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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)

#201

Post by gotchange »

graeme wrote: post #93
joeyspn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? No, it just means that you need more exposure. That very same thing happened to me while learning english (as my 3rd language after Spanish and Catalan [0]). I started to interact and shared flat with people from USA, England, Wales, Australia, Ireland, e…

Spanish speaking people tell me they find the Cuban accent difficult. Of course, it's all inter-comprehensible, but you're not refuting the OP's point.

Probably it has to do with socioeconomic classes and level of education. Usually uneducated people or people from rural areas sound, for the lack of a better term, "crude" to big city or urban ears in universally all languages and Spanish is no exception. You have to judge a language or dialect based on how they communicate in official mass communication media like Radio or TV and not some guy you met on the street.

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

#202

Post by gotchange »

curun1r wrote: post #129
leaveyou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

The problem with Romance languages is that they shifted the burden of complexity from orthography to grammar with all the verb conjugations that a speaker has to memorize in all tenses and moods such as the bloody subjunctive :)

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

#203

Post by gotchange »

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…

But in Sicily there are different dialects of the same mother language, is that right?

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

#204

Post by mappu »

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 our company, the practice is to refer to MS SQL server as "Sequel Server", and MySQL as "My S. Q. L.". I think it's not clear-cut.

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

#205

Post by mhartl »

As a native English speaker learning Spanish, one thing I've found especially helpful is watching Spanish programming with Spanish subtitles. Such resources used to be difficult to find, but with SAP on cable systems [1], YouTube videos [2], and streaming programming [3], it's never been easier. And Spanish is easy to spell; I'd bet the returns to watching English programming with English subtitles would be even higher, given that English spelling is a bit, um, tough.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program. I particularly like watching children's programs, which focus on vocabulary acquisition for everyday terms.

[2]: See especially http://www.bookbox.com/.

[3]: E.g., Club de Cuervos and Narcos on Netflix.

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

#206

Post by toyg »

kansface wrote: post #197
toyg wrote: post #125

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 achiev…

imprescindible is not a word (in english at least) :P

That will teach me to post on mobile without spellcheck :) still, I'd never confuse it's / its, their / they're / there, have / of... so I'm already better than a lot of native speakers ;P

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

#207

Post by pinaceae »

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.

compared to the germans? sure. compared to swedes? nope.

/schluchtenscheisser

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

#208

Post by chenster »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #180
ajmurmann wrote: post #175

One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got an apple" instead of just "I have an ap…

Wow. You have made me remember that I also learned it like that at school. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that since school (maybe once in a blue moon, but it seems to be really infrequent), so I just forgot about it and say "have". It would be interesting to have the opinion of native speakers on this. For the record, I'm now learning some Mandarin Chinese and apparently this kind of phenomenom is even str…

People do say "你好" in formal, like "How do you do?" such as greet someone who just met for the first time. "Hello" is more like "嗨", casual greeting.

Having said that, learning spoken and writing English are hard for countries that have complete different language system such as Japanese and Chinese, Korean etc. Two reasons:

First, there’s no argument that they all have completely different style of writing and pronunciation. Nothing to piggyback on like Dutch or German. The English teacher in my school doesn't even speak good English, more like "Chinglish" as we mostly emphasize in writing. Many do write English well but have hard time communicate verbally. That’s a BIG problem.

The second thing is that the in the old days, kids don't get to learn English until in middle school. The best time to learn language is when one is still very young. It then becomes a second nature rather than a skills to master later in life. I think that it's different now. Kids are learning English early in school now. However, they don't get to practice outside of school.

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

#209

Post by davidw »

gotchange wrote: post #203
antirez wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But in Sicily there are different dialects of the same mother language, is that right?

Languages/dialects in Italy are complicated!

http://vgsitaliansig.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Language...

Many of them basically evolved from latin on their own, rather than from some kind of standard Italian. Standardization has come later, with TV/radio/travel spreading 'standard' Italian.

For fun, here's "Where did the guy go?" in Italian, followed by some sort of Venetian:

"Dov'e` andato il ragazzo?"

"Dove xeo nda' el toso?"

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

#210

Post by leoc »

toyg wrote: post #103
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.

> Wales, Scotland and Ireland were taught the language at the point of a sword.

AFAIK this is somewhere between very incomplete and clearly wrong in the case of Scotland, and to a lesser extent Ireland. It may actually be a bit more accurate to say that of England, come to think of it: it's just that the pointing of swords happened a while earlier there (to the extent that it really happened) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit... . But this just highlights that it's probably impossible to reasonably declare languages non-native on this kind of basis.

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