English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by cheshire137 » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

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…

Native English speaker here with some corrections, if you like! :)

police are

50-year-old

lives of those people are

sharp sounds

long-term

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

#122

Post by codewiz » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

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…

As a native speaker of Florentine Tuscan Italian, I often have more trouble understanding other Italian dialects than other Latin-derived languages such as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese.

My maternal grandmother came from a small town in Abruzzo and nobody could understand her when she was arguing with her sister in their dialect.

The truth is that these "dialects" are indeed completely separate languages evolved from Latin with strong influences from various waves of domination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_in_the_Middle_Ages#/medi...

Wikipedia has more details on the present situation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy

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

#123

Post by superplussed » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

I agree with the sentiment regarding how important talking/listening is in the language learning process. I came to Germany from the U.S. a year and a half ago and have spent that time trying to learn a foreign language for the first time. I definitely found a lack of online resources that were centered around conversational fluency, and so started working on one of my own:

http://seedlang.com

They take influence from some of the resources I found most effective like the Michel Thomas and Assimil audio books which gave me the biggest boosts in terms of my German listening and speaking abilities.

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

#124

Post by walshemj » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #45

tyho wrote: post #43

I can relate to this despite being a native English speaker from the UK. I misspent my childhood in IRC and messing around with dozens of UNIX machines. I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in conversation, people have no idea what I…

That's very common. No-one knew what the heck I was talking about the day I first spoke out loud about Ess Queue Ell.

in UK English we tend to convert acronyms like SQL to words like Sequel

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

#125

Post by toyg » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

Another Italian checking in, agreeing with everything Antirez says. I've been living in England for 13 years, but talking to inner-city-ghetto youth to order a mcburger can still be a hellish experience.

English is the QWERTY of languages: historically messed up for reasons that don't matter anymore, but an imprescindible standard enjoying unmatched global popularity. It's simple enough to allow non-natives to achieve good productivity very quickly, but mastering it phonetically is harder than in most other languages. This complexity means that it's constantly getting stretched by people with limited formal education, and effectively enforces class separation.

Anyway, I'll never forget when I started studying it and realized that words I was familiar with because of gaming experience (LOAD, FOR, NETWORK etc) were actual everyday words that programmers simply borrowed. Suddenly, coding made so much sense! To this day I value language clarity so much, I prefer Python to everything else ;)

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

#126

Post by walshemj » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:10 PM UTC

foggy80 wrote: post #94

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

I think America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada might beg to differ

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

#127

Post by lovboat » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

cheshire137 wrote: post #121

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…

Native English speaker here with some corrections, if you like! :) police are 50-year-old lives of those people are sharp sounds long-term

Thanks. police are (ok they are more than one). 50-year-old (why not 50-years-old ?).

It seems that nouns are created with "-" (merriam-webster agree with you).

a long-term solution is like a never-ending story.

Now, my question why neverending story (film) and not never-ending?

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

#128

Post by icebraining » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #61

jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).

Not here in Portugal - only shows for children are dubbed.

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

#129

Post by curun1r » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

leaveyou wrote: post #50

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…

by "phonetically broken" I think he means that there is not enough consistency regarding what you write and what you pronounce. I give you some examples: door and tool. The same two letters 'oo' are pronounced differently. 'en' in 'broken' and 'en' in 'enough'. I suspect Italian, Romanian and Spanish inherited some consistency from Latin where AFAIK 'a' is pronounced the same everywhere and even in combination with o…

It's interesting that you chose the word 'enough' but didn't talk about the end of the word. Because the 'ough' construction in English is perhaps the best example of what you're talking about. There are 10 [1] ways to pronounce those 4 letters, though only 6 in American English.

My Spanish teach was fond of telling us, "There are no Spanish spelling bees." It was his lighthearted way of telling us to memorize the few pronunciation rules of the language so that we could easily parse what we were hearing and pronounce what we were reading. But inherent in his comment was a reference to the lack of consistency in English. This lack of consistency means that speakers need to memorize more. If we were talking about a programming language, we'd say that the language has unnecessary cognitive load. Similarly, Spanish and the other romance languages add unnecessary cognitive load by differentiating between masculine and feminine words. Still, of the major European languages, English is probably the one with the largest unnecessary cognitive load, so I can definitely sympathize with those who have difficulty learning it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

P.S. As an aside, I always thought Antirez was much better at written English communication than he appears to be. There's something about having corresponded with people online for the past 2 decades that has leads me to turn off my inner proofreader until something like the subject matter that was being discussed brings it to the fore.

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

#130

Post by DonaldFisk » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

bazzargh wrote: post #53

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…

Of course none of the accents in that clip are supposed to be Glaswegian...they're all meant to be from Edinburgh (though Robert Carlyle was born in Maryhill in Glasgow). For the full Glaswegian effect, try this bit of Rab C Nesbitt, parodying the fact that previous series of this show had been shown subtitled in England https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9LT7R60kU#t=6m30s on the other hand we from Glasgow don't seem…

A Glaswegian here, who learned phonetics for a text-to-speech project. A Glasgow accent actually has the closest correspondence between spelling and pronunciation of any accent of English.

We don't all speak like Rab C. Nesbitt. The reason you might find it difficult to understand some Glaswegians is not so much lack of familiarity with their accent, but because they don't speak Standard English. What you're hearing is a mixture of English and a variety of Scots. Scots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) is a distinct language, though it's very closely related to English. So when, for example, you hear a word like mair (meaning more), it's not a different accent, it's a different language, just like German mehr or Dutch meer. Glaswegians pronouncing "more" in Standard English don't sound that different from Canadians or most Americans.