161–170 of 210 posts
No English school teaches you this, only real practice.
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>(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document. The point of lea…
> If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word? I've been in this situation. There's no real difference between the two circumstances you describe.
I still cannot get my head around what is "lunch", "supper", and "dinner" - and how this was explained to me at school was different from reality, also depending on the country where you are in :-) No English school teaches you this, only real practice.
Supper has always meant evening as far as I know but referring to the evening meal as supper became a marker first of the upper class and then of pretension. Hearing someone say supper is quite jarring for me.
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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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> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.
As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone…
It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reject, to ask permission), and 適当 (tekitou, suitable, appropriate, half-assed, careless).
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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…
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…
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> This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words! Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard .
> Depends what you mean by "proficient". I thought I was pretty clear - you could understand at the level of television. Television scripts are dumbed down.
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> 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…
> 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, etc. Hence the common phrase, found in most language phrasebooks: “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”
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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…
When I started dating someone whose second language was English, I found that the idioms were a giant hurdle. We really do speak in idioms and metaphors and this makes it very difficult for people who understand the words but not the cultural context. While my (now spouse) adapted, I also adapted by learning how to speak far more literally, especially around people of mixed levels of English. I don't think there is a…
Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.