> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? You would love French (coincidentally these words are of french origin). I learn (or at least remember to use) words nearly every day.
> these words are of french origin It seems they are derived from Latin, not French. https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbate is from Latin or from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbation https://www.etymonline.com/word/defenestration
Almost all of latin-based words in English have been imported from French (which itself is almost entirely latin-based), including these 2. There's not much historical reason for English to pull vocabulary directly from Latin I think
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.
A few years ago I visited an office in Birmingham which is less than 100 miles. Someone was trying to tell me a password and I had to get them to write it down after several failed attempts. The basic sound of some of the letters was just completely different. I also have a strong accent which can be much harder to understand than a none native speaker.
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 w…
I’ve thought, for years, about improving my English. But I don’t know how to go about doing so. I already speak, read, and write English without effort. But I want to improve further. There seem to be a lack of options for someone in this situation, all English learning resources seem to be aimed at beginners.
After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow i…
I'd say English listeners are incredibly fault-tolerant because of how diverse English speakers are. Languages with fewer, more localized speakers are less tolerant of poor pronunciation because there's less variety in what they hear.
This x 100! My pronunciation in Czech is now pretty bang on, but when I started I didn't elongate "long" vowels enough - by that I mean a vowel like "á" should be pronounced about 50% longer than "a". My great example is when I was trying to tell my friend something about a pub called "u čápa". She told me she didn't know it, which was surprising as it was well known within my friend group. I explained its location and she said "ahhhhh, you mean u čápa!". I couldn't believe it - the difference between "I know this" and "What are you talking about, I have no clue what that could possibly be" was like 50 milliseconds more "a". But it makes sense - if you've only ever heard correct Czech your likely won't know dodgy Czech. Most native-English speakers have plenty of exposure to various levels of English-language ability, either directly via speaking to a tourist or indirectly through various other media (radio, TV, film, podcast, music).
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 f…
> Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste.
> The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.
My wife (nonnative speaker, European, Romance language) started looking at GRE vocabulary at one point. She found most of the hard words were super easy; it was the everyday ones that proved tricky.
OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation. Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other langu…
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.
And, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.
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 unders…
For that matter, deep South and Cajun accents can be tough for a Northerner. I worked in New Orleans for a few years. A friend of mine from undergrad was also working there. He was from Jacksonville in northern Florida, so less deep South language-wise than other places. I remember telling him once I sometimes really had trouble understanding people. His response was that he did too.
OTOH, English speakers are happy to accept that you speak decent English with a relatively low bar. I can have a conference call with French, German, or Russian accented people, where nobody questions whether those people understand the content of the conversation. Certain languages are so specific that as soon as someone says one wrong thing, everyone switches to... English. Happens all the time in every other langu…
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.
> 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.
And vice versa. What has enriched English is much of Scandinavian origin[1][2].
An recent example in Sweden involved a politician protesting about anglicanisation of the Swedish language. He wanted to replace some widely used English term with a Swedish equivalent. Tracing the origin easily revealed it was instead the English who are using a Scandinavian expression. Which Swedes are now finding convenient.