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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

#221

Post by DanBC »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #208
DanBC wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 W…

He spoke English to a non-Welsh speaking colleague.

The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers.

They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language.

A tribunal found that it was about his use of language.

> 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).

I'd be interested to know what would have happened if it had been a language other than Welsh.

If there were a bunch of people who spoke Russian fluently, and he spoke Russian to them and English to the English speakers.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#222

Post by ihaveajob »

npalli wrote: post #214
defen wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grove not being the founder of Intel is a very pedantic point. He was there since day one of the company and had the biggest influence on Intel’s domination of the industry since it was startup (more than anyone else in the company’s history). Also, you need to have a distinct definition of what a strong accent is. If Grove has a clear accent not sure who we are talking about. Every time someone gives a counterexampl…

To be fair (and as an immigrant I was also appalled by PG's logic), he qualifies his statement by saying that he considers it a problem when the accent makes it difficult to understand the person. I think that's a reasonable bias, but a bias nonetheless.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#223

Post by subsystem »

crassus wrote: post #206
subsystem wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I can find there's been around a thousand comments on the subject over the last week. Three comments called someone xenophobic, all of those where directed at pg. No comment called anyone else on HN a racist. So either I'm missing something or you're doing the exact same thing you accuse others of, making false accusations and overreacting.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#224

Post by gojomo »

AYBABTME wrote: post #215
npalli wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. So when Groupon and Uber are expanding abroad with investor capital, is someone checking if their accent fits with the local population? Their entire international expansion has been funded by external investors not their own capital.

The situation can't be flipped on it's top like that. English is the lingua franca, people can speak it everywhere. This is not a symmetric relationship where you can say that if A -> B then B -> A. I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business sp…

"English is the lingua franca" is one of my favorite phrases.

It's right up there with the allegation that "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneurship".

(Of course, only the 1st phrase is true, but they're both funny.)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#225

Post by GFischer »

airesQ wrote: post #108

Over the past year I have improved my spoken English immensely, here's how: - I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it. - Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one h…

How did you contact your tutors? I know of some startup attempts, was it something more prosaic like a classifieds ad?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#226

Post by 001sky »

gojomo wrote: post #219
npalli wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913). Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English a…

any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement

This is a self fulfilling prophesy. Like a 'black swan'. If PG meant to criticise (or point out) that poor communication skills are unproductive, his comment would be banal. He chose this as a cute, cock-tail party line. It was just a poor decision on his part. Its not too dis-similar to another famous SV/C who admitted 'he knows no black people'. OK, great. No we have two prominent people in the Valley who use the rule of thumb: no blacks, no funny-sounding people. Quite embarrassing, really.[0,1]

__________________

[0] 'I don't know a single black entrepreneur' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS93R1YnK-U

[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm

National Origin Discrimination & Work Situations

The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent

___________________

Note that investing is not hiring; there is no employer-employee legal relationship. BUT, need to be careful as they do in fact hire employees. So this is pretty ??? advice to entrepreneurs unless it comes pro-bono legal advice.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#227

Post by kneisley »

A need that I can see is for a class (or at least a few videos) for native English speakers to effectively communicate with non-native speakers, and a way to practice.

The crux of the issue is that by repeating themselves a little louder and at the same speed, a native speaker is treating the (non-native) listener as a linguistic equal. If my brother doesn't understand what I said, it is almost certainly due to the volume of my speech relative to our listening environment, not my content. To assume otherwise would insult his intelligence. If I'm speaking to a non-native speaker, my natural instinct is to extend the same courtesy. It isn't laziness or a lack of empathy. (You could argue it was lazy to speak that way in the first place, but to rephrase it after the fact would be condescending)

I used to work for a company based in Tokyo and, through practice and frustration, learned how to modulate my idiom-laden, Missouri-accented, high-speed, low-volume drawl into something at least partially intelligible to my Japanese colleagues. It required a lot of effort and still sounds strange out of context. If I spoke to my father the same way, he'd laugh at me.

As an American, I think it would be really helpful if part of our education included speaking (and listening to) English as it is spoken by non-natives. We should have to practice listening to and understanding various common accents (South Asian, Chinese, Nigerian, etc), practice making ourselves understood, and learn how to graciously ask for (or give) re-phrasing or clarification.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#228

Post by foobarbazqux »

DanBC wrote: post #221
foobarbazqux wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 W…

He spoke English to a non-Welsh speaking colleague. The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers. They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language. A tribunal found that it was about his use of language. > If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could under…

Somehow I misread that part about him speaking English out of courtesy when necessary. Thanks for clarifying.

So in multilingual jurisdictions there can be strong employment protections around speaking one's choice of national language. In this case the article says there was the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which presumably says that citizens of Wales are free to conduct all of their business in English or Welsh and shall not be discriminated against in any professional or government capacity for speaking either language as they please.

It's about workplace expectations that derive from the local culture. The hypothetical comparison that comes to mind would be if California adopted Spanish as a second language or something.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#229

Post by dsego »

vacri wrote: post #115
dsego wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord. If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you sta…

Is this "losing the root" really such a big issue? The etymology is recorded for people who want to study such stuff.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#230

Post by npalli »

gojomo wrote: post #219
npalli wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913). Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English a…

It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg’s family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why?

In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.

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