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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)

#191

Post by robotmay »

kh1 wrote: post #176
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.

I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.

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

#192

Post by jiggawatts »

As a point of reference, I just watched a video of a non-native speaker speaking Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44KrRp7QgA

He's trying really hard, but it's like nails on a chalkboard listening to him. It's worse than a bad computer text-to-speech converter.

Hungarian is one of those languages where it is shockingly difficult to learn to a level where you're intelligible at all, and learning to be fluent as an adult is borderline impossible. I've never met a person who has managed it.

For comparison, I once came across some Dutch primary school teachers on holiday that were more fluent in English than most native speakers that I know. They had a bigger vocabulary and used more complex sentence structures than I was used to from the typical locals. They had a mild, barely detectable accent.

Not all languages are equal!

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

#193

Post by foldr »

flobosg wrote: post #71
leephillips wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be , conjugated, followed by the present participle.

I’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + ge…

To be clear, this is just a difference in the traditional grammatical terminology for each language. Linguistically speaking neither English nor Spanish has any such thing as a "present continuous tense".

Of course, the exact linguistic notion of "tense" is not particularly relevant to most people learning a language. I'm not objecting to its broader use in the context of language learning.

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

#194

Post by foldr »

leephillips wrote: post #58
flobosg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.

Yes, it seems some grammarians reserve “tense” for conjugations. The same grammarians will say that English has no future tense.

The reason for saying that English has no future tense goes beyond just morphology. 'Will' is a modal operator that has no inherent future sense. For example, you can say "John will be here already". You can't do that with a true future tense. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.h... for more on this. If you try translating the examples at the bottom into a language with a true future tense, then 90% of them will come out as gibberish, or as meaning something quite different.

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

#195

Post by stevesimmons »

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”?

In English, the short, common words are the oldest ones, from Old English and Anglo-Saxon origin, the language of everyday people. The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.

You see these two distinct forms a lot in Shakespeare. Indeed he popularised many of the borrowings. Here is one great example from Macbeth:

"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Back in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, only the best educated could understand "... will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine". So Shakespeare finishes with "making the green one red", which everyone got.

* multitudinous - from Latin "multitudo"

* incarnadine - from French "incarnadin", via Italian and originally from Latin.

* red - from Old English "read", similar root as the German "rot" and Dutch "rood".

* green - from Old English "grene", similar root as the German "grun" and Dutch "groen".

So short words = old, Germanic; complicated words = newer, Latin or French/Italian.

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

#196

Post by JPLeRouzic »

gerdesj wrote: post #150
tartoran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also because English is currently the bridge language, also known as Lingua franca. I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.

"also known as Lingua franca." ... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!

Wikipedia says [0] "However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca#Hi...

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

#197

Post by charcircuit »

robotmay wrote: post #191
kh1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.

Learning kanji is a skill. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Also what's a few thousand kanji if you also have to learn 10s of thousands of vocabulary.

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

#198

Post by williamdclt »

e12e wrote: post #183
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…

> 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. Alth…

> Although "defenestrate" is probably more like "tweet" than "computer"

Not sure I understand your point, but "defenestrate" -> "de-fenestrate" which literally translates (via old French) as "un-window"!

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

#199

Post by foldr »

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…

Sorry, but this seems like nonsense to me in relation to Spanish. The Spanish construction is pretty similar to the English one in usage. It may be slightly more restricted, but there is no linguistic basis for saying that one is a tense and the other is not. Linguistically speaking, the construction is not a tense unto itself in either language. (It's fine to talk informally about the "present progressive" as a tense, but no serious linguistic analysis of English would recognize the existence of any such tense as distinct from the present tense.)

I actually remember being misled by the myth of the uniqueness of the English present progressive when learning Spanish. I'd keep trying to avoid the use of the present participle unless the relevant event was really in progress right now. But it's really easy to find examples where this is not the case. See e.g. the headline here ("how often are you singing?"): https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/espectaculos-y-tv/tv/201... Or try a Google search for "these days I'm trying to": https://www.google.com/search?q=%22estos+dias+estoy+tratando...

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

#200

Post by veqz »

e12e wrote: post #183
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…

> 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. Alth…

Wait, what? Norwegian is richer because of Danish?? (Also, what conquest?) I'd say it's the same language, just with lots of different dialects anyway.

What has enriched the Norwegian (and Danish and Swedish) language beyond the Germanic Scandinavian would be the importation of words from Latin, German, French, and English. All happening through trade and cultural influence, in roughly that order.

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