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How the words we teach English language learners changed

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Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#171

Post by fluoridation »

tdeck wrote: post #165
fluoridation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone…

English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar. It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reje…

Thanks. I'm learning Japanese too. The other day I learned that 在る can be used with either で or に and didn't make this connection, though I guess whether it counts as different meanings depends on how you look at it, since in both cases you're specifying the position in spacetime of something.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#172

Post by psp99 »

AgentMatt wrote: post #170
ebiester wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started dating someone whose second language was English, I found that the idioms were a giant hurdle. We really do speak in idioms and metaphors and this makes it very difficult for people who understand the words but not the cultural context. While my (now spouse) adapted, I also adapted by learning how to speak far more literally, especially around people of mixed levels of English. I don't think there is a…

In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise? Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.

[dead]

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#173

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

retrac wrote: post #63
crazygringo wrote: post #16

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#174

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

adrianN wrote: post #35
crazygringo wrote: post #16

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.

I recently discovered that even high-level non-native speakers do not know the term "fraidy cat."

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#175

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

fluoridation wrote: post #145
jonahx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone…

This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one).

In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#176

Post by TFNA »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #173
retrac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

Universities in certain countries have strict ethical standards that require consent and crediting informants. These standards were often inspired by working with indigenous informants, who were viewed as having been historically exploited in the collection of data, but they apply now to anyone eliciting data from anyone.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#177

Post by calpaterson »

joshdavham wrote: post #77
calpaterson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is indeed how it works https://news.ycombinator.com/pool But not in this case. It's a slow Sunday afternoon and getting a few upvotes quickly is enough

Interesting! I didn't know about the 'pool' section of HN. Would you mind explaining to us how it works?

There was a good explanation when they published the mechanism

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#178

Post by gmac »

fluoridation wrote: post #145
jonahx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone…

These are called phrasal verbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#179

Post by fragmede »

eudamoniac wrote: post #101
conductr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#180

Post by Gander5739 »

tdeck wrote: post #165
fluoridation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone…

English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar. It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reje…

> [Japanese] also has words with opposite meanings

These are known as contronyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym).

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