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English has been my pain for 15 years

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#201

Post by stan_rogers »

DanBC wrote: post #89
pestaa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vari…

Oddly enough, the English-language service of Deutsche Welle provides much of what BBC World Service used to provide, and in a fairly standardized "mid-Atlantic" accent.

(There was a time, as well, when the CBC and Radio Canada International used/enforced a standard pronunciation across the board. There was something quaint about it for every regional Canadian English dialect -- and our dialects, apart from Newfanese and the Nova Scotia Lunenburg dialect, tend to be pretty subtle -- but everyone could understand it. With the trend toward a vox populi approach, a rural Saskatchewan listener may find the various immigrant Englishes of major population centres like Toronto baffling at first. It's nice that communities can hear themselves on the radio -- it makes them feel more like first class citizens -- but it can impede communication between groups, and that friction can foster the very problems that the policies are trying to correct.)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#203

Post by nu23 »

MSexton wrote: post #149
nu23 wrote: post #62

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 p…

When I took an acting class on accents, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa ). It is surprisingly handy, although most Americans have no idea it exists, much less how to read it.

Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#204

Post by DanBC »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #199
mjn wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TOEFL doesn't have any kind of accent requirement, as would be clear by walking into any American university's science or engineering departments and speaking with the students who have top TOEFL marks. You do have to be comprehensible, but it's a fairly low bar. Nothing's held against a Russian or Chinese or German accent; in some areas they even have a little cachet (especially Russian accents in mathematics).

Alright, so maybe PG would have some problems with these students leading YC companies too. But in principle, how is it suddenly discrimination because the bar has been raised to higher than "so thick that people struggle to understand you"? This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country, especially for any kind of leadership or public-facing position.

> This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country

It depends what country you're in.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm)

> A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation.

> The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon after refusing to speak English to Welsh-speaking colleagues.

His bosses didn't speak Welsh.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#205

Post by stan_rogers »

btilly wrote: post #142
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…

...the lingua franca... Here is a random irony that I like. People today use an Italian phrase describing French, and mean English by it.

Lingua franca (on the ground, as opposed to diplomatic French) wasn't exactly French, either; it was a sort of Occitan/Spanish/Italian hybrid that was something more than a mere pidgin (possible because of the common Romance roots of its speakers). The name is more of a "this isn't Italian; sounds like French to me" designation. (William Caxton remarked that London-area English was received similarly in Kent in the 15th century.)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#206

Post by crassus »

subsystem wrote: post #198
crassus wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire him for sticking up for his principles[1]. You give the thought police and inch and soon they'll be back for another. There is no theoretical limit to how warm and fuzzy they can make the world. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Who is the really the "thought police" here? You're the one trying to ridicule people whose opinion you don't agree with while hiding behind some "warm and fuzzy" sarcasm.

WTFPD is about people forbidding ideas because they are offensive, rather than having an honest debate about them. I'm perfectly willing to debate any idea with an honest opponent who's not going to get offended and start calling me names like "xenophobe" and "racist".

Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#207

Post by crassus »

DanBC wrote: post #204
foobarbazqux wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, so maybe PG would have some problems with these students leading YC companies too. But in principle, how is it suddenly discrimination because the bar has been raised to higher than "so thick that people struggle to understand you"? This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country, especially for any kind of leadership or public-facing position.

> This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country It depends what country you're in. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm ) > A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation. > The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon a…

Legality and reasonableness is seldom correlated

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#208

Post by foobarbazqux »

DanBC wrote: post #204
foobarbazqux wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, so maybe PG would have some problems with these students leading YC companies too. But in principle, how is it suddenly discrimination because the bar has been raised to higher than "so thick that people struggle to understand you"? This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country, especially for any kind of leadership or public-facing position.

> This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country It depends what country you're in. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm ) > A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation. > The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon a…

I don't get it. He was a head chef in Wales where the national languages are English and Welsh, and he was able to speak one of those two languages fluently. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like he was also being discriminatory and out to make a political / nationalist point by refusing to communicate whatsoever in English.

If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#209

Post by defen »

npalli wrote: post #182
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…

Would PG (or his predecessor silicon valley VC) have made the same comment about strong accents 30 years ago? I don’t think so. For one, the diffusion of Americanisms (idioms, accent etc.) were weaker and founders had stronger accents. It would be inconceivable to say this in public. To me this signifies, perhaps, a shift in the valley from investing in technology heavy companies toward more consumer branded companie…

None of your examples are relevant. Andy Grove did not found Intel, and his accent is not incomprehensible. Likewise Tim Cook did not found Apple in China.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#210

Post by AYBABTME »

melipone wrote: post #180
btilly wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really doubt pg's claim that an accent strong enough to impede comprehension is a barrier to creating a successful startup in Silicon Valley? The importance of this is undoubtably a piece of common sense that some need to hear, but really, it is common sense. As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how coul…

IMHO, it's not which accents are strong enough. It's the baggage that an accent brings. Yes, people pattern match an accent but not just the words. For example, the content of what a woman with a strong French accent says will be diluted with thoughts of sexiness instead of being taken seriously (except Christine Lagarde :-)). In this sense, the validity of PG's claim is not cut and dry. There are other factors.

I don't think so. Diluting a speakers content into cultural bias implies that the content of the speech is understood to begin with. This is not the case for what I'd call a strong accent. Those strong accent are too far away from a locution I can make sense of. A strong accent makes it hard to grasp the words that are said. And if you're in a venture perspective and nobody can make sense of the words that are getting out of your mouth, I believe it's fair to say that your strong accent is a problem.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.

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