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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)

#131

Post by globular-toast »

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…

That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form.

If you want to learn more about English and be able to help people in these cases, the best way is to learn a foreign language. I recommend French or German and get the corresponding "English Grammar for Students of..." book, i.e. for French: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-French-Lea...

These books are excellent. You can read it in a day. You won't be that close to being able to speak French (as you won't know any vocabulary for a start), but you'll suddenly appreciate the grammar of your own language. It will even make you appreciate programming languages more. It's a truly enlightening experience. All the second-language European speakers you meet will know this stuff already.

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

#132

Post by smitty1e »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123

> 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…

"I love my job, and my job loves loving me."

Something I'm fond of saying when the office life goes the Full Dilbert.

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

#133

Post by as1mov »

jeswin wrote: post #17
cletus wrote: post #11

I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating. Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened. The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importan…

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. English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. T…

I think that's also the reason why Indians have a thick accent while speaking English.

A lot of the languages we learnt in India have a script that's spoken exactly the way it's written. The words contain all the information on how to pronounce it and there are no exceptions. This seems to carry over when we try to learn English (mostly to the everyone's amusement hah).

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

#134

Post by inkyoto »

goodcanadian wrote: post #84
inkyoto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things. You h…

To be fair, once upon a time, England was full of English people. The educated would know Latin as that was the language of the church and of international correspondence. Then, the Normans arrived and the upper classes rapidly became somewhat French. So, the difference in speech between upper class and commoner as well as between educated and less educated (England had remarkably high literacy rates even among the c…

It is deeply rooted in history, indeed; however, the British class system is a much more recent invention, and came along to become solidified with an onset of the industrial revolution, if I am not mistaken. The social divide had become so stark that good education became a privilege of middle and upper classes. Commoners could no longer afford paying for their education, hence they had no way of learning «fancy» Latin and «Greecian» words.

As for the Old Norse influence on English, I believe it is still a thing in Orkney Islands and in the local dialect locals speak. Danes at the time, when they took a questionable joy of raiding and pillaging villages and towns across British Isles spoke, essentially, the Old Norse

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

#136

Post by anoncake »

globular-toast wrote: post #131
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…

That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form. If you want to learn more about English and be able to help people in these cases, the best way is to learn a foreign language. I recommend French or German and get the corresponding "English Grammar for Students of..." book, i.e. for French: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-…

> That's actually quite a common rule found in many languages Usually the second or third verbs in a sentence take their infinitive form.

It's just a bit hidden in English because the conjugated form is identical to the infinitive so often.

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

#137

Post by jeroenhd »

KaiserPro wrote: post #122

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…

As a native Dutchman, I won't pretend that our language doesn't have some of these problems as well (good luck pronouncing things like "glooiing" or "apostelen" right the first time), but English is just special.

One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about pronunciation in English that's near impossible to read for anyone but native speakers.

In my experience, speaking English is something you can learn about as quickly as you can learn any language, depending on how close your native tongue is to its language family. There's a few rules about how to structure a sentence, but overal, it's not a language that's particularly difficult to learn.

Reading becomes a challenge. If you don't know how a word is pronounced, you'll often mispronounced it the first time you read it.

When it comes to writing, you may as well be learning Chinese or Japanese; nobody in their right mind would write "thorough" and "tough" like they are written if they would come up with a writing system today.

I think the problem with English is that it's been written down without a proper reform for so long. Pronunciation changes over time, but if the written word doesn't change with it, you end up with a mess that's only making things difficult for kids and foreigners.

I'm not saying English is the only language with problems, though. If you're learning Dutch, you've probably run into the impossible "de" vs "het" problem, a remnant of when the language still had masculine, feminine and neuter. I've argued with other native speakers which articles feel more natural compared to which noun, only to find out the dictionary says both are allowed. Luckily, there are some rules (many of which are vague and full of exceptions), but most native speakers won't be able to tell them to you. Every language has its challenges.

[1]: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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

#138

Post by smitty1e »

lordnacho wrote: post #86
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…

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? This is the thing about English. Everyone can learn intermediate English, but there's a long tail of vocabulary that comes from other languages. Often you find there's an English word, a French work, and a Latin word for something. You'll then discover that there's some subtlety of me…

The fact that English has an "eye doctor" and an "ophthamologist" is a direct result of the Norman invasion of 1066.

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

#139

Post by tsimionescu »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115
danjac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest things I found in Russian were the mobile stress - the way the stress on the noun or verb moves around depending on tense/case etc - and the sheer amount of irregularity in the inflections. The vocabulary is smaller though and it's also shared among other Slavic languages - I can get at least the gist of a newspaper headline in Polish or Bulgarian based on my knowledge of Russian, and I can imagine if you…

I'm Greek, so not a Slav, technically, but once I was in Plovdiv in Bulgaria and I realised I could read all the store signs . Not only where they in an alphabete very similar to the Greek alphabet (compared to the Latin one anyway), the words themselves were also often similar. For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek. Nor…

The balkan countries have a long history of mutual cultural influence which mostly exolains this. In particular, there is a large Trukish influence common for things like exotic fruits and foods. The name for oranges is similar in Romanian (a romance language - portocală/portocale), Bulgarian (a slavic language - Портокали / портокали), and Greek (Πορτοκάλι / πορτοκάλια), all borrowed from Turkish (a Turkic, far-eastern language - Portakal / portakal).

The same is true for tea (Ceai, Чай, Τσάι, Çay), but it is not true for older local foods - for exmaple cheese is Brânză in Romanian, Сирене in Bulgarian, Τυρί in Greek and Peynir in Turkish; apple is măr, Ябълка, μήλο, elma.

Interestingly, while they don't generally share much vocabulary, the Balkan languages all share certain grammatical traits despite their very different origins origins (some examples are the use of articles even in slavic languages, a preference for the subjunctive instead of the infinitive, the lack of a proper future form for verbs, using a compound with "want" instead).

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