Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

christopherwink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 330 posts

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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by danjac »

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…

> Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?

I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syllable) but these follow regular rules with a few exceptions for some foreign loanwords.

Vocabulary is quite small with lots of compound words - however other than some aforementioned loanwords (mostly from Swedish and more recently English) the core vocabulary is pretty alien to an Indo-European speaker. Spelling is completely phonetic (everything written as it's spelt) although as with most languages there are strong regional dialects.

Finnish has a lot of up-front rules to learn, but for the most part it's pretty regular with few exceptions (there's also the lack of grammatical gender, another feature of Uralic languages). Russian on the other hand is exceptions all the way down.

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

#173

Post by mkl »

andi999 wrote: post #169
AndrewDucker wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).

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

#174

Post by Asraelite »

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…

I think the primary factor that causes this perception is the lack of any proper dialect continuum between English and another language. There are of course a few minor ones like EnglishScots and EnglishJamaican Patois, but nothing significant that any sizeable number of speakers would encounter.

Dialect continuums between languages are basically the norm around the world. You can even connect Sicilian to Portuguese for example.

I would assume the primary reason English isn't part of any major one is because Britain is an island, otherwise English would probably connect to Dutch and join the West Germanic continuum. It would then appear just as fractured as any other language.

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

#175

Post by brabel »

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.

Portuguese is exactly the same in your examples!

io sto mangiando - eu estou comendo

io sto leggendo - eu estou lendo

lei stava facendo - ela estava fazendo

I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teacher spoke fluently to me in Italian, obviously I would suddenly realize my Italian was still very poor and I had a lot to learn.

EDIT: by the way, the author must have meant that other germanic languages don't have "gerundio"? Looks like all Latin languages do.

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

#176

Post by kh1 »

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…

As a Japanese, I agree with you. When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them. So I end up saying "that's just how we say/use it".

And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.

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

#177

Post by danjac »

tsimionescu wrote: post #139
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-east…

I think the term for this is Sprachbund[1] - where a number of languages in close geographical proximity pick up each others' grammatical and other traits despite belonging to different families.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

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

#178

Post by kwhitefoot »

andi999 wrote: post #169
AndrewDucker wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother

Yes.

Usually size comes first: big red metal ball.

red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball.

But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.

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

#180

Post by smitty1e »

gerdesj wrote: post #155
smitty1e wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Sa…

Sure, I could have offered a better example, but the point is that English has enjoyed some wrenching integrations over time, Hastings having caused a big one.
Post reply on HN