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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)

#251

Post by pja »

wenc wrote: post #230
jeroenhd wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native Dutchman, I won't pretend that our language doesn't have some of these problems as well (good luck pronouncing things like "glooiing" or "apostelen" right the first time), but English is just special. One of the simplest words, "read", has two correct interpretations that can sometimes even exist in the same sentence, with its pronunciation purely being based on context. There's an entire poem[1] about pr…

That poem is amazing. It really brings to light how inconsistent English pronunciation truly is. Also I bet most native English speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce most of those words correctly. Many are obscure words that rarely come up in conversation (I only know them because I watched a lot of British TV as a kid). And for the longest time I thought awry was pronounced “Aw ry” until I heard someone say it as “…

I’ve always pronounced it "-tile", not "-teel" & both Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mercantile ) & the OED ( https://www.lexico.com/definition/mercantile ) agree that it’s pronounced "-tile" rather than "-teel", so I think your initial belief was the correct one!

Wiktionary suggests that -teel is an alternate pronunciation in the US, but that -tile is the preferred one even there.

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

#252

Post by brandmeyer »

7952 wrote: post #202
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.

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.

NATO phonetics (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc) helps with this. The words were chosen specifically to be resistant to accent differences.

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

#253

Post by kh1 »

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”??

When you finish middle school, you're supposed to learn most of kanjis used in real life.[0] At that point it's pretty rare to encounter kanjis that are completely foreign to you.

But there's electronic dictionary on which you can draw to search for kanji.[1] I used one of these in high school.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji [1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...

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

#254

Post by IgorPartola »

cpursley wrote: post #51
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…

Do you mind sharing the version of the dick conversations in Russian? I'm one of those crazy people studying Russian.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes#Taboo_vocabula...

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

#255

Post by Razengan »

English is not easy to learn (or teach) without being [involuntarily] exposed to it in one way or the other since childhood.

One of the best examples of the convoluted mess of ambiguities and exceptions in English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841

It's particularly frustrating when English-speakers arrogantly make fun of other languages (like Chinese/Japanese) as if English doesn't have its share of stupid shit.

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

#256

Post by EE84M3i »

presentation wrote: post #143
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…

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…

>Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana.

Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.

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

#257

Post by pja »

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…

P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive.

Perhaps you just need an education in high quality English swearing? Although I’m informed by my partner that Spanish is a much better language to swear in than English, if you have the choice.

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

#258

Post by pja »

dghf wrote: post #248
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…

> 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 i…

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

“Come the fuck in, or fuck the fuck off.”

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

#259

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

em-bee wrote: post #249
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, a…

I would describe your statement of german to be accurate in terms of how I've been learning it. I'd classify myself as a soft A1 but i have a decent vocabulary built up and can generally understand what a sentence is saying even if I don't know all the words. The foundation of the language is vital to learning it and as a native English stuck in SVO, the german sentence structure gets weird fast. But then it just clicked. Like oh I know where to put that now! The hard part i have is knowing which specific word to use because in context the meaning of it could change based off of how a native would use it. Honestly, the conjugations don't scare me so much as they used to. I'm not good at all with like accusative, genitive, etc but I don't think twice when altering verbs.

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

#260

Post by tocoder »

hahahahe wrote: post #179

Mastering a language is not easy even for native speakers.

I agree with this assessment as a person of colour who was born in an English-speaking country. I also have a degree on English. I'm currently at a threshold where I could get better, but the margins in terms of pay-off to diminishing returns is not appealing.
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