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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)

#161

Post by afiori »

toyg wrote: post #149
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…

Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando , I am eating; io sto leggendo , I am reading; lei stava facendo , she was doing... It's just a form of gerundio . As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.

personally I am a fan of the parallel universe where the translation of "I am eating" is "sono mangiante"

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

#162

Post by andi999 »

presentation wrote: post #143
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…

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward d…

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

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

#163

Post by cehrlich »

presentation wrote: post #143
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…

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward d…

Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable.

Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood.

However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist.

As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X

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

#164

Post by stevekemp »

danjac wrote: post #90
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…

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 moved to Finland, and find Finnish quite hard.

On the one hand it is very consistent and regular, on the other hand the suffix-approach means it requires a lot of concentration in speech. (Which then often results in Finnish people replying to me in English.)

Russian I love to hear, and I love the Russian naming system (Anna -> Anya).

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

#165

Post by AndrewDucker »

andi999 wrote: post #162
presentation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward d…

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

It's "some dolphins" and "some larks"

Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).

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

#166

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

necrobrit wrote: post #93
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not a counter-example: the Latin root “corpus” was borrowed through French twice: once in the 16th century (corps) and once in Middle English (first corse, then corpse). This is a case of path-dependence: the newer borrowing is pronounced more like French while the older one has been regularized.

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

#167

Post by lordnacho »

vinay427 wrote: post #151
lordnacho wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a good point. When I was in Switzerland they had a guy from Muothathal on TV. TV decided to subtitle him. I thought Swiss German was weird, but this fellow seemed to be speaking a completely different language, to my beginner ear.

The thing is though, you can ask people to speak High German instead of mundart, eg at meetings. They admit it's different enough to warrant explicit statement.

You can't be telling your Liverpudlian or Brummie to speak the Queen's English, that would be rude.

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

#168

Post by wccrawford »

andi999 wrote: post #162
presentation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward d…

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

There's a few well known ones that everyone uses.

And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them.

And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses.

In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc.

https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...

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

#169

Post by andi999 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #165
andi999 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).

Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?

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

#170

Post by mkl »

andi999 wrote: post #162
presentation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward d…

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

Most of those collective nouns are just made up and are not used in the real world: "In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, the tendency had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild."

And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/

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