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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

#81

Post by brownbat »

Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects.

1. Shakespearean pronunciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

2. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

3. Power of Babel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural-Language/dp/00...

4. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#82

Post by toyg »

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…

> My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis.

That's quite an unfortunate example: it comes straight from classic Greek (another very bitchy language when it comes to pronunciation pseudo-rules), and percolated into Latin and eventually English.

Still, I agree large chunks of current English pronunciation "rules" (rules? what rules?) just don't make any sense from a logical perspective; proof is that even born-and-bread Englishmen can often struggle with spelling well into their late 20s and beyond, regardless of education level.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#83

Post by hisham_hm »

antirez wrote: post #27
ludoo wrote: post #4

Your English has improved tremendously since I've known you. You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)

Thanks Ludo, I hope this time I'll be able to fix my English before the next project ;-)

A bit ironically, I do have a hard time figuring out how to pronounce "redis"!

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#84

Post by Mithaldu »

antirez wrote: post #64
voltagex_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

It does and is called Anki. You'll probably need to search a bit though to find a deck that has italian/english with english sounds:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/english

Alternatively you could take decks made for other languages and build a new deck, since they're all stored in SQLite.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#85

Post by tehwalrus »

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…

I have to agree about the World Service. It made me so very cross when I heard they were cutting the funding! Having listened to the Africa Daily for a few months, I was convinced that it was the only robust news source for so many people. (robust = willing to interview relevant politicians with real, tough questions.)

I may be wrong, but it is still an enormous asset, worth saving and/or reviving one day.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#86

Post by samscully »

> Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

I'm a native English speaker and I don't understand why people do this. If you are trying to have a conversation with someone, surely you want to do what is necessary for everyone to be understood as well as possible. It is only a little effort for you to slow down and simplify your speech, but it is impossible for the other person to learn better English on the spot. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and some US/UK people still wouldn't adapt their accent, even though the locals were humouring them by speaking English to them in the first place.

Perhaps it is easier for me to empathise given I have a (now very mild) Yorkshire accent, which was consistently mocked when I moved to London, and is reasonably slow paced anyway.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#87

Post by girvo »

precisioncoder wrote: post #44
pagles wrote: post #6

This sentence is so true "My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language."

Heh, I grew up speaking English and still had that problem just because my reading vocabulary surpassed the vocabulary in usage in the country where I was.

I'm 23 and a native Australian English speaker and I still run into this problem for the same reason.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#88

Post by toyg »

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…

> BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming.

BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The result is such that, in 2013, I struggle to find any broadcast at all that might sound like old-fashioned RP. There is now no real alternative for learning RP: either you attend Oxbridge and/or belong to certain circles, or you'll be stuck with a local accent forever.

Paradoxically, trying to make RP disappear, they made it even more exclusive and desirable.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#89

Post by DanBC »

pestaa wrote: post #66
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 .

The BBC World Service used to have a wide variety of programming.

They'd include some of the programmes broadcast on BBC Radio Four, including panel games such as "Just a minute". They'd include some of the science and medical documentary that Radio 4 would broadcast. They'd also have their own programming - some soap operas, some news, some great documentaries.

All of this meant that English was being used in a variety of ways. There was informal, conversational English. There was English humour and word play. And there was more formal English.

But now the World Service has lost most of that. It is just a rolling news service now. There are some arts and science programmes, but those aren't great. The variety of spoken English is much reduced, and the variety of programming is much less. And everything is repeated every few hours, with some tweaks for different time zones.

Speaking English must be very hard!

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#90

Post by rmccue »

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)

In Australian English, it's "ann-tith-iss-iss" versus "ann-tee thee-sis"; I imagined British English would have been the same. Interesting to learn.
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