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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)

#301

Post by inkyoto »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #247
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…

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/h…

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

Hardly a 10/10 for the BDSM part. Whilst the Russian language has retained many grammatical features of the Proto-Indo-European language, it has also dropped many (i.e. perfect tenses, the aorist, a number of noun cases, merged long, short and ultra-short vowels into same quality vowels and lost all nasal vowels and the list goes on). Russian, whilst having its own share of linguistic quirks (but, hey, what language does not?) is no more complex than, say, Sanskrit.

For the purpose of inflicting severe bouts of pain in the rear orifice, give Basque (an absolutive-ergative language) or Georgian (a Kartveli language with the split ergative) a go. Both have no known language ancestors, both are highly agglunative languages with some serious phonetic challenges and with a wealth of deliciously mesmerising grammatical peculiarities.

Or try native highly agglunative North / South American (e.g. Navajo for agglunative and fusional delights and the tenseless verb conjugation by 7x modes and 12x aspects of each mode and Quechua for reversed concepts where future is placed «behind» the past which is always «ahead»), or Innuit, or North-Caucasian languages. Russian will feel like a godsend and a breeze after that.

Then, there are Klingon and Lojban.

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

#302

Post by sershe »

ccpcx wrote: post #283
sershe wrote: post #279

Comparing 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…

Do you mean understanding what the words are or what they're talking about? I can understand the words in Two Ways to Play, but I would have had a lot of gaps in Poke Chop Sandwich if I hadn't already looked at the lyrics. I have little, if any, idea of what either of them are actually talking about. I get the vague sense that Poke Chop Sandwich might be their version of Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen ("waiting in the s…

I can understand the words, I just have very vague (or no) idea of what they're talking about :)

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

#303

Post by Arete314159 »

I've 45, a native English speaker, and extremely literate. A few months ago I got into a disagreement with my husband on how to pronounce a word ("satiety"). Because I'd never seen it before, and while I could figure it out from context, it turns out my guess at the pronunciation was wrong.

English is humbling. You are still learning words in middle age. You are still learning pronunciations in middle age. It just never ends.

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

#304

Post by EE84M3i »

cehrlich wrote: post #163
presentation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native sp…

>Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics.

For reference, the Kanji Kentei test[1] has 12 levels.

> Level 2 is as high as many Japanese, even those with higher education degrees, tend to go. Passing level 2 can be used as leverage when applying for jobs, etc. Passing levels pre-1 and 1 is especially rare even among native speakers.

Level 2 has 2136 daily use kanji. Pre-level 1 has 2965 kanji, Level 1 (the highest) has 6355.

Learning 3000 kanji is definitely "advanced".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei

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

#305

Post by jhanschoo »

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…

> 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).

In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.

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

#306

Post by wwwwewwww »

jeswin wrote: post #17
cletus wrote: post #11

I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating. Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened. The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importan…

The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master. English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. T…

Pedantic nitpick here, but the issue you are raising is orthography, not pronunciation.

A difficult pronunciation implies that a language has difficult sounds that non-native speakers can't pronounce (regardless how those sounds are spelled, or even if the language has a writing system at all).

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

#307

Post by wwwwewwww »

jiggawatts wrote: post #192

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 fluen…

I don't think it's possible to be more fluent then a native speaker. You can sound more educated, or elite, or have better verbal skills or otherwise have a "gift of the gab", but a language is defined by the native speakers (except in special cases like Continental English or Esperanto).

One mark of high-level fluency is being able to casually confuse "less" and "few" and say things like "more better" just like a native English speaker does.

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

#308

Post by wwwwewwww »

soldehierro wrote: post #267
bonoboTP wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

"that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity."

I would love to see a citation for this.

It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn.

With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.

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

#309

Post by yigitcakar »

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 agree with both of your premises. I started going to International school when I was 10 and got all my education in English. I got two college and one masters degrees. I am fairly confident in my ability to use English yet my wife is American and every day she finds something to correct in my English.

My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well.

Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.

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

#310

Post by 5C07BF3E »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #244
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 w…

> I go store

Grammar is simpler, but the need for tonal agreement makes the vocabulary more complex. You can't just go to a "store". You would go to a food-store or a one-thing-store, or a store-store.

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