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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#251

Post by jeena »

NolF wrote: post #192
jeena wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite. I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

In Spanish culture correcting someone miss-pronunciation is quite common. It's one of the reasons why it can be quicker to master the language by immersion that in an ultra-polite society found in English speaking languages. The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the prin…

Recording myself is an interesting idea, I will try that.

I also told all my coworkers to correct me but of the 10 people I cpeak to often only one does, for which I am super thankfull.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#252

Post by jeena »

ktRolster wrote: post #202
jeena wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite. I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

The first tip is to learn to listen to yourself. If someone ever corrects you, that is gold. 1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean) 2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here. 3) Focus on…

Yeah, I guess the only tip I have is to make a concious decission to want to improve on that, that at least is the first important step as far as I can see.

I'll try to integrate some of the things you point out into my daily life, we'll see how it goes :D

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#253

Post by yodsanklai »

bkantt wrote: post #149
yodsanklai wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy. What I find more difficult are all the irregular verbs. On the other hand, I've been learning English for decades and oral communication is s…

> I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy. Did you get to Subjuntivo or Pretérito vs. Imperfecto yet? Unless you already speak Portuguese or Italian, that's when the verbs get tricky :)

Yes, I'm getting there :) I speak French which is somewhat similar. However, I feel that what is difficult are not the conjugations per se but the irregularities. Each irregular verbs is a new conjugation table to learn!

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#254

Post by gutnor »

rvense wrote: post #218
wirrbel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages). To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily b…

> The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english. > At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the…

I'm puzzled by this, as a French speaker. But strangely, I have heard it being said quite often by people from a variety of native languages. ( never by people that have had to live in a French speaking country )

It could be the structure of the courses. When learning English, you almost go straight to learning those idioms Especially the idiom-like infinite collections of verb + preposition. In French, on the other hand, you will spend an enormous amount of time learning grammar, the exceptions and the exceptions exceptions, and of course stuff like noun genders. It can make you think that learning French is all about technique, while learning English is all about knowing an infinitely large vocabulary while the truth is just that French grammar is awful and writing without spelling mistake is a challenge even for well educated French natives.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#255

Post by aninhumer »

lstamour wrote: post #211
beat wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that baffles me is how Chinese speakers (and other tone-language speakers) ever learn to speak and understand spoken English effectively. In English, tones (changes in pitch) are used to imply emotional shadings like sarcasm and surprise. In Chinese, tones are actually different words. It's hard for an English speaker to learn to pronounce tonal langauges (I did one year of Chinese, and my wife has a master's…

If the anime I've been watching for almost a decade has taught me anything, it's that for Japanese at least, the clues behind sarcasm there and in English aren't quite that dissimilar. Tone of voice can still be used, you just have to be a bit more careful about it. Sometimes it just comes down to accent or word choice. After Googling, the consensus seems to be that sarcasm really comes down to the shared context in…

Japanese isn't a tonal language, so it's not really comparable to Chinese in this regard.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#256

Post by kuschku »

majewsky wrote: post #249
kuschku wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language. That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several tim…

> "backyard-filled-with-children" (kindergarten) A kindergarten is most definitely a backyard filled with children. You would call that a "playground", most likely. Or just a backyard filled with children. A kindergarten is a daycare center for children aged 2-6.

Yes – that’s why the AWO decided to name their Kindergartens Kinderhäuser instead.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#257

Post by kuschku »

majewsky wrote: post #247
kuschku wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. Rather no universal language and having to translate than forcing every child to learn this abomination of a language. Maybe I’m biased as someone who had to learn english as second language, and had to memorize every word multiple times - just for the different ways of spellings, or composita (helpful vs. help and full, wtf?)... People always complain about having to learn gender for the German words – but…

> but that's 2 bits of data As if brains store bits.

Smaller pieces of information are still easier to store in a brain than larger pieces of information.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#258

Post by malkia »

I had a terrible boss (russian) long long time ago, and he made fun of me (in front of others) the way I was saying: three, free and tree - it all sounded the same (and still I have problems). I'm not a native speaker also (bulgarian). Nowadays I'm grateful to our son (~8 years old) who corrects us all the time, and it's kind of cool since this makes him feel good about it. I often would consult him when reading a book to him, how this and that is supposed to sound. He's even starting to correct my grammar, and learned early on about etymology (I had to geekimize him).

Oh, that boss is long gone, he had another strange thing - correcting e-mails, people wrote to the point he wanted to correct one brit (and he was not the easy kind). I understand he also wanted to be helpful, but done privately would've been appreciated, done publicly - not so...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#259

Post by bshimmin »

wodenokoto wrote: post #95
newman314 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main beef is that English is, for lack of better words, imprecise. This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.

no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!

Is ambiguity in language always a bad thing? William Empson wrote in Seven Type of Ambiguity that "The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", and he seemed to know a thing or two.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#260

Post by Armisael16 »

wirrbel wrote: post #235
majewsky wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language I'm also German and had French in upper school for five years, and that was certainly not true for me. In fact, I've yet to encounter a language that you can "complete" within three years of a normal school curriculum. (I'm not talking about living abroad or specialized language learning curriculums, where you can get proficient in well less than th…

Yeah that point might have been a bit exuberant. Nevertheless, after 3-4 years I think you have covered most grammar topics, maybe excluding passe simple and subjonctive. In English you'll continue to learn new concepts such as "contact clauses" etc

I'm only doing this because of the topic of conversation, but you probably meant to say that your point was a bit exaggerated instead of exuberant (which means something along the lines of energetically happy).

That's the only mistake I noticed reading through, so I have to congratulate you - I wouldn't've noticed you weren't a native speaker.

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