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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)

#311

Post by cehrlich »

aasasd wrote: post #295
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.

Perhaps ‘spaced repetition’ tools like Anki might come in handy in organising the memorization. You still need to come up with a system, but the app will then help with putting kanji into the brain. Spaced repetition is suited precisely for things that don't have a prominent internal structure which would lend itself to learning. Afaik Anki is popular for learning Japanese, iirc even the author did exactly that, so t…

Yes, IMO the easiest way to 'learn' the kanji is Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji", along with an Anki deck to review daily. I 'learned' 2000 kanji this way in 3 months, with a daily time investment of about 1 hour. There are plenty of pre-made RTK Anki decks.

The reason I'm putting learn in quotation marks is because afterwards you need to reinforce them in context, ie by learning vocab and doing tons of reading (there's a term called 多読 which means it's not the quality of the material or even your level of comprehension, but just the sheer amount of pages you read).

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

#312

Post by jeswin »

wwwwewwww wrote: post #306
jeswin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Informative. Thank you for the correction.

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

#313

Post by ivan1783 »

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…

English is no more or less fault tolerant than any other language. You can make the exact same sentences in Russian, German, French (I speak those so I can draw parallels) and they make the same amount of sense and sound the same (incorrect) - but you get the meaning. People here saying that native speakers of other languages are not fault tolerant but that just isn't true. There are exceptions, sure but for the most part people speak with me in German/French just fine even with the mistakes I make (Russian/English being my mother languages).

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

#314

Post by ivan1783 »

axaxs wrote: post #52

I'm convinced English is impossible to master. There are just too many corner cases. That said, English is also a very abused language. Sadly these days, correcting someone leads to 'oh it's a living language and use determines definition', and more sadly, dictionaries play along with this idea. This both makes the language harder to understand, and impossible to master IMO.

Its also impossible to master because what can be 100% correct in the US is wrong in India or in the UK or in Australia or New Zealand - all of who have English as their native language.

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

#315

Post by euroderf »

orthoxerox wrote: post #231
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.

AFAIK it's only The New Yorker that does that. They have their own standards I guess.

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

#316

Post by euroderf »

danjac wrote: post #172
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Greek, so not a Slav, technically, but once I was in Plovdiv in Bulgaria and I realised I could read all the store signs . Not only where they in an alphabete very similar to the Greek alphabet (compared to the Latin one anyway), the words themselves were also often similar. For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek. Nor…

> Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that? I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syl…

Seconding this. Endings are very regular, much more so than even (say) in Estonian. The base vocabulary is small (compared to English) and is acquired by sheer repetition (both active and passive). You need to retune your ear from English though, because both vowels and consonants differentiate between single and doubled (think: I scream, ice cream, ice scream).

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

#317

Post by euroderf »

ekianjo wrote: post #228
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…

Old english was a more complex language but evolved to more simple grammar over time. Languages are not static.

If they had had the misfortune to invent movable type we might be stuck with it even today.

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

#318

Post by blackshaw »

gerdesj wrote: post #150
tartoran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also because English is currently the bridge language, also known as Lingua franca. I find that the main thesis of this post is in agreement with my experience, been using English for 20 years and haven’t explored all the galleries and tunnels inside the language.

"also known as Lingua franca." ... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!

Ironically, while they gave their name to the French language, the Franks themselves spoke a Germanic language, not French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankish_language

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

#319

Post by blackshaw »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #126
dehrmann wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English also holds onto gender for some French loan words (fiancée, blonde), accent marks, Latin plurals (cacti), the Latin notion of the word (viruses because viri is bad Latin), and occasionally Latin gender and plural (dominatrices). But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes. With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully? Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

"Criterion/criteria"

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

#320

Post by blackshaw »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #98
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…

>> 5. Word munging is uncommon in English. Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have),…

> "I would have had eaten"

Where are you from? "I would have had eaten" makes no sense to me (British). I don't think it's a valid construction.

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