kids. In Bulgaria on the other hand, our neighbors, they've been dubbing movies at least since I was little. Not sure what the deal is there, but Romania has almost 3 times the population of Bulgaria, so I don't buy that it's about size.

Anyway, in Romania we are speaking far better English than any of our neighbors, which includes Hungary and Ukraine. I used to think that happens because Romanian is a romance language, but that doesn't fully explain it. Oh, and people here learn Italian and Spanish as well, almost effortlessly, just by watching soap opera :-) And many of us have learned French in school, though I was not lucky to have good teachers.

BTW, English has some nice features for learners. For example it doesn't assign gender to objects, like all romance languages are doing. Those of us that speak in such languages forgot how hard it was to learn those genders when we were kids.

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

#108

Post by Vomzor »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #99
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…

Not sure it's down to the size of the country. More likely, it's the size of the community speaking the language, and the closeness of the language to English, together with some other factors. During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were…

Actually, French is the second language learned in Flanders. English is the third.

Flanders uses subtitles, Wallonia dubs. Instead of learning Dutch as their second language most Walloons learn English. This is anecdotal, but I've noticed their English is worse than most people in Flanders. I think this is where the whole dubbing/subtitles also plays a part.

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

#109

Post by andreasvc »

Vomzor wrote: post #86
andreasvc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't supply an argument why that's because of dubbing/subtitling. I think the real reason for the change is that English has become more important as a cultural language, at the expense of French, in this case.

Because we don't use dubbing, English is way more prevalent. Most kids have a somewhat basic grasp of English before being taught in school. Years of hearing English also made it easier to learn in school. You already know how to pronounce many words, it's also less foreign because you grew up with it. With French, you learn it in school and when you go home.. That's it, no more French influences. With English, you t…

So I agree with all your points, except that the subtitling/dubbing issue is the cause of all this. The subtitling/dubbing is an effect, not a cause. Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language. The status/prestige/coolness is a cultural thing, and this is what explains the difference in motivation to learn languages.

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

#110

Post by gone35 »

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'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.

Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

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