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

131–140 of 308 posts

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#131

Post by tjgq »

sergiosgc wrote: post #100
kome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

An even better one (linked because it's too long to paste here):

http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#132

Post by vxNsr »

arethuza wrote: post #45
antirez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly. In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot. Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I u…

In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29 What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.

There's a similar show in the US about people in the deep south making moonshine, and I, a US born English speaker could not understand a word they were saying, even with the subtitles I had trouble understanding what word was what.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#133

Post by microcolonel »

We need a standard technical document describing a subset of the natural language English, which is suitable for increasing clarity of technical documentation and discussion. Maybe evolve it like we do so many software projects(in a revision control mechanism, with an issue tracker).

I know somebody is going to say “But there's ASD-STE100!”, unfortunately ASD-STE100 is a closed standard, and it's not even exactly clear how one might get a copy(without working for a DoD contractor or some similar).

Revised Report on the natural language English(RRE) maybe. ;)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#134

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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.

> Antirez is spot on describing the problems of English as a foreign language in Europe

Only in those european countries that dub foreign language movies. In the countries where they subtitle them instead, the exposure to spoken English comes much sooner without the need for formal lessons.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#135

Post by samatman »

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…

What you're referring to is not a problem of orthography, per se. It is a quality of the English language called "Sandhi"[1], and is fundamental to how we construct grammar.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

The fact that Sandhi is often not reflected in our orthography is a mixed blessing. Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

Every language has complexity that seems totally horrible to a foreign learner. German, for example, has three genders, which are to an English speaker completely pointless and annoying. I've yet to study a language that doesn't feel like that, although Spanish is very close to actually making sense: the two genders are 90% a matter of suffix agreement, and the exceptions like "el día" are relatively few and far between.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#136

Post by riffraff »

antirez wrote: post #33
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 w…

as a fellow broken english speaker I have to note: _which_ pronounce? And does it even matter?

Should "can't" be kaːnt, kʰeɪnt or kænt ? Pederasts are pɛ.dəˌfaɪl or ˈpiː.dəˌfaɪl? Do we like to dɑːns or dæns ?

(examples taken from the last two TV shows I've seen _yesterday_)

Surely there are improvements we can all have to the way we misspeak (heck, I just learned "honorable" doesn't have a "h"!) but I have given up on getting english right until native speakers finally agree on whether it's tomaito or tomahto.

(Or, as wiktionary showss: təˈmɛɪtoː, təˈmætoː, təˈmɑːtəʊ, təˈmeɪtoʊ or təˈmeɪtə..)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#137

Post by shabble »

rmc wrote: post #58
arethuza wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29 What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.

I remember seeing a new segement on BBC about socially deprived areas of Glasgow, and local youths were talking and it was subtitled.

If I remember rightly, this also happened in some regional releases of the film Trainspotting.

For the opposite problem, try reading Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#138

Post by jahewson »

sergiosgc wrote: post #100
kome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Likewise, five different words all pronounced the same: or, oar, ore, awe, aww.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#139

Post by mogrim »

tehwalrus wrote: post #85
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.

Ideally you would probably want to cross reference it with something like Al Jazeera to get a non-western point of view, too.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#140

Post by chrisoverzero »

malandrew wrote: post #101

The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words. Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this: on... ono... onomat... onomato... onomatopei... onomatopeia Try saying it out…

I think you have misspelled the word "onomatopoeia". (Which would normally be fine – it's just such an important word in your post that I thought you should know.)
Post reply on HN