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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#311

Post by WildUtah »

ktRolster wrote: post #39
rvense wrote: post #3

This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents. And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whos…

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language). Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

"Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent."

Taking on enough of a local accent to be understood is good. Losing your accent is a terrible cost that requires hard work to achieve. Why would you work hard to hurt yourself?

After all, chicks dig an accent.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#312

Post by WildUtah »

panglott wrote: post #292
Turing_Machine wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.

I sometimes see American TV stations subtitle American-dialect speakers. Mostly this is due to audio quality, but it happens frequently enough with urban speakers of African American Vernacular English. Standard English on television probably certainly helps speakers of less-prestigious lects understand Standard English, but not necessarily inspires them to produce it.

Oh, stewardess. I speak Jive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#313

Post by atemerev »

paride5745 wrote: post #269
atemerev wrote: post #36

English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable. The best European language is, of course, Italian.

As an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree. Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a unique way. I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly). Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major…

Perhaps, but this is not a language feature. The only reason that English looks like an easy language to learn is that everyone is now adjusted to less-than-perfect English of non-native speakers. And if you choose to speak Italian (or, G-d forbid, French), you'd better do it well enough.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#314

Post by ktRolster »

jeena wrote: post #252
ktRolster wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thinking about it some more, I think it is essential to get the resonance right. And when you do get it right, it fixes a million other small problems along with it.

Focusing hard on the vowels is the easiest way I know to get the resonance

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#315

Post by Maken »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #197
Maken wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "…

'I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted".' This varies a lot between different Spanish-speaking countries. Heck, in Argentina they still use "vos".

But that's different, because in Argentina they have replaced the second person and "tú" by the third person and "vos". For them it's not a formal addressing at all.

However, I won't deny that for most Spanish-speakers Argentinians sound surprisingly polite.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#316

Post by Maken »

crazygringo wrote: post #136

Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce. On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances. And hon…

>There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception).

I don't see the problem with making the verb express how probable or feasible the action is, aside from the fact that you have to remember how to conjugate the verb instead of adding an adverb to express the uncertainty (which certainly avoids memorizing, since you can reuse the same adverb with almost every verb).

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#317

Post by panglott »

wolfgke wrote: post #307
panglott wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.) Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated pe…

> Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. What evidence do you have the the number of Esperanto speakers are increasing? The best source I could find > http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 thinks that this question is very…

"Gaining new speakers" is a less strong claim than "speaker population is increasing".

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#318

Post by beat »

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 and Chinese are probably more different from each other than either is from English. The big point is that Japanese isn't tonal

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#319

Post by kazinator »

Shrug. I came into the English-speaking world midway through fifth grade. By the end of sixth, I was among the top performers in the area of spelling.

There is an intuition to some of the spelling which, combined with a decent memory, makes it fairly easy.

I think the underlying key to it is that there aren't that many choices for how a word, or part of a word, can be spelled. So even if you have to memorize the spelling by rote, you're not memorizing the actual letter-for-letter spelling; you're only memorizing which of the plausible ways of spelling that word applies to it. That is a lot less information.

If you happen not to remember a spelling, then you can hypothesize the several plausible ways in which it may be spelled. These possibilities reduce the problem to a multiple-choice question, rather than cold recall, which is easier since the choices jog your memory.

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