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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

#61

Post by lotsofcows »

benjiweber wrote: post #41
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…

Antithesis sounds close to Anti thesis in English (As opposed to American English)

There's much more stress on the first e in thesis than there is in antithesis.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#62

Post by nu23 »

Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system.

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#63

Post by guspe »

siong1987 wrote: post #18

Not just Italian, same applies to Mandarin too. Mandarin speakers from different regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, different parts of China, Malaysia, Singapore) speak in different accents but we usually don't have problem understanding each other (yeah, sometimes we make fun of the different accents).

It's awkward to compare Italian and Mandarin to the state of English in the world. English is a language that was "exported" to America by the British Empire. It was also "exported" to Australia and many other former colonies. It's no surprise, really, that these people have difficulties understanding each other. While China and Italy inhabitants share common borders, native English speakers share only the relationship to their former colonizer.

There are other languages that suffer from the same problem. Brazilian Portuguese differs greatly from Portugal's, which is also different from East Timor's. I don't know much about Spanish and French but I assume the situation is analogous.

It's important to note that such differences between colonies and their colonizers were once a strong argument towards independence.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#64

Post by antirez »

voltagex_ wrote: post #47
antirez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

How would the card game work? It sounds like an interesting idea.

There is a common game to learn new words of a foreign language consisting of a set of cards with the word translated in your native language in the back, and the word translated in the target language in the front. You have to pick the cards you are not very sure, and remember the translation before flipping the card. At this point you can flip the card for confirmation.

I would love to have the same, but with the ability to play the sound of the word at the same time. Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#65

Post by antirez »

djm_ wrote: post #54
antirez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Have you taken a look at Duolingo[1]? It doesn't 100% focus on pronunciation but it certainly does provide them for all words. The app is great. [1] http://www.duolingo.com/

Thanks, I'll try it for sure.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#66

Post by pestaa »

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…

Can you please shed more light on BBC World Service? Why the past tense? What radio would you suggest now as a general English background noise to occasionally learn vocabulary from?

Honestly I'd have to improve my spoken English a lot. It's not even comparable to my written skills. It feels like I have to learn the language all over again with my ears.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#67

Post by jtheory »

doomlaser wrote: post #30

The recent frenzy of accent related Hacker News posts seems to reinforce the opinion I saw in a thread discussing the pg controversy: "Dear Paul, It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope. I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha ha…

This doesn't address the real problem, though, which is how exactly pg is supposed to filter out what is bias vs. what is an actual problem. It seems pretty obvious that both are true, so drawing the exact line may not be useful.

If you're starting a company, your communication skills are possibly equally as important as your technical skills -- there are simply so many difficult tasks that you will need really great communication to accomplish.

Not just convincing investors, but also your customers, possible suppliers and/or potential partners, your employees and potential hires... Communication is huge.

If your targets here are NOT English-speaking, then your communication in English is not what matters -- you had damn well better be very fluent in the languages those people speak. This also applies to a native English-speaker trying to break into foreign markets.

Unfortunately, there are all kinds of nasty psychological tricks that can harm you if you even look foreign (I'm thinking of a study where students were given one of two photos of an instructor but the same audio file, and some of the ones shown a Chinese-looking instructor had trouble with her accent, but the ones shown a blond instructor didn't.

Then if you do have a strongly non-local accent... people who grew up in fairly urban areas may have no trouble understanding you, but others may be lost with an accent that's even moderately different from their own. I remember spending a hour on the phone debugging with an IBM DB2 tech based in India, and his accent didn't seem terribly strong to me, but the (upstate-NY born & bred) woman sitting next to me was extremely quiet on the call... I found out afterwards that she'd hardly understood a word he'd said.

It's totally legit to talk about the bias (and I tend to agree pg should make some effort not to make the irrational part worse...), but it's also valid to tell founders that working on their accent can make a huge difference in their success.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#68

Post by jbaiter »

mjn wrote: post #56
beloch wrote: post #36

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…

Mostly true, and good for me to the extent it's true (as a native English speaker), but it does depend on the field and country. A lot of robotics and EE research in Japan is published in Japanese-language journals, as one of the bigger remaining outposts of non-English technical literature. The journals are slowly moving slowly towards more English, at least to the extent of publishing English abstracts for the Japa…

OT, but an English translation of that (excellent, btw) book was released last year by Princeton Architectural Press: https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#69

Post by cliveowen »

kome wrote: post #55
cliveowen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translating the documentation from English is akin to providing obese people with scooters inside chain stores: instead of facing the problem head-on you're just avoiding it and learning to live with it.

> instead of facing the problem The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

The problem is not being willing to learn an essential skill.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#70

Post by d0m »

kome wrote: post #48
d0m wrote: post #28

I don't understand why people are making such a big fuss about the PG article. He gave only one example of so many red hearing. Obviously being a foreigner with a strong accent doesn't help you when 90% of your time is spent communicating. duh. What makes me sad is that by being honest and wanting to help founders, PG just got a new shit load of problems from people over-reacting. Do you really think he'll give great…

The problem of PG (and yours) it's the lack on empathy, simply as that. Like "antirez" says, English is not a hobby: English is pushed down the throat of a growing share of people around the world today. And they need English to live a normal life, not for fancy careers. Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be…

First of all, I'm a foreigner, English is clearly not my native language and I have problems every day because of it. So yeah, native english speakers have it easier. But so what? Nobody said life was supposed to be easy and that everyone was created with the same skills and weaknesses. Some people are prettier, others are taller, other speak better english. Not acknowledging this is only hypocrisy. What PG said is that if you want to put the chance on your side, learning to speak a better english is a very important skill.

    Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives.
That's life. Learn it, move on. Or I can, you know, not learn it correctly, gain less money and have it even harder.

I can understand having empathy for some people where English is pushed down their throat. But, for founders applying to YC and going to the Valley? Please. Why would anyone invest any money or take seriously a CEO that doesn't take his/her work seriously. (Yes, communicating well for a CEO is very important. What about a programmer that can't code?)

Imagine a Steve Jobs explaining to the world how Apple is great with a foreign accent that nobody can't understand.

The school you went to matters. Your height matters. Your appearance matters. Your family matters. Where you live matters. The amount of money you have matters. It always been and will always be. Faster you understand it and start putting the chances on your side, the better you will be.

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