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

Post by smitty1e » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #112

lordnacho wrote: post #86

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”? 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…

You only get defenestrate in quite pretentious literary essays. I'm English and only came across it recently. I think the availability of Google has made that sort of stuff more common writers can use obscure words and rather than have 90% of their readers not understand, now they can google it. English has a vast stock of words like that that some writer probably made up a centuries ago - there's a lot of old litera…

Post by presentation » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

cehrlich wrote: post #129

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 pre…

Post by nfg » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

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…

Post by barry27 » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #41

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…

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…

Post by toyg » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

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…