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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)

#181

Post by tasogare »

cehrlich wrote: post #163
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…

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 sp…

Japanese is hard for different reasons but some of them are self-inflicted. Bothering with pitch accent is one: no second of effort towards it will be ever relevant in comparison to learning new vocabulary or collocation. An other big issue is indeed in manuals, which teach sentences construction with the English logic instead of the Japanese one (eg starting with 私は学生です already poses 3-4 pedagogical problems). I’m working on a conversation guide (in French for now) to avoid those issue but that’s a lot of work...

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

#182

Post by inkyoto »

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).

Pandemoniums of cockatoos are still rather common in Australia, especially considering the ruckus they bring along, and the occasional damage they cause.

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

#183

Post by e12e »

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…

> 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.

That's... Not how vocabulary develops. English is a rich language in large part due to the conquest by the French - much like Norwegian is a rich language due to conquest by the Danish.

Although "defenestrate" is probably more like "tweet" than "computer" - I believe it was a bit of a "fashion statement" at the time.

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

#184

Post by michaelt »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #126
dehrmann wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes. With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully? Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

As far as I can tell, the English rule is "sometimes we take the loanword's pluralisation, sometimes we don't, just memorise every single case and don't worry if you get it wrong sometimes"

For example, Samurai and Kimono are both loan words - but we import the pluralisation of Samurai (Seven Samurai) [1] whereas Kimono pluralises with an s on the end (Seven Kimonos) [2].

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/samurai [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kimono

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

#186

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

leephillips wrote: post #12

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; wor…

Thank you for your educated empathy! I spent ten years in the US, have the highest proficiency level in the CEFR standard, and yet I dread phrasal verbs. Sure, I get the feeling the set of idioms I know is getting smaller as time goes on, and spelling is, well, not foreign friendly, to put it mildly.

But phrasal verbs... how can I really process that make out is somehow, intuitively, connected to kissing? What about putting out? How can a house burn up but also burn down? Putting off, setting somebody up, giving up? I will always feel more comfortable using postponing, framing and surrendering respectively. (I don't really use them more often to fit in [hey, that one almost makes sense!], but internally most phrasal verbs always feel artificial.)

For the record, coming from Spanish I feel the pain of native English speakers having to cope with to be as both ser y estar, but to this day I still have some trouble with do and make.

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

#187

Post by thaumasiotes »

mkl wrote: post #173
andi999 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class.

English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns.

[1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.

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

#188

Post by datastoat »

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.

> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

Though Australia is in the antipodes (to the UK), not the antipuses.

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

#189

Post by sokoloff »

cpursley wrote: post #53
jeswin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

English spelling really is terrible and needs a full writing reform.

That’s only slightly less likely to complete successfully than any other major system re-write.

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

#190

Post by donogh »

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…

I’m learning Polish (from English), which is very similar grammatically and even allows for some understanding of Russian (with many false friends of course).

Going back to an earlier point re English speakers understanding beginners/non-natives, I find Polish to be the opposite — I imagine it’s similar with Russian? Examples of errors that cause Poles to look at me like I have two heads:

1. Mistakes in declination: granted changing an ending can dramatically change the meaning of a noun/adverb/adjective, but the ability to infer the intended meaning seems to be largely absent.

2. Mispronunciation of syllables: neglecting to pronounce an accent, for example “mnóstwo” (plenty) vs “mnostwo” (meaningless).

3. Using a wrong conjugation with verbs or slightly mangling the conjugation, e.g., “napisałem list” (I wrote a letter) vs “napisem list” (meaningless).

4. Not breaking up a word correctly —- it’s not always obvious where one syllable ends and another begins, e.g., pronouncing “zadzwonić” (to call) as “zadz-wonić” vs “za-dwonić”.

5. When not accenting the correct syllable (usually second to last in Polish but I understand there’s no general rule in Russian).

My best guess as to why there is little natural tolerance for mistakes is because of lack of immigration. Poland is nearly entirely homogenous, and the biggest immigrant population is Ukrainians, who also speak Slavic languages.

Anyway, personally, I still find it fun to learn, and I look forward to the day I can confidently wear this t-shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Polish-Whats-Superpower-Shirt/d...

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