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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

#161

Post by tszyn »

I think any geek interested in improving their English should check out my website: http://www.antimoon.com especially the "How to learn English" section, which is a guide based on my own experiences and some language acquisition theory. http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm

I've been writing about effective language learning techniques since 2000, with an emphasis on pronunciation (which is an oft-neglected topic in English classrooms). The site is written in simple English, so if you're a native speaker of English, don't be put off by the spartan writing style.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#162

Post by crassus »

kyro wrote: post #160
crassus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dear Paul, The warm and fuzzy thought police department (WTFPD) would like to have a little chat with you. You see, we have taken down bigger game than you, and we could easily have you stuffed and mounted on our mantle. Instead of saying what you believe to be true, the WTFPD recommends that you say what we wish were true. Here at the WTFPD, our belief is that wishing hard enough for something will make it true. Su…

WFTPD

We feel that WTFPD is a better acronym. Are you trying to enforce Eurocentric norms of acronym construction on us?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#164

Post by sergeykish »

My mother tongue is russian.

At childhood I was astonished by spelling scene in translated american film:

  - Как пишется "кот" # How to spell cat?
  - К О Т # C A T
It's quite a dumb question on russian. There is no difference between spelling and pronunciation. Yet repeating word character by character shown as a mark of intelligence.

Later on I've learned english by reading. Direct mapping to known phonemes gives very rough accent. To change it one has to be aware: things are not as they seem. Reading hidden language helps a lot:

  $ curl http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html | htmlfmt | espeak --ipa -q
  dˈiəɹəst kɹˈiːtʃəɹ ɪn kɹiːˈeɪʃən
  stˈʌdɪ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ pɹənˌʌnsɪˈeɪʃən
  aɪ wɪl tˈiːtʃ juː ɪn maɪ vˈɜːs
  sˈaʊndz lˈaɪk kˈɔːps
  kˈɔː
  hˈɔːs
  and wˈɜːs
  aɪ wɪl kˈiːp juː
  sˈuːzɪ
  bˈɪzɪ
  mˌeɪk jɔː hˈɛd wɪð hˈiːt ɡɹˈəʊ dˈɪzɪ
  tˈiəɹ ɪn ˈaɪ
  jɔː dɹˈɛs wɪl tˈeə
  sˌəʊ ʃˌal ˈaɪ
  ˈəʊ hˈiə maɪ pɹˈeə

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#165

Post by jgg »

Technical comment, ignoring the Paul Graham drama (which seems like a non-controversy to me):

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#166

Post by mdpye »

hobs wrote: post #158
jahewson wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where do you live that or and awe sound the same? I get or, oar and ore, but awe (such as awe shucks, or awesome) and aww sound nothing like or in the midwest.

Certainly in the UK, 'or' and 'awe' or very similar. But I'm pretty sure the same is true across the states. The 'awe' in 'awe, shucks' is not even really a word, just a sympathetic utterance in the same sort of class as 'um' and 'aaah', so I don't think it has an official spelling, just a phonetic approximation. It is certainly distinct from the word 'awe' that's the root of 'awesome'.

Edit: I meant to point out that I have never seen 'awe, shucks' written before, always 'ah' or 'aww', but I can see how it might be written that way based on a Midwestern accent.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#167

Post by nmeofthestate »

graue wrote: post #154
riffraff wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

/dɑːns/ and /kɑːnt/ in the UK, /dæns/ and /kænt/ in most of the US. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dance#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t#Pronunciation Which way you should pronounce them depends, I suppose, on whether you speak to more British people or Americans.

It also depends on which British people you speak to - I don't pronounce those words like that.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#168

Post by T-hawk »

unwind wrote: post #91
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.

Catholic -> Catholicism is my favorite.

Even as a thoroughly American monolingual English speaker, I didn't get that until high school. The stress moves from the first to the second syllable thanks to the addition of a suffix two syllables distant. God help a non-native speaker trying to understand why that happens; I'm not even sure I do.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#169

Post by mdpye »

willyt wrote: post #75
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…

Cockney is relatively easy compared to some other local UK dialects/accents. My wife's family is from Stirlingshire in Scotland and they say stuff like: 'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'. 'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food' It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

Accent and dialect are distinct. Maybe it's because I was born in Scotland, spent my teenage years in the English midlands and north, now live in London and watch TV from the states, but I've never met an English speaker whose accent I had difficulty understanding. And that includes all the heavily accented (although generally second-gen) immigrants I've met.

Dialect on the other hand means words I don't know the definition of, and sometimes there isn't enough context to intuit it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#170

Post by walshemj »

DanBC wrote: post #80
cliveowen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not being willing to learn an essential skill.

So a 12 year old in Brazil not only has to learn how to install an OS, and then how to install Python, and then how to program with Python, but also has to do all of that in a different language? Pretty easy to call it an essential skill when English is your first language. How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only Japanese documentation?

But in away this is always been with us.

Before ww2 in some technical fields you more or less had to learn German as that where a lot of the research was done - in chemistry it was effectively mandatory.

Before that a natural philosophers had to learn/know Latin.

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