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Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

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Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#171

Post by dirtyaura »

gamegoblin wrote: post #170
dirtyaura wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just accent or that people make too many grammatical mistakes? Or to put it another way, if you had to choose between two: clear pronunciation with a lot of grammatical mistakes vs a strong accent but flawless grammar. Which one is harder to understand for a native speaker?

I have had a few Indian professors who tend to have perfect grammar but strong accents, and some Chinese professors with poor grammar but better accents. I find the latter much easier. It's easy to correct simple grammatical errors in my head, but if you don't know what words are being said, it doesn't matter if grammar is perfect.

Thanks, that's something I thought, but wasn't sure, because as a Finn it's hard to get enough samples of the equivalent situation: someone speaking my native language without accent or without grammatical errors.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#172

Post by gamegoblin »

dirtyaura wrote: post #171
gamegoblin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a few Indian professors who tend to have perfect grammar but strong accents, and some Chinese professors with poor grammar but better accents. I find the latter much easier. It's easy to correct simple grammatical errors in my head, but if you don't know what words are being said, it doesn't matter if grammar is perfect.

Thanks, that's something I thought, but wasn't sure, because as a Finn it's hard to get enough samples of the equivalent situation: someone speaking my native language without accent or without grammatical errors.

I've heard from some Finns that they have never heard of a foreigner speak Finnish at a level comparable to a native.

Contrarily, I have heard several Europeans speak American English almost flawlessly.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#173

Post by jholman »

NhanH wrote: post #57
larrys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent" Specifically "clueless". I agree with that but I also think it's an attitude as well in some people. I think even if it was explained to them they might not think that it would benefit them. In that case they are not clueless they are simply rigid in their thinking, right? As the saying goes "when in rome do as the romans do" Along those l…

I've actually asked some American (one of them being my boss) on whether I should be using an American name to make it easier for everyone at work. I received two "It's weird" answers, and haven't asked the third person yet. Considering that my name is relative short (the first 4 letter of my username, Americans tend to remember the "h" and "a"'s position swapped though), would you consider it a difficult name to rem…

I can't say what you "should" do, but here are some thoughts.

Your name is really really hard for English-only speakers. Sorry.

I have a friend named Nhan. I put a lot of work into learning to say his name correctly. Most people did not. After two degrees in Canada, when he moved to the Valley he gave up and changed to an English name. An ex-co-worker named Nhi has just accepted that everyone calls her "Ni" (like "knee")... at least it's closer than calling you "naan" or "non". ;P As far as I can tell, the best spelling to get people to say your name correctly is probably "nyen". (Like maybe if you put in your email sig "Nhan (pronounced like 'Nyen')") If you want to make a joke about it, I guess you could even say "the 'h' looks like an upside-down 'y', so just pretend it's a 'y'". Although I dunno if you feel okay about using humour about your native language to try to improve communication.

As I'm sure you've noticed, Vietnamese pronunciation rules have surprisingly little in common with English pronunciation rules, so virtually zero English speakers will correctly pronounce your name, unless they've been told (by you or by someone else). The other more-common examples are Ng and Nguyen (I've been told these are actually Chinese names, but everyone I've met with one of these names was Vietnamese... I dunno, I'm just an ignorant Canadian struggling to be less ignorant). Almost zero English speakers pronounce these names correctly, even after being told many times! It's not that hard, people! But most people are hilariously lazy about learning new sounds. "Nhan" is a lot easier to get almost-right than "Ng" or "Nguyen".

Personally, as a language nerd, I like it when we're forced to learn a little tiny bit about another language, so selfishly I hope you keep your name. =] But you'll have to decide what's best for you.

As a little side story, in Vancouver there used to be a pho restaurant named Pho Bich Nga, on a very busy street (Kingsway, for the Vancouverites in the crowd, which has lots of Vietnamese shops... I'll drop a shout-out here for Green Lemongrass). I'm told that's correctly pronounced kind of like "fuh beek nga". English speakers don't really know what to do with that, but the best guess usually ends up being "fo' bitch nigga". Teenagers think that name is pretty funny, yes sir. Sadly, they changed the name, and a Vancouver cultural landmark is no more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pho+bich+nga

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#174

Post by jholman »

gbog wrote: post #145
znt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had read this reply 3 years ago, I would have called you "racist". But after spending time with engineers from different countries, I believe having an understandable English accent is not a nice thing to have, but rather a professional responsibility. I have personally witnessed people losing their jobs/contracts because of this issue, and although I enjoyed their friendship, I wasn't really sorry for losing a…

> having understandable English accent Do you mean American mumbling accent or International English accent? If the later, I fully agree and this apply the most to US citizens. Last week I was having beer with two friend (one US one Canada) and a guy from LA came by, and it was completely impossible to me to understand one single word in his sentences (except for "fuck" and variants, which convey no meaning). He didn…

> Do you mean American mumbling accent or International English accent?

> Indian English has as many rights to life as have German English or Texan English or Aussie

You are missing the point. It's not about "rights to life". No language (or dialect, or idiolect, or accent) has a "right to exist", or they all do. Who cares? (Also, German English? wtf?)

What matters are things like: Are you getting the results you want? Are you delivering good value to others (so that they want to give you good value back!)?

If your job doesn't require communication, speak whatever you like. If you're so damn good at your job that everyone else has to obey your whims, AND you don't care about the total effectiveness of your team, then speak whatever you like. But most people need to communicate, and for some people, poor accent becomes a dominant factor in their job performance. The responsibility is shared, but it falls most-heavily on the person who is most-different, because it's easier for one person to change than for a whole office to change. This, I hope and trust, is what znt meant when he said "professional responsibility".

Sometimes it cuts the other way, though. I'll give you an example from my own life. I am personally bad at understanding thick south-asian accents. I used to think all people from my background (Canadian anglophone) had the same problem. But I'm learning that I have more trouble than most people. That means it's mostly my problem. But if everyone agrees that so-and-so is very hard to understand, then it would be mostly so-and-so's problem.

This isn't about "rights" or "entitlement". It's about being effective. It's not the "law of the jungle", it's the law of gravity. And it's laughable, stupid, and somewhat offensive, to say that we might as well go back to slavery.

(Of course, sometimes I hear someone say "you have no right to speak your own language in my country". Those people are stupid and wrong. Fortunately, most people who say things like that are also not very good at other things in life, and they usually get punished by the marketplace, and we can ignore them. The rare people who are both powerful, and also stupid xenophobes, everyone else should cooperate to punish such people.)

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#175

Post by rmc »

unono wrote: post #105
patio11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question. The main reason is that the hypothetical Huge Wall Street Firm doesn't see a way to reproduce the project at scale. They don't have pg et al, and while YC is applying mass-production techniques to startups, by the standards of markets where APIs exist to conduct transactions they're still in the early industrial revolution. If pg was just a decision engine for Startup#fund(amount), a vaguely s…

That's a good point - PG is essentially decision engine. All YC investments are public and some investor could go through and build PG's model using videotapes of all those founders. Collect all this data, put a few data scientists on it, and build a virtual PG. The connections don't matter if you're a huge fund, you can buy your way to a meeting with Presidents, silicon valley types are puny in comparison. This is a…

you can buy your way to a meeting with Presidents, silicon valley types are puny in comparison.

Ah, but how do you know who to talk to? What presidents of companies, what SV types?

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