Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

English has been my pain for 15 years

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 308 posts

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#91

Post by unwind »

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 (coming from Swedish, which is also a language fond of its concatenations) is finite/infinite.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#93

Post by antirez »

Mithaldu wrote: post #84
antirez wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! I don't need an italian -> english one, just english with sounds will be enough.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#94

Post by enimodas »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #71
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…

There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform: 1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good. 2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent exa…

1. Every other language with such a system bases it on the "standard" pronunciation, for English this could be for example BBC English. As a result you'll sometimes have youths who will write the local dialect phonetically in IM chat, but they also know how to write (and speak) the standard way.

2. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and that that's somehow better? My instincts tell me that knowing how to pronounce a word by reading it is more advantageous than having to learn 1000's of glyph-like words, maybe someone else has more knowledge about the tradeoffs between phonetic and glyph like scripts.

3. This is a gimmic. How many times do you estimate the average English speaking person reads these texts in their life?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#95

Post by zer »

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 with your post. TV shows and movies helped a lot, and many wrong things just sound wrong. Pure grammar exercises can only teach so much.

However a solid understanding of grammar helps. For example in your post you wrote "like if doing". Correct would be "as if doing" since "as if" is a conjunction and "like" is a preposition. It was probably just a typo, and you would have caught it during a proof-read since it sounds "wrong" but actual grammar knowledge will confirm any suspicions.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#96

Post by gtufano »

toolslive wrote: post #11
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…

2 remarks: * The Turkish written language has had a similar transformation. There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy. * Dutch is a similar 'power language' you can combine any 2 nouns in any order to create new words. For a native speaker, the meaning then is obvious.

In Italian there are not dictation exercise beyond age of 8. ;)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#97

Post by DanBC »

cliveowen wrote: post #35

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

> You need to know English

No, you really don't. You only need to know English if you're selling to English speaking people. You'll probably need to learn English for a number of professions. But apart from that you can live and work perfectly well without using English at all.

English isn't the main language on the Internet any more, it is just one of them. The fact that you happen to think that English is the major language used on the Internet is possibly just a vicious self-reinforcing cognitive bias.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jtheory wrote: post #67
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…

[deleted]

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#100

Post by sergiosgc »

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.

No, not really. I have the same opinion and I'm not a native English speaker.

English has some good properties for a common language:

- It has a simple grammar

- It is spoken by the entertaining media

- It already has a head start

Now, if they could actually fix the major flaws:

- Spelling is absurd. It's not just bad, it is absurd.

- For foreigners, the UK accents are terrible. It took me a couple of days in London before I could understand people; and I came from a base of being perfectly fluent

Come to think of it. Scratch that fixing the UK accent part. It's a cool accent, double-oh seven style.

For the love of god, fix the spelling:

-----

"Eye Rhymes, by Helen Bowyer"

Bear and dear // Share, I fear // The pointless deceptivness // Of there and here.

Some and home // Tomb and comb, // Sin against the tongue // Like from and whom.

Howl and bowl // Foul and soul, // Mislead the ear // Like doll and toll. //

Give and dive // Live and thrive, // Bewilder the moppet // Of six or five.

Love and hove // Dove and strove // Sound no more alike // Than glove and cove.

Pew and sew // Do and go // Fail expectation // Like now and slow.

Laid and said // Must be read // As if they rhymed // With neighed and Ned.

------

As I said before, English spelling's bonkers.

Post reply on HN