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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)

#241

Post by eternalban »

kh1 wrote: post #221
robotmay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Ja…

> On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name.

Do you have any thoughts on the implications (social, mainly) of logographic writing systems?

Also would be interested in having a sense of the historic patterns of literacy in Japan in context of Tokugawa caste system.

/tia

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

#243

Post by kleton »

matt-attack wrote: post #240
kh1 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Ja…

How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??

Nowadays you draw it in your phone/computer. In the old days you looked up by "radical" and number of strokes in large tables.

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

#244

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

schrodinger wrote: post #49

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…

OTOH in Mandarin, the correct way to say things is actually more or less like that :) Most of the time tenses are inferred from context, copula (the verb "to be" in "I am hungry" or "there is no rain") is omitted, and there are some prepositions but very often you don't need them (for example, you would indeed say "I go store").

A pity that it has a super complex pronunciation, tonal system and writing system to go with the extremely straightforward grammar.

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

#245

Post by leephillips »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #233
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…

I've lived in Spain for many years and speak pretty good Spanish. But there is one thing I still find relatively tricky in Spanish: the correct gender for nouns. The worst is when you're referring to something elsewhere in a sentence just by lo/la, well away from where the noun was, or have to make the adjective match the gender. If you get it wrong native speakers will not fully understand you or at least look at yo…

Interesting point. Another thing that I recently learned is that a (for example) masculine noun, such as presidente, will take the feminine article if the person you’re talking about is female: la Presidente.

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

#246

Post by gpanders »

ghaff wrote: post #211
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…

>Run-on sentence are discouraged. Sort of. This is a somewhat modern thing. There is various punctuation--parentheses, em dashes, and semicolons in particular--that let you construct fairly long and complex sentences. But the modern style, certainly for basic communication, is to mostly break things up with periods. (To the point where it's sometimes OK if the segments are sentence fragments.)

> This is a somewhat modern thing.

Indeed. Go back and read some speeches from the 19th century (e.g. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural speech) and you’ll find run on sentences everywhere. Heck, even the US Constitution is full of them.

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

#247

Post by d1sxeyes »

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…

2. Two short sentences here don't accurately convey the horror of Russian's case system, where not just verbs but also NOUNS must change (decline) into one of 6 main cases (potentially more depending on whether you consider the locative, partitive genitive, vocative, etc. as distinct cases) :D, but yes absolutely - basically, you only ever have the possessive form in English 'add 's, or for pronouns just learn 'his/her/their' and even verbs have a maximum of 8 forms (be - am - is - are - was - were - been - being), with the vast majority having just four or five.

3. 9 is an odd number to pick, most people agree there are 12 or 16, but you have (multiply as appropriate) past, present, future, simple, future-in-the-past, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, indicative, imperative, subjunctive, active, and passive forms.

Russian on the other hand has 2 grammatical tenses (past and non-past), and 2 aspects (perfective and imperfective), as well as a couple of forms constructed using auxiliaries (immediate future, conditional). It also has gerunds and participles, and all of this before we even start thinking about verbs of motion.

4. Russian does have the concept of specificity in some cases - in particular there are some cases where the genitive can be used instead of the accusative to indicate indefiniteness.

Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).

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

#248

Post by dghf »

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…

> Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct.

Prequel. Tweetstorm. Brexit. Clusterfuck. Omnishambles. Freegan. Romcom. Stagflation.

> Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

The word usually appears in its noun form, defenestration, for which there isn’t really a handy alternative. You can’t really talk about The Throwing-out-of-the-Window of Prague when discussing the Thirty Years’ War, for example.

> “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough

“The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked” is perfectly grammatical and comprehensible English, if somewhat colloquial.

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

#249

Post by em-bee »

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…

i have a similar experience. i became mostly fluent after a year of living in the US during high school. (and then living in the US again and other english speaking countries for a few years)

i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder.

learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.

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

#250

Post by amelius »

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…

> I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist.

This is how language develops, so I wouldn't feel bad about it.

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