In this sense it's like perl. In fact perl is this way by design as it was not designed by a theoretical linguist but a practical linguist.
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)
#92Earlier 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…
> How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"?
About the same %, i think. The only difference is russian language can absorb almost anything, applying usual rules - so newly imported words are feeling native almost immediately
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master. Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish). Compared to languag…
What I’ve always wondered about this is if there’s a better way to present this: pronunciation in English is sort of path-dependent and I wonder if a two-phase approach of recognizing the etymological groups (Germanic-origin, French-origin, Spanish-origin, etc.) and then applying the rules for that group would make the pronunciation appear more regular.
I can immediately think of a counter example: corps vs corpse. Literally from the same word origin, wildly different pronunciation.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#94Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…
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…
Informal British English does break a few of those rules, especially comedy.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
«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»
You can kind of do the same thing in English: Those fuckers fucked everything up and then promptly fucked off to fuck knows where.
Can you make it with other words? Like "cunt".
Эти распиздяи много пиздят, надо их отпиздить.
Those lazy guys talk too much, we have to beat them.
Btw fuck = ебать.
Эти ебанутые совсем ебанулись, я бы их ёбнул, заебали они меня.
Those crazy guys have gone completely mad, I would beat them, they annoyed me.
Russian filthy language is like a sub-language inside a language, I don't think that normal words could be used like that.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#96This got me wondering about the concept of a custom designed language focused on functionality, unambiguity, ease to learn. My understanding is that all commonly used spoken languages are basically organically evolved and not designed?
That's the whole concept of esperanto afaik. Google it, it's a language designed to be easy to learn.
Yes and it lives up to that promise. This article says English is "easy" but Esperanto is so much easier you can learn it for free along the way of learning English.
For an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
And a recent experiment: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-...
> The tests were completed by the pupils who learned Esperanto and a control group of equal size and same previous language learning experience, who did not. They showed that the children who participated in Multilingualism Accelerator classes had considerably higher scores than those who didn't.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#97Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…
OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation.
Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other language that I know anything in. Someone shows up who gets a der/die/das wrong, or they can't do a soft Danish D, or they muck up a tone, and everyone else looks at each other and reply in, of all things, foreign accented English.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#98Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…
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…
>> 5. Word munging is uncommon in English.
Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have), comes from. The later are needed to slightly tweak the meaning of words to make them express different concepts; and, sometimes, you just need to invent a new word to say a new thing.
So for instance you go from simple "I eat" to more complex "I have eaten" to the cumbersome "I have been eating" and "I would have been eating" or, heaven forbid, "I would have had eaten". In Greek -and, I bet, in Russian or any language that allows inflection- these variations on the basic concept of eating can be expressed by verb terminations, although the occasional auxiliary verb or particle is also used: "έφαγα" (I have eaten), "έτρωγα" (I have been eating), "θα έτρωγα" (I would have been eating) and "θα είχα φάει" ("I would have had eaten) [granted, "τρώω", is an anomalous verb and its different forms sound like different words altogether... but they are composed in the same way as er omalous words, "κοιτάω", "κοίταγα", "θα κοίταγα", "θα είχα κοιτάξει" for "looking" rather than "eating"].
Then there's the thing with gendered nouns, that are absent in English but present in many other European languages. For example, to say "a male dog" in English you have to - well, do what I just did or add a pronoun ("he-dog", I don't know how this practice is called); respectively "she-dog" for female dog. In Greek you say "σκύλος, σκύλα, σκυλί" (skyl-os -a -i) for male, female and neuter (i.e. when gender is not important).
This makes English a language of many small words combined in different ways to give new meaning to utterances. It does really remind of ideographic writing as opposed to an alphabet.
But let's talk about what our languages lack that English has - you say that English has articles to indicate specificity. Most Slavic languages lack those and so native speakers of Slavic languages stand out when they use English. Instead of "the program has a bug", "progam has bug", instead of "search a list of integers", "search list of integers", etc.
In Greek again, we have a single word to indicate the position of an object "σε", as in "_στο_ τραπέζι" ("_on_ the table"), "_στην_ κουζίνα" (_in_ the kitchen), "πάω _στη_ θάλασσα" ("I'm going _to_ the beach") and "_σε_ δείχνω" ("I'm pointing _at_ you"). For me at least, after 15 years of living in the UK and using English every day, the correct use of thse different location-indicators (particles?) is still the last frontier that I haven't fully conquered and I find myself making mistakes when using them. "In the page" or "on the page"? "To the house" or "at the house"? Leaving things unsaid and relying on concept is all well and fine until you need to speak in a language that makes the ommitted information clear. Then you're in trouble and you realise you actually didn't have such a clear idea of the unsaid, after all.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#99> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”)
Huh? We have the same construction in Spanish, which is another European language. "I read" -> "[yo] leo"; "I am reading" -> "[yo] estoy leyendo".
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#100Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…
Yeah I've heard/seen that a lot. I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. It must be one of the least consistent languages out there. But most languages probably have some interesting surprises at the "advanced" level. I learned French for a long time. It's hard at first because the spelling/pronunciation is weird for an English speaker. Then it gets much easier, because…
To be fair, native speakers make mistakes all the time (less/fewer, wrong tense, etc).