Interesting point between English and Italian - when I was diagnosed with dyslexia the specialist at great ormand street commented that if was an Italian I would have had much less trouble with writing and grammar as Italian is a very regular language compered to English
English has been my pain for 15 years
171–180 of 308 posts
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#172Earlier 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.
US pronunciation is generally rhotic, ie. they will pronounce the r's distinctly in those words. Most of the UK (the southwest being the largest exception) is non-rhotic, as are Australia and New Zealand, and in those accents those words generally would be indistinguishable.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#173The 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…
"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…
What Paul needed is some one to have taken his shovel away when we was up to his neck in the brown stuff instead of digging himself in even deeper.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#174Last time I expressed my thoughts[1] here about the same thing I was brutally word-raped by the angriest people on earth, now everyone is saying what I was saying all along and it's all well and good. You need to know English: put in the effort, watch a shitload of movies and read even more books. That's it, you can't just ignore it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371
You belittled those who don't speak English as lazy schmucks. This is an offensive, narrow minded viewpoint. Not surprisingly, others reacted strongly.
Willingness to learn a new skill is a requisite for any kind of skilled work. If that skill is a new language or a way to master your craft doesn't matter, what matters is that there's no excuse for avoiding work needed for you to make the best out of your time.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#175Earlier 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?
> How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only 日本語 documentation?
Funny story: Ruby took a while to catch on outside of Japan because its docs were all in 日本語. The Pickaxe was created by basically ignoring all the docs, reading the C, and playing around in the REPL.
Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#176Concentrated learning for English accents is effective. From personal experience (through acting) I can tell you that sitting down with a professional accent coach 2-3x per week can have you speaking and understanding heavy, hard accents (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZU...) quickly. A month of lessons will get you understanding, and fooling some people who don't have that accent. A few months is required to fool people who have that accent.
From this experience I learned that the process of learning a new accent is totally separate from learning a language as most people do it. You need to master IPA as well as carry a mirror to watch your own lips and have good close-up reference material. As evidenced by all the mediocre accents in movies it's not a foolproof process, but it can certainly get you much closer to your goal.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#177I have the same problem. I've learnt English from programming manuals and old CRPG games pronouncing words in my mind like it was Polish (it has regular phonetics too). It's very hard to undo the damage now. I watch a lot of English movies without subtitles, so I can understand (at least American English), but I'm afraid of speaking, and I have troubles with pronouncing even basic words.
This, pretty much.
"Cancel" is always going to stay [kuh-ntseh-l], "OK" [oh-k] and "Delete" [deh-leh-t].
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#178Earlier 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…
What Paul needed is some one to have taken his shovel away when we was up to his neck in the brown stuff instead of digging himself in even deeper.
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.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#179This 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…
> BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming. BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The r…
Nah... RP is the accent all us inverse snobs snigger at. In all seriousness, there are more "neutral" and aurally-pleasing English accents than old-fashioned RP.
It's interesting to see the effects of varied accents in modern British television programming on largely self-taught English speakers in relatively isolated communities though: Burmese Cockney has to be my favourite.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#180The 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…
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.