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English has been my pain for 15 years

antirez.com

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#31

Post by antirez »

robotmay wrote: post #8

I'd actually say that the English most Europeans learn is very compatible with British English, and I very, very rarely struggle to understand them. However I do quite regularly cause issues when speaking with Americans, as the difference between our dialects is quite large; the British in general have a very diverse array of accents and colloquialisms, and we tend to speak pretty quickly in comparison to the US (per…

> This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers.

That definitely can be the case, also I observed intermitting slow and very fast speeds in the same sentence in order to put the emphasis in different parts of the sentence.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#32

Post by drtse4 »

gedrap wrote: post #24
drtse4 wrote: post #19

The main issue with the the usual approach of language learning is the focus on grammar, like if doing useless grammar exercises would improve your grasp of grammar and sentence construction rules. It doesn't help much actually. I've learned more grammar watching tv series than actually studying grammar for years in school, and my pronunciation improved too. Now many things just come naturally. And i can understand t…

I agree regarding the grammar. After living in England for a couple of years, mainly surrounded by native English speakers, things just either sound 'right' or 'broken'. Although opportunity of living here is somewhat luxurious for many. So I would say that listening to as much native English as possible is really good for grammar :)

Exactly, you can get that right/broken gut feeling just being immersed in that language for thousand of hours.

Regarding real immersion (both listening and speaking) maybe personal tutors via skype or language learning communities could be a cheap alternative, i've never really tried this approach (lazyness) but i've thought for years it could have been worth the price.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#33

Post by antirez »

DanBC wrote: post #7

This is a great post. Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about! ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs ) > The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically. It doesn't have…

Thanks for the interesting links, it is interesting that there is a debate about it.

About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more.

As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough with a "card game" program that actually focuses on pronounce, I can't find any, even if I suspect that a simple script using osx "say" program should suffice.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#34

Post by pja »

opminion wrote: post #15

Antirez is spot on describing the problems of English as a foreign language in Europe (although I don't think it has much to do with PG's remarks and I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it). My favourite example is the pronunciation of the math symbol Pi in a European meeting in which everyone and their dog would be tempted to say something like "pih" except a native speaker. Or try asking for the nearest Ikea.

To be fair (ish) Ikea is a Swedish brand, so the pronunciation was always likely to be a bit odd.

Pi is pronounced the way it is because a bunch of people in the C16th decided to reconstruct classical Greek pronunciation & teach that to students in England. Mix with the great vowel shift (some of which was later reversed for Greek letters in the C19th, but in different ways in the US and the UK) and you end up with the odd mix of pronunciations we have today, with UK and US English disagreeing. At least according to this stackexchange post anyway: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/why-are-gre...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#35

Post by cliveowen »

Last time I expressed my thoughts[1] here about the same thing I was brutally word-raped by the angriest people on earth, now everyone is saying what I was saying all along and it's all well and good.

You need to know English: put in the effort, watch a shitload of movies and read even more books. That's it, you can't just ignore it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#36

Post by beloch »

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers!

Over the years, I've worked with a lot of people who are not native English speakers. The one thing that trips me up is when one of them is so utterly brilliant at speaking English that I completely forget they're not a native speaker and start unconsciously throwing in some of the slang and colorful idioms my redneck father has fed me over the years. I always feel bad when I do this because it must sound like I go from perfectly understandable English to complete and utter gibberish in nothing flat! Idioms and slang are really horrible things to inflict upon non-native speakers. I can't imagine what it must be like for a non-native English speaker trying to work with Cockneys or newfies!

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#37

Post by levosmetalo »

dsego wrote: post #16
nasmorn wrote: post #5

English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irreg…

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

Yeah, the reform of Vuk Karadžić[1] few centuries ago has made wonder for ex-Yugoslawien languages that made them truly phonetic. One simple rule: "Write as you speak, speak as you write" allowed children to be fully literate as soon as they learn the alphabet. Of course, there are edge cases where something is written differently than pronounced, but are edge cases that accounts for less than 0.001% of the words, and can safely be ignored.

If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#38

Post by blumentopf »

English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#39

Post by robotmay »

antirez wrote: post #31
robotmay wrote: post #8

I'd actually say that the English most Europeans learn is very compatible with British English, and I very, very rarely struggle to understand them. However I do quite regularly cause issues when speaking with Americans, as the difference between our dialects is quite large; the British in general have a very diverse array of accents and colloquialisms, and we tend to speak pretty quickly in comparison to the US (per…

> This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers. That definitely can be the case, also I observed intermitting slow and very fast speeds in the same sentence in order to put the emphasis in different parts of the sentence.

I suspect a lot of the problems with British English come from how many different influences we had in the origins of the language. It doesn't really make much sense because it's a weird bastardisation of Germanic, Latinate, and Celtic languages (with a few choice French words for good luck). The pacing when speaking it can be pretty wonky because the words don't really flow together like they do in other languages.

I don't really understand the whole uproar over people's grasp of English. If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them. The best I can achieve in another language is to describe how my car broke down in German.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#40

Post by thinkersilver »

The author mentions that he spent a lot of time using English without ever listening to it. A big problem is the way English( or languages) are taught or learnt that causes these problems.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.

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