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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)

#151

Post by vinay427 »

lordnacho wrote: post #127
orbital-decay wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More of a tangent as I agree with your point, but...

I think this diversity, while large, is still less than in many other languages. As one example of many, just within Europe there are accents/dialects of German in Switzerland that are largely mutually unintelligible even to some other Swiss German speakers, and nearly entirely unintelligible to most Germans. This is also true for dialects of Italian, or even Dutch, according to friends from those countries. It's generally even more fragmented outside of European languages.

Unlike English, some of these cases don't even have easily standardized registers. In my experience, people in Birmingham or Glasgow, for instance, can fluidly switch to a more standardized accent and dialect that's natively or "intuitively" understandable to a speaker from North America or South Africa.

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

#152

Post by jjgreen »

samatman wrote: post #30
cletus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a definite advantage if a language is phonetic (eg German, Turkish) but there are also worse than English. French springs to mind. English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin). Also, at l…

I don't think that's true about French. It has some weird rules, the refusal to pronounce the last consonant in a word is especially galling (ok, pun was intended), but it's fairly consistent once you figure it out. English, though, is a slough. Enough practice, thorough practice, and you'll get through it. But it's rough going.

As a late learner of French, I was delighted to discover that the exceptions are CRLF, so DOS line-endings

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

#153

Post by dragonwriter »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
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…

Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse. Then there's the matter…

> In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses

To be fair, in English it's not really “big words”, either, it's also old (but not particularly English; Greek, Latin, and French are pretty high on the list.)

Exacerbation (from which exacerbate is a back formation) is a fairly direct import from Latin. Defenestration was from (IIRC, at the time—and this was 400 years ago—already archaic) French. sic, which is definitely not a big word, is often perceived this way, again a Latin import. &c.

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

#154

Post by [deleted] »

globular-toast wrote: post #120
ggambetta wrote: post #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".

It didn't say you can't express the same thing. Of course you can. The point was the present progressive tense is unique to English. Also, the translation of present progressive in English is more often than not simple present in Romance languages. I only know French but, example "I am eating" would be "je mange" in most contexts. The French way to express progressive, as "je suis en train de manger" is relatively un…

[deleted]

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

#155

Post by gerdesj »

smitty1e wrote: post #138
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…

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

Ophthalmologist is derived from old Greek. I have never visited an eye doctor but I get my specs from an optician. Eye doctor makes sense as a concept and I have said it myself but is not routinely used.

The Normans brought Old French with them and that became the court language. Old English was more Saxon based. The classic examples of the effect of that invasion are meat vs animal names eg beef (French) and cow (Saxon).

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

#156

Post by sokoloff »

nickkell wrote: post #128
theobeers wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.

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

#157

Post by globular-toast »

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…

I disagree. I think English does have some inherent advantages. I can't say it's the "best", but it's certainly better than some alternatives.

There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers.

What also needs to be mentioned, though, is its expressiveness. There are many objectively "easier" languages than English. For example: Afrikaans has a very simple grammar, being essentially a "stripped" Dutch; Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary. But all humans talk about the same things one way or another. A language being "simpler" means there must be other ways to communicate those more complex things. It's often done using very specific and nuanced rules based on context and culture.

English, on the other hand, can be mostly learnt in a book. There's not much culture to learn as English culture has already been exported widely around the world. You're much less likely to end up in a situation where you have no idea at all how to express yourself using the rules you've learnt.

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

#158

Post by MandieD »

lordnacho wrote: post #127
orbital-decay wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even native speakers can have trouble understanding some British accents. Most of my family has lived in Texas for several generations and are monolingual English speakers, but one cousin was born in and has lived his whole life near Liverpool, and sounds a bit like it (omitting long story about immediate aftermath of WW2 and my feckless great uncle). His wife is from Cheshire and has a rather strong accent. I understand her just fine, but went to college on the East Coast, had professors and classmates of varied linguistic backgrounds, and have spent most of my adult life in Germany.

When they visited Texas for a family reunion, several of my cousins who have not spent much time around non-Texans honestly asked about the language she was speaking.

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

#159

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

IIRC, octopus, while Greek in origin, came into English mainly through scientific Latin, which probably plays a role in it not having a Greek-derived plural, or at least not dominantly (you will encounter both octopi and octopodes in English sometimes.)
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