Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the words we teach English language learners changed

pudding.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 210 posts

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#121

Post by bigstrat2003 »

overtone1000 wrote: post #54
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…

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#122

Post by scoot »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #47

When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel. I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English. I…

> I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity

That seems like a given. If you're curious, you'll soon see through any ideology you were spoon-fed as a child, religious or otherwise.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#123

Post by miki123211 »

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…

Oh, this is such a fun rabbit hole.

There are plenty of programmers who can write a commit message in almost perfect English, yet don't know the difference between lettuce and radish, and can't tell what a little sheep is called.

My favorite area to catch people on is religion. Many C1 English speakers who grew up religious, some of whom are still devout and go to Church every Sunday, would be unable to hold even a basic conversation about their religion in English.

The unfortunate side of this is how non-native speakers of English swear much more often. I got better at it, but I suspect I'd still struggle in American corporate culture.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#124

Post by [deleted] »

chrismorgan wrote: post #60
ninjahawk1 wrote: post #47

When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel. I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English. I…

Here’s one verse from the Bible itself that shows that language changed: 1 Samuel 9:9: > (Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.) I love that one because it translates so well into English because we also have an older and a newer word for close enough to the same thing. Though when saying older and…

[deleted]

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#125

Post by yongjik »

refactor_master wrote: post #99
theli0nheart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#126

Post by YoshiRulz »

kuboble wrote: post #8

I tried to build a similar list myself for German and it's not easy as just taking a lot of content and counting frequency. I also haven't found existing curated lists of most useful vocabulary. There are some databases but e.g. they are biased towards Wikipedia and web which makes some very obscure words at the top of popularity (like some technical words which are present on each wiki page like Datenschutz or Impre…

Another commenter mentioned that enWiktionary[1] has some, and I also found a dewp article[2].

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Ge...

[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequenzwörterbuch

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#127

Post by [deleted] »

miki123211 wrote: post #123
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…

Oh, this is such a fun rabbit hole. There are plenty of programmers who can write a commit message in almost perfect English, yet don't know the difference between lettuce and radish, and can't tell what a little sheep is called. My favorite area to catch people on is religion. Many C1 English speakers who grew up religious, some of whom are still devout and go to Church every Sunday, would be unable to hold even a b…

[deleted]

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#128

Post by ButlerianJihad »

WalterBright wrote: post #109
refactor_master wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation". The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades late…

But your friend was applying consistent rules of grammar from his mother tongue. Having learned some vocabulary, he would mentally form the phrases in his head, and then literally translate out the words and tenses.

Grammar was so important to him that he was adhering to the grammatical rules he knew. It would be interesting to know how he would perform with writing or typing instead of contemporaneous conversation.

"go" in particular is an irregular verb, and also one of the most versatile words in the English language. Having studied how to conjugate "go" in other languages, I do not envy anyone trying to conjugate or just use it in an English sentence!

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#129

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #87
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 tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.

You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#130

Post by monk_grilla »

itsamario wrote: post #81
retrac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

That's what I discovered religion is for, understand the language as it was created. Ever wonder who decides what's self-explanatory and what resonates?

What?
Post reply on HN