English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by orbital-decay » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #97

gruppe_sechs wrote: post #2

Something 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 langu…

This has another side: non-native speakers are expected to understand different accents and flavors of English just like an anglophone would. For example, as a Russian native speaker, I had real trouble comprehending even a slightest French accent, while having zero issues with others. I'd imagine there are a lot of ears "incompatible" with my own accent, so I spent a fair amount of time on getting rid of it.

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

#122

Post by KaiserPro » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

Learning to read english is not simple.

I've been learning dutch, and teaching my children to read (english, native language) The one thing that struck me is how impossible it is to "sound out" english. That is use the letters to make a stab at what the word will sound like.

Unlike dutch, the written word is only a slight guide as to how its supposed to sound.

I can't spell for shit in english, but I can spell quite well in dutch.

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

#123

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

> 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.”)

At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary:

In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it.

And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être en train de + )

So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.

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

#124

Post by inkyoto » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:49 AM UTC

j4yav wrote: post #85

inkyoto wrote: post #72

Earlier 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.

Yes, with this example, it is possible to translate the foul language nearly bidirectionally.

The OP was enquiring upon an example of a dick conversation, hence an example of the use of the word «хуй» (a cock / a dick) to illustrate how productive the word formation can be in the Russian foul language.

Another quirk in the sample sentence is that the direction of the locomotion is not explicitly mentioned anywhere but is rather conveyed by way of a specific verb prefix «по-».

Russian verbs of motion can be uni- or multidirectional and employ prefixes to emphasise motion aspects.

The same sentence can be changed to: «Эти хуи, на хуй, это захуярили и потом вместе захуярили отсюда на хуй» to mean «this bunch of not very nice men have done a sloppy job (of something) and then have locomoted out of here in a particular direction (likely having something specific on their mind)». The prefix of «за-» disambiguates the direction and the purpose of the motion. Also notable that «захуярили» means both, «to have done a sloppy job of something» and «to get out of here / commence the locomotion».

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

#125

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:50 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #78

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.

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #77

tablespoon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully?

Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

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

#127

Post by lordnacho » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

orbital-decay wrote: post #121

lordnacho wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langu…

This has another side: non-native speakers are expected to understand different accents and flavors of English just like an anglophone would. For example, as a Russian native speaker, I had real trouble comprehending even a slightest French accent, while having zero issues with others. I'd imagine there are a lot of ears "incompatible" with my own accent, so I spent a fair amount of time on getting rid of it.

Even accents from Britain itself can be weird. Ever spoken to a Scot, a Liverpudlian, or a Brummie?

Even people who've spoken English daily for decades will do a double take if they're not used to it.

If you listen carefully, the range of vowels is quite wide, for the same word in different accents. The probably throws off a lot of people.

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

#128

Post by nickkell » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

theobeers wrote: post #104

lordnacho wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langu…

Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used. Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.

It's a blessing and a curse.

Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege.

Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.

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

#129

Post by cehrlich » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

I agree with the premise of the article. I started going to International school (all classes in English) at age 9. Got two University degrees in England. Have several academic papers published. There are still moments where I'm made aware that I'm not a native English speaker - for example I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist.

However I'd disagree that the article's premise is unique to English. I've been learning Japanese for the past few years, and while it's definitely more difficult to learn than English for someone who's coming from another European language, I think the long tail of being native-like is equally infinite. It's just based on different things. Examples would be は vs が (this is a beginner-level topic as well, but comes back in a different way much later), sentence-level pitch accent, the fact that writing in formal language is basically the world's most elaborate game of madlibs, etc.

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

#130

Post by anoncake » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

dorkwood wrote: post #87

I know people who have spoken English for over 10 years, but still give themselves away as non-native speakers by using the incorrect tense. A common one is that they'll type something like "I didn't understood what he said". I can see their reasoning here: "understood" seems like the correct word to use when talking about a past event. Sadly, I don't know enough about my own native language to explain to them why th…

Let me try:

"Understand" is an an infinite verb. "Understood" and "did" are finite ones. Each clause can have only one finite verb (its head) so "did" and "understood" cannot both occur in one. Put another way, "did" only takes an infinite verb as its argument.