Relative to other languages, the premise might be correct but learning English was still not easy due to all the irregularities and overloaded words one has to memorize.
English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
271–280 of 330 posts
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse. Then there's the matter…
Some write "coöperate" in English, which looks like the same kind of pretentiousness.
I'd argue that it's less pretentious and more helpful to non-native speakers, as it indicates pronunciation. It's a marker that the word is pronounced "co-op-er-ate" and not "coop-er-ate". The diaeresis works much like vowel markers in Hebrew to make the words easier to pronounce for people reading a word they might not have heard pronounced.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind.
So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes.
For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it.
[0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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...
By the Byzantines
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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"!
It's from an event I Praha - I mean that there's very little use for the word (as opposed to "kill" or "throw out a window". It's not like sheep and mutton.
Ed: see first part, and the section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration#Origin_of_the...
It's not from old Latin, but rather from "new Latin".
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Conquest might indeed be too strong - occupation might fit better. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark%E2%80%93Norway#Langu...
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando , I am eating; io sto leggendo , I am reading; lei stava facendo , she was doing... It's just a form of gerundio . As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
Portuguese is exactly the same in your examples! io sto mangiando - eu estou comendo io sto leggendo - eu estou lendo lei stava facendo - ela estava fazendo I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teac…
In Italy it’s a running joke that everyone thinks they can speak any “Latinesque” language if necessary, because “they are just Italian pronounced a bit differently” - when obviously that’s far from the truth, resulting in very funny attempts to invent words on the spot. But yes, there are a lot of structural similarities; which is natural, considering how these languages came to be.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I've never heard someone use the word defenestrate unironically.
Depends on your social circle. It’s used among the gentry in the UK when referring to board members of various types if they are ejected with force.
https://magpiebrule.ca/2021/01/12/the-self-defenestration-of...
Andrew Scheer (former Conservative Party of Canada leader) learned this recently.
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#279Comparing Russian (my native language), English, and Turkish (that I've learned to lower-intermediate level 15 years ago and have since forgotten)... English has very simple rules, and tons of irregularities and exceptions everywhere. And as some have mentioned, tons of vocabulary. Aspects of Turkish sometimes felt to me almost like a programming language, it's very modular with complex rules compared to English (for a non-native learner of both), but there seem to be relatively few irregularities. Russian has both - complex rules, and tons of irregularities.
I am guessing rote learning without many complex rules is easier for most people?
PS. The biggest gap in my English that is obvious in my daily life is that I cannot for the life of me understand half of ZZ Top lyrics. Can native English speakers understand ZZ Top lyrics, e.g. "Poke Chop Sandwich" or "Two Ways To Play"?
Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stu…
I'll admit my ignorance of the grammatical complexities of Hungarian beyond the fact that it's highly declined and has a really interesting case system, though I will remark that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity. (This isn't necessarily an established, of course, as complexity is something that will likely never be fully quantified). Ultimatel…
> the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity
That doesn't mean the complexity has to be evenly distributed along the learner's path.
Also, I'm not saying one is better than the other. But it's certainly something people experience. When I learned German, it took longer to craft correct sentences because there are more rules to pay attention to. You have to get the cases and its interactions with the genders right in every sentence for example. Same with conjugations. There is no "simple subset" of the language where you can avoid this. While there is a simple English that you can resort to and use almost perfectly with little study.
To build even a simple Hungarian sentence you need to understand vowel harmony, definite and indefinite conjugation, nuanced word order rules etc.
Also regarding this:
> the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity
It's very hard to quantify as you say and I don't think they'd be able to say otherwise even if it was otherwise due to fear of misinterpretation (i.e. they'd be accused of racism).