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English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

antirez.com

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

#151

Post by nrr »

junto wrote: post #80
masklinn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Germany dubs everything. Unless you invest in Sky, the German television broadcasters don't even bother broadcasting the original language as an alternative tone, which I assume over cable isn't a massive extra expense. Only Arté bothers to do so in both German and French. German home made programmes are also particularly dire. Their long running police drama series Tartort is their single saving grace.

Tatort (German for "the scene of the crime") is particularly interesting in that each one of ARD's regional broadcasters contributes some number of episodes to the pool. Considering that Germany is a very regional country, it's a good way to get a survey of accents and local word usage.

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

#152

Post by teddyh »

tailgate wrote: post #3

As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often treat me as if I am retarded. I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.

Dearest creature in creation,

Study English pronunciation.

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

[…]

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos

Further notes:

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/e/pronounc.htm

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

#153

Post by nordify »

defen wrote: post #96
metafunctor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German Just curious, in what order did you learn them? That's a pretty diverse set.

Based on the language list metafunctor is Finnish, so the only language standing out is Japanese. Finnish and Swedish are first and second languages (or vice versa). English and German are typical third and fourth school languages and Japanese is most likely something picked up in college.

Metafunctor: how did I do? :)

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

#154

Post by antirez »

atmosx wrote: post #119

I can related with the OP. I guess most non-native English speakers can. > Before 1950, when the "TV Language Unification" happened, everybody was still taking with their dialects and italian was only mastered by a small percentage of people. Sicilian itself, the language talked the most by my family, predates Italian by centuries. For a hands-on example about what he is talking about, those of you who learned Italia…

I love this song btw :-) It's 20 years I listen to it from time to time.

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

#155

Post by antirez »

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…

That totally makes sense bshimmin, Sicilian is considered a language per-se for example, so it's not very understandable by people talking just Italian and not even a southern Italian dialect at least. But all the schools use Italian language so unless you talk with an 80 years old in Sicily that is not able to talk Italian at all (rare but possible), you can understand easily what people tell you. However within families or colloquially it is possible that most people in small towns use dialects.

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

#156

Post by Broken_Hippo »

graeme wrote: post #85
jzelinskie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean "write it fluently"? Are you just skipping out on memorizing kanji and their onyomi an kunyomi? Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. I feel like you get another level of understanding what's being said out loud if you can imagine the kanji. For example, you might not know that みる has multiple forms with slightly differing meanings depending…

>Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. Actually, you don't. I've learned several languages with Pimsleur, which is audio only. I took the lessons to their end and then progressed just by talking to people. You learn the grammar intuitively. I'm doing Pimsleur for Japanese now. Though I'm learning the writing system as well, because I've heard that writte…

Some people, including myself, find it much easier to speak when the grammar is more advanced than the speaking - or at least conversations. Reading aloud for the sake of learning how to say words, was the sole exception. I'm in my second year of language classes now. Once I got a good sense of grammar - more than just basic - the ease of speaking jumped.

In contrast, my brother really does well with audio learning - such as the pimsleur method. Immersive environment methods do well for him. He also benefits more from things like classroom lectures than I.

My sister is somewhere in between, but since she does well with inter-personal communication, she would pick up on sayings and slang and dialects a bit faster.

These sorts of differences, along with differences in learning difficulty, are noticable in class.

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

#157

Post by henriquemaia »

grecy wrote: post #24
frooxie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is my third language; I've read and written English almost every day for 30 years, but I've only ever spent two weeks in English-speaking countries. I sometimes find myself unable to pronounce words that I've used for decades in writing – often, it's the type of more formal vocabulary that doesn't often come up in movies or TV series. For instance: cuticle, paean, echelon, emaciated, heinous, comely, disreput…

English is my first language, I've spoken it all of my 33 years, and I am an Engineer. I have no idea what "contumely" means, or how to pronounce it. You're doing great :)

If you use Chromium (or Google Chrome), you can use this extension. It has helped me greatly with my pronunciation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/english-dictionary...

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

#158

Post by Broken_Hippo »

superplussed wrote: post #123

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 fro…

Oh, I so completely understand the lack of resources, though imagine you are in Norway instead. I took a year of french and a couple years of German in high school, unfortunately that was years ago. I've been here 2.5 years, and tried to teach myself. I started my second year of language classes in August, which has worked out much, much better.

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

#159

Post by Broken_Hippo »

masklinn wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #8

I enjoy watching foreign movies with subtitles, and then trying to learn a few words in the language that way. I watched a French movie a few days ago that way, and was surprised at how many French words I already knew. I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles.

> I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles. IIRC that's the case in all scandinavian countries, I'd also expect it in most of eastern europe (but having started much more recently).

Norway dubs childrens showsm including things like Disney. It was helpful; At one point in my learning Norwegian, I was watching Spiderman cartoons because the language is always very simple and clear. Children start learning English in school formally around age 6. It helps that video games and popular more adultish movies only have subtitles. A few workplaces are English-dominant, but in general one can't find job with english skills alone.

The actual effect of this is that I'm easily understood when I speak english by many and get advantages like being able to use an english word when I am unsure or being greeted by many words that i only need remember pronunciation. But not everyone can actually speak english well, or they are just as unsure using english as I am norwegian - which weirdly, doesn't seem to be such a problem speaking english with other non-native english speakers.

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

#160

Post by bshimmin »

antirez wrote: post #155
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…

That totally makes sense bshimmin, Sicilian is considered a language per-se for example, so it's not very understandable by people talking just Italian and not even a southern Italian dialect at least. But all the schools use Italian language so unless you talk with an 80 years old in Sicily that is not able to talk Italian at all (rare but possible), you can understand easily what people tell you. However within fam…

That absolutely mirrors my experience - I never spoke to anyone in Sicily or Venice who didn't immediately switch to non-dialect Italian as soon as they realised I was a foreigner (fairly obvious from my fair hair and blue eyes!) who could hopefully just about understand Italian but plainly couldn't understand their dialect. I did once watch a play entirely in Sicilian; it was very beautiful and mostly incomprehensible to me!
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