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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

#201

Post by schoen »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #175
fluoridation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one). In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.

My German teachers translated "trennbare Verben" as "separable verbs":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#202

Post by cryptopian »

alex_akimov wrote: post #161

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.

Wait til you find out that in Northern England, we call the evening meal "tea", not to be confused with "tea", the delicious leaf water.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#203

Post by lesostep »

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.

Tbh, that's how I learned English. Rudimentary grammar, knew a few words, and then just read with dictionary until I didn't need a dictionary. Also watched a lot of shows until I didn't need subtitles.

Languages are weird like that – if you use them enough, your brain just figures some things out. After all, natural languages are easy enough for toddlers to learn.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#204

Post by lesostep »

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…

>> We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why?

Alternative theory: asynchronous communication.

It used to be your speech stayed with you, and if you were unprecise, or misspoke, or was caught meandering off-topic, people could just ask you and you would clarify. With exception for authors and journalists, that were explicitly taught how to write.

Now, your speech stays while you leave, so you have to construct as precise of an image as you can. If you misspoke or said something wrong, people have to engage with your speech as-is.

People can ask you to clarify online, of course. But you have to build a solid foundation, before people even start to think that they could benefit from a few clarifications.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#205

Post by thomastjeffery »

lesostep wrote: post #204
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…

>> We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why? Alternative theory: asynchronous communication. It used to be your speech stayed with you, and if you were unprecise, or misspoke, or was caught meandering off-topic, people could just ask you and you would clarify. With exception for authors and journalists, that were explicitly taught how to write. Now, your speech stays while you leave, so you…

That's another useful perspective on the same thing I'm talking about.

Your speech doesn't just fail to stay with you, it's implications hang over you. What you have said is treated structurally like a magical incantation: directly relevant to reality itself, no matter how little sense comes out of that relationship. This is the vain objectivity I'm talking about: everything you say is interpreted as if you meant to state an objective fact.

Context is a fundamental feature of communication. Objectivity just means factoring as much context as we can out of the interpreter, and into the expression. It's a useful tradeoff, but it has limitations. At some point, there must be subjective interpretation. Without it, you are just talking to a brick wall.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#206

Post by ebiester »

AgentMatt wrote: post #170
ebiester wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise? 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.

I don't think my communication became more precise. Language is imprecise and in these cases (ESL), you are also limiting your vocabulary. (Especially when I moved outside the US - while I was around very educated people who studied for the GRE, learning a word is not the same as digesting all connotations.

So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.

And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.

The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#207

Post by hulitu »

rsynnott wrote: post #88
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…

> 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?”

> “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”

No, a FAANG employee. /s

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#208

Post by bot41 »

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…

You're talking about ignorant teenagers. Is there more proof that large groups of people don't believe languages change over time?

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#210

Post by bot41 »

ghaff wrote: post #15
OJFord wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting one if you look at Google Ngram Viewer – usage dropped off massively to 70s/80s, and it's picked back up since but not to 1953 or earlier levels, so even that doesn't explain it. Must just be the combination of that increase as well as other words decreasing in usage I suppose. E.g. perhaps we're a bit less keen, but also much less passionate, so keen ends up making the cut.

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.

It's used in Australia. "who's keen for some beers?", "keen as", etc
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