Here's one aspect of English that drives me completely insane: phrasal verbs.
Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all the things I would have picked out - except I would just drop 'would', not replace with it 'will'. (The verb then becoming 'do', later in the sentence.) I'd also add that in changing any of those I could easily be proof-reading a native speaker's writing. With the exception of: > if you spot out anything unless it's an AmE idiom or something, to me that's the only think that marks you out as non-native.…
AmE speaker here. I have never heard anyone use "spot out" as a verb, but on the other hand, prepositions seem to pretty frequently attach themselves to new verbs or drop from common phrases. It still bugs me a little to hear colleagues talking about "building out" a new feature instead of simply building it, for example.
That is a weird one, yes. I think it comes from 'flesh out', which, if similar, is at least old enough that it doesn't sound strange to me.
Wiktionary sort of suggests it should sound similarly odd - it doesn't discuss it on the flesh out page [0], but for flesh vb. [1] it does give '5. To put flesh on; to fatten'.
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#83My first thought was to suggest finding multiple English translations of a piece of Hebrew Literature you like and comparing them. Then I remembered the linked article, which is a comparison of four different English translations of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. The article was written by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University who has an essay collection called Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games). The first few essays are about self-referential sentences and a subset of those, self-replicating sentences, which you really have to read to believe. Maybe check out his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It won the Pulitzer, but if you pick it up, just remember that when you get confused, it’s his fault, not yours.
But Winston Churchill said it best, and this is great advice: “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all”.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#84You could try reading articles from the Economist. They have a very interesting way of writing that avoids common phrases, cliches and words that come from latin when an English equivalent exists. They also use lots of comparisons and interesting word choice.
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#85The answer to your question really depends on what you need it for. Technical or content writing? Work communication? Deeper conversations in your personal life? I think the most broadly applicable answer is to read the most famous English stylists such as Gibbon, Carlyle, Arnold, or novelists like Austen, Eliot, Henry James, etc. This writing is complex and sophisticated enough to be challenging even to native speak…
my answer is: read and write open source documentation
I disagree. You need very little language skill to read technical docs if you're familiar with the topic, and only slightly more to write them yourself.
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#86Everything that is worth knowing was written in English or has been translated to it. Well, not quite, but it's a good rule of thumb. So, immerse yourself in books written in English. Get audiobooks if you can. If you go far enough, you will be exposed to new concepts and ideas in English first, before they percolate to your native language. After a time, you will find yourself struggling to put into your mother tong…
>Everything that is with knowing was written in English or has been translated to it. Noam Chomsky must have believed this too; when he was prince of linguistics he considered trying to save or document dying languages a waste of time and unfashionable. It effectively resulted in a language genocide. It's hubris to think English will contain all of the answers. There was a really engaging interview with Wade Davis on…
Why would you want to save a dying language? Just curious. If the answer is in the interview you linked to, could you give a tldr?
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#87If you spot out anything you might have articulated differently, it’d be great to hear
I'm not a native speaker, but I'd use "spot" rather than "spot out". Don't know why, just looks a bit unusual.
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#88I love the Only Fools and Horses suggestion.
This question and related suggestions might vary by English speaking country, or even region. The beauty is there is no 'right'.
https://twitter.com/SirPatStew
This was my second stage of enjoying learning my mother tongue. Not Patrick Stewart specifically (he's superb), but doing Shakespeare in secondary school (UK). Great fun. This was an inner London comprehensive not a fancy school at any level, yet everyone loved it. Who hates shouting 'Ho!' at the rest of the class? The interpretation, flexibility, etymology, was enlightening.
The third stage was writing a thesis in university. I think you're there for precise writing already. I think you're > a lot of native speakers already. Try some Shakespeare. Lots of good other suggestions here too; find one that fits, and try a few that might not seem they do, but then do.
Disclaimer: Am no linguist.
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#89If you spot out anything you might have articulated differently, it’d be great to hear I'm not a native speaker, but I'd use "spot" rather than "spot out". Don't know why, just looks a bit unusual.
You "call out" something that you’ve spotted.
I suspect that the OP has merged one idiom into the other :)
As a native speaker, "spot" by itself or maybe more formally a verb like "notice" would be something that I would use in normal everyday speech in this context.
I would probably write: “If you spot anything you might have articulated differently, it’d be great to hear about it!”
OPs grammar & vocabulary is really impressive. Internalising all these entirely unwritten rules that are implicit to native speakers of a language is what makes the difference between someone who is "merely" (! hah: like there’s anything unimpressive about being fluent in a non-native tongue) fluent & someone who sounds like they grew up with the language.
(I know someone who has lived in Paris for decades & speaks fluent French, but to this day still speaks French with an obvious Yorkshire accent. Not even just an English accent: it’s obviously a Yorkshire one!)
Re: Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?
#90Correction in your last para: "If you spot out..." should be "If you spot anything you might have..." "Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express." I'd have gone with the simpler "said differently." Honestly, it gets really tough at this level, because native speakers learn these shades of meaning - if they learn them at all - through years…
"Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express." That didn't even cross my mind. That's probably "an engineer's perspective" so to speak. These days, lots of words have different meanings to different people, depending upon the context of their lives, and it's getting really hard to treat anything as a lingua franca, even English which gets cal…
Honestly, to this native speaker, articulated was a perfectly good word choice in this instance & one that I might have made myself.
I agree; I don’t think the alternate meaning of 'jointed movement' is going to occur to the majority of people - it’s really not in common use.