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Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

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Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#281

Post by xxpor »

bradrn wrote: post #202
jakub_g wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas: planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak ‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’ Or Wichita: kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks ‘by making many trips, he…

That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word.

The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#282

Post by fidelramos »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #137
anotherhue wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Italian friend of mine, when struggling to find the word for a Satellite Dish, called it a parabola. I was very impressed.

I find that particularly amusing because Parabola is exactly how we call satellite dishes here in Italy. It’s technically called Antenna Parabolica but plenty of people simply call it Parabola (at least here up north)

We say "parabólica" in Spain.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#283

Post by 908B64B197 »

biztos wrote: post #29

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not prono…

> And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.

That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#284

Post by xxpor »

nkrisc wrote: post #173
heurisko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a d…

You can definitely find dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible" in the US just by traveling around Appalachia.

I'd never had a problem understanding a native English speaker from the US until I met a truck driver from eastern KY. Couldn't understand a single word he said. He was driving with his wife, who translated for him.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#285

Post by jpindar »

mumblemumble wrote: post #222
manuelmoreale wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that particularly amusing because Parabola is exactly how we call satellite dishes here in Italy. It’s technically called Antenna Parabolica but plenty of people simply call it Parabola (at least here up north)

Technically in English you'd only use "satellite dish" to describe a parabolic antenna that's being used for satellite communications. In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.

What else does anyone use the term satellite dish to refer to?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#286

Post by smcl »

jakub_g wrote: post #136
awillen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :) Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication. Polish is a goddamn ni…

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

I dunno, as a native-English speaker of (bad) Czech which has similar-ish thing to what you listed I am not sure these are such a mindfuck after all. If you threw all that at person at once they’d definitely lose their mind, but realistically they’ll learn it in something like this order (edit: updated to use similar example “hrát” - to play):

- conjugating verbs, “hraju” = I play, “hraje” = he/she plays

- past tense of verbs, “hrál jsem” = I was playing, “hrál” = he was playing, “hrála” = she was playing

- that verbs have a “perfective” form, so “zahraju” = I will play, “zahraje” = he/she will play

- naturally the past tense of these follow, “zahrál jsem” = I played, “zahrál” = he played, “zahrála” = she played

- that this can be conditional, “zahrál bych” = I would play, “zahrál by” = he would play, “zahrála by” = she would play

It’s not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you to constructing those little sentence fragments isn’t too bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn’t decline any nouns or adjectives, didn’t cover positions of words in a more complex sentence)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#287

Post by tcgv »

chris_j wrote: post #154
tcgv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese: > "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue" That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue. I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterp…

> That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese: The chap in question was from Portugal. If I understand correctly from your website, you're from Brazil, right? Is there any difference between how that word would be used in Brazilian vs European Portuguese?

That's right, I'm from Brazil!

The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal.

As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.

Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usage, mostly regarding the "popular" vocabulary. Some heavily used words in one country are less frequently used in the other. There's also a noticeable difference in the accent.

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

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#288

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> Sergio Serrano has participated in many international scientific conferences across the globe. "In a typical situation, a group of foreign researchers are discussing a complex technical issue with very precise and elaborate formal English," Serrano says, "until an American joins the group."

I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins the group" there would be a twitterstorm.

What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't quite share it.

I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase, everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks would reply in English. Then the process looped back to the second phase.

The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could - because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable speaking in English.

Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!".

Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it. Everyone does it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#289

Post by dmingod666 »

qart wrote: post #2

"prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around when the Indians did it.

With it's usefulness it's a surprise it's not picked up as an actual word.

Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#290

Post by 908B64B197 »

brk wrote: post #70
FriedrichN wrote: post #41

There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American English. As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone

There is such a thing as Indian English If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.

I've heard "do the needful" used by non-Indians in tech, thanks to Indian expats in tech using it.

I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.

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