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How the words we teach English language learners changed

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Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#111

Post by KPGv2 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82
alyeska2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not. Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying…

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot." This is more corporate/middle class. There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extrem…

> Americans don't seem to do understatement.

Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.

I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.

I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.

You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...

I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."

Examples abound.

(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#112

Post by KPGv2 »

conductr wrote: post #78
dadie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors. It always made me question if Americ…

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

> you almost never hear it said where English is that language

I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:

1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"

2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#113

Post by KPGv2 »

eudamoniac wrote: post #101
conductr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

We don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.

So 3–8%.

Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#114

Post by poncho_romero »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #92
ghaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native English speaker, keen feels like a very 1950s TV word. Don't know if that's actually true but feels like that way. I expect you're more likely to hear like cool today are some more contemporary word.

Still in common use in Britain as far as I know. A more local (Bristolian) word would be "keener" used to describe someone who puts lots of effort into a task to win praise.

In Canada I hear keener more often than keen (although both are rare).

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#115

Post by KPGv2 »

DC-3 wrote: post #28
crazygringo wrote: post #16

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

I think a lot about this. It's funny how there are certain domains of language, familiar to all native speakers, but that you are simply not likely to learn as an adult language learner, at least not without diligent and focused study. I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agr…

> if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.

Indeed. I'm American but my family has spoken German in the USA uninterrupted for 200 years. I speak German with my kids. But there's a children's song called Alle Vögel sind schon da and another called die Vogelhochzeit that I listen to with my kids, and it's just a litany of bird species I do not know but, being in a kid's song, I assume means they are common words for German kids.

When I look them up, the English words are ones I've heard and know from context are birds, but I couldn't tell you what they are like, and I would never use the word in English when asked about birds. My go-tos would be mockingbird, cardinal, hummingbird...ones I see in my backyard and have seen my entire life.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#116

Post by KPGv2 »

saghm wrote: post #96
coliveira wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're a foreigner learning a language your experience is mostly from reading. There are words, however, that are much more common at home and in spoken language. So you'll probably never learn the words that a 10 year old kid knows.

One subtle issue in learning words from reading is that with languages like English where there's ambiguity in how to pronounce a given spelling, sometimes you might not guess the correct pronunciation for words you learned. This isn't specific to learning non-native languages either; growing up I read a lot and learned most of my advanced vocabulary that way, so as a teenager I would often find out that I didn't pro…

There's a quote I've come across before, never make fun of someone mispronouncing a word in English, because it's a sign they are a reader.

I was in my 30s when I learned "ennui" was pronounced "on wee" rather than N-U-I. I did not know it was from French. No shame. I never spoke the word aloud, but used it in writing. A teenager I knew was studying for a vocab test and had to learn the word, and I overheard him flash carding. Pronounced it "on-wee" and my brain exploded.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#117

Post by thomastjeffery »

pixl97 wrote: post #42
thomastjeffery wrote: post #27

> It’s as if the world now requires you to be more precise about everything. This is something I've been thinking a lot about. We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why? Computing. Software is written with objective language. Everything is clearly unambiguously defined. Blue is no longer a category, it's #0000FF. Logic must always reduce to a binary truth value. Most of what we have to talk…

Eh, this seems somewhat right, but somewhat not right either. Language has to do with our Monkeysphere, that humans over long periods of time in the past were limited to a very small subset of people they interacted with socially and closely. A few institutions likely had a large effect on your language like the church depending on where you were. After that it was the people you interacted with to stay alive. Becaus…

> It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective.

I was saying the opposite. The core feature of an LLM is that it is subjective. The implications of a written expression (prompt) are not well-defined objective truth, but instead a vague probability. We can compute the probability, but that doesn't ever intersect with logical reduction or arithmetic; so the implications we get are just vague guesses on the progression of the story. With enough examples and training, the LLM can guess correct arithmetic answers, but critically, it does not actually perform the arithmetic that verifies them.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#118

Post by viciousvoxel »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82
alyeska2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not. Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying…

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot." This is more corporate/middle class. There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extrem…

Seems like an extremely reductive and negative take on what is "American". Perhaps you've only experienced America via LinkedIn and a specific shitty company?

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#119

Post by mmooss »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #71
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime

? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible.

> Jesus Freaks

That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#120

Post by SoftTalker »

Frieren wrote: post #97
SoftTalker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't quite follow your point. Are you saying there is more inequality today than in 1953?

From 1945 to 1980 inequality was the lowest in the USA. From 1980 onward economic inequality exploded. I understand that you cannot follow my point without this important piece of information.

So you're talking strictly about economic inequality. Because in 1953 we were still 10 years away from the end of legal segregation.
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