Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 249 posts

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

#221

Post by StavrosK »

mamcx wrote: post #177
graeme wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A kind-of-rule based in personal observations, is that spanish people closer to the sea talk FASTER than the rest. We have somebody in the family that is know as: "Blah ahk guak fiuya sdsds caramañola ñame!". And " caramañola ñame" is the only thing you will understand 100% of him ;) -- the other text is not a perfect rendition. In fact, nobody agree how exactly him talk when left him at full speed! How fast is the t…

Oh man, don't get me started. I'm trying to learn Spanish, and if I watch a movie from Spain, there's no "v" sound, everything is "b". If I watch a movie from Mexico, it's the other way around! Trying to get the accent right on my trips to Spain are pretty frustrating to me, although it's a pretty minor difference, so it ends up fine.

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

#222

Post by StavrosK »

mhartl wrote: post #205

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 high…

Club de Cuervos looks nice, I've been looking for a Spanish comedy, thanks!

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

#223

Post by StavrosK »

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…

What? "Have got" is used all the damn time! What do you think "gotta" is short for? Most of the time you say "got", there's a "have" in front, especially in things like "I've gotten older".

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

#224

Post by StavrosK »

jagger27 wrote: post #200
lovboat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'll try to answer your "50-year-old" question: You'll find that you describe a quality that has a quantity attached to it, you'll drop the 's'. The reason is mostly to keep things brief by omitting a verb. A few examples: - We walked a ten kilometer-long trail. (The trail we walked is ten kilometers long) - They are building a 500 seat auditorium. (The auditorium they are building has 500 seats.) - We'll put a 10,00…

The hyphen actually goes the other way:

* They are building a 500-seat auditorium

* We'll put a 10,000-piece order in on Monday

* We walked a ten kilometer long trail. No hyphen here, the trail was just ten kilometers long. "We walked a ten-kilometer trail" is what you were looking for.

Non-native English speaker here, btw.

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

#225

Post by StavrosK »

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…

That song's language is like Italian and Romanian had a child.

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

#226

Post by StavrosK »

anon4 wrote: post #146

That's weird. I have pretty much the opposite experience from the author. I'm talking with americans, canadians, english people, australians and a few slavic europeans in english (myself being from a slavic country) and the only ones I have a little bit of trouble understanding are australians. And that one guy with the lisp.

Are your TV shows dubbed or subtitled?

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

#227

Post by ciupicri »

leoc wrote: post #210
toyg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language

> Irish (Gaeilge), also referred to as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. [...]

> Irish was the predominant language of the Irish people for most of their recorded history, and they brought it with them to other regions, notably Scotland and the Isle of Man, where through earlier branching from Middle Irish it gave rise to Scottish Gaelic and Manx respectively.

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

#228

Post by leoc »

ciupicri wrote: post #227
leoc wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language > Irish (Gaeilge), also referred to as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. [...] > Irish was the predominant language of the Irish people for most of their recorded history, and they brought it with them to other regions, notably Scotland and the Isle o…

I did most of my primary and secondary education in the Republic of Ireland, and finished with a secondary leaving qualification in Irish Gaelic language and literature (as well as modern Irish and European history). My final grade in Irish was fairly respectable too, and I even had half-decent conversational Irish by then.

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

#229

Post by antirez »

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?

Sicilian is a single language that extends even in some part of near regions like Calabria and Puglia (the south parts), it predates Italian a lot, and was one of the main literature schools in ancient times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_School. So from one part to the other of Sicily there are a few different words and accents and there is a division by "groups", but it's pretty much the same thing.

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

#230

Post by DrScump »

I don't know what is typical in the rest of the English-speaking world... but note that in the USA now, it is law that all broadcast programming be closed-captioned in English (at least). There are two CC "channels" for every program; the second may be populated by captions for another language, e.g. Spanish.

A growing number of network shows also have live audio in Spanish via a selectable Separate Audio Program (SAP).

Even older programming broadcast in syndication is typically captioned. (Heck, I'm watching a series episode from 1964 on MeTV right now that has been captioned.)

Point being, if you are in the USA and are an English learner, turn on CC for any programming you watch. Most captions are placed such that they don't disrupt you viewing very much. (The exceptions are kind of comical... many Fox sports shows, for example, have the CC overlay the scoreboard block more often than not.) I generally leave mine on most of the time, since modern TV dramas often "drop" a critical phrase or two of dialog in background noise, to my ear.

Post reply on HN