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English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

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Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#71

Post by flobosg »

leephillips wrote: post #65
flobosg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to as a “future tense”. In Spanish, unlike «haber», «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in conjugation and therefore the present continuous-ish construction is not treated as a proper tense or tense-aspect pair.

There is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be , conjugated, followed by the present participle.

I’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + gerund”. Tomayto, tomahto.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#72

Post by inkyoto »

cpursley wrote: post #51
IgorPartola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much mor…

Do you mind sharing the version of the dick conversations in Russian? I'm one of those crazy people studying Russian.

«Эти хуи, на хуй, это захуярили и потом вместе похуярили на хуй» – «this bunch of not very nice men have done a sloppy job (of something) and then have locomoted out of here in a unknown direction»

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#73

Post by nullsense »

yellowcake0 wrote: post #54
IgorPartola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much mor…

To be fair, I've never heard someone use the word defenestrate unironically.

Same here. I think we could also coin and use on the fly the word "refenestrate" which would be to throw some back throw someone back into a window they have just been thrown out of and "emphenestrate" which would be to throw someone through a window into a building.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#74

Post by nullsense »

Easy vs hard is dominated not by grammar and vocabulary, but by access to the language and interest in it.

Nothing is more accessible than English, and there is absolutely mountains upon mountains of pop culture from the Anglosphere which no other language comes close to matching except for Japanese.

If you have access to people that speak the language, access to native media, and there is lots of stuff on that language that interests you, then it's easy.

If you want hard vs easy you could move to Antarctica and try learn Kimbundu.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#75

Post by nullsense »

soldehierro wrote: post #18
ekianjo wrote: post #4

That sounds like a blanket statement valid for most languages.

"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungari…

It's not easier to learn because of grammar or vocab, but simply due to network effects. If you want to learn it, whoever you are, and wherever you live and whatever your mother tongue is there is the highest possible chance on average that you can access people who speak English, find high quality reference materials, and find native media that interests you.

If you run those considerations through all possible language pairs it's easy to see that these are the main factors that influence difficulty. Grammar, vocab, and pronunciation are a distant second.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#76

Post by nullsense »

schrodinger wrote: post #49

After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow i…

Not much different than any other language... You can still get get quite a bit wrong and still be understood no matter what you're speaking. You dont even need to conjugate verbs necessarily.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#77

Post by dehrmann »

tablespoon wrote: post #60
IgorPartola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much mor…

> Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"? My understanding it that English's vocabulary is pretty messed up because it's a mongrel language: Germanic substrate with substantial portions replaced or augmented by medieval French, with lots of Greek/Latinate…

English also holds onto gender for some French loan words (fiancée, blonde), accent marks, Latin plurals (cacti), the Latin notion of the word (viruses because viri is bad Latin), and occasionally Latin gender and plural (dominatrices). But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#78

Post by dehrmann »

schrodinger wrote: post #49

After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow i…

I'd say English listeners are incredibly fault-tolerant because of how diverse English speakers are. Languages with fewer, more localized speakers are less tolerant of poor pronunciation because there's less variety in what they hear.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#79

Post by raverbashing »

yongjik wrote: post #33
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're getting at, but I still disagree. Because it's not only about classisism it's about not giving a f! A non-native can communicate better than a native in several occasions.

Grammar is, by definition, what native speakers get right when they don't give a fuck.

Descriptivism x Prescriptivism, the thing someone is getting wrong today was something that someone "got right" before

Yes grammar deviations from the norm "are right" if they are productive and if they are understood in a collective manner.

This is different from someone who speaks with an ininteligible pronunciation

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

soldehierro wrote: post #18
ekianjo wrote: post #4

That sounds like a blanket statement valid for most languages.

"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungari…

[deleted]
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