Listen to audio books. Problem solved.
English has been my pain for 15 years
181–190 of 308 posts
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#182The 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 companies. What I mean by this is if I look at Andy Grove and Intel (30 years ago), I don’t think his accent prevented him from being successful. However today you need someone who is more US market oriented. Maybe in 10 years Silicon Valley turns into a modern day Madison Avenue, where it is filled predominantly with marketing/adverting type people who have mastered the medium of Internet and smartphones. They spend their time trying to get people to buy ‘stuff’.
As for people who are standing behind PG’s statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can’t expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#183I have a French colleague with the strangest attitude to his strong accent when speaking English. His accent is strong enough that it makes understanding him a bit tricky sometimes, and when I mentioned it, he said that this accent was part of his identity and he wouldn't be trying to improve it. He was weirdly taken aback when I said something in a 'good' French accent. This attitude was really surprising to me. For…
I see your point, but nowadays English is not merely yet another foreign language, in a way it belongs to people of all over the world by right of their contribution to universal English-speaking culture (think Vladimir Nabokov or Linus Torvalds).
Today Runglish (flavour of English spoken by those whose mother tongue is Russian) is nothing but derogatory term, but some day, when most of Russians will know English well enough, we are going to start to skip articles out of pure pride.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#184My 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…
Привед, а как пишется "код"?
(Spoiler: "код" (code) is pronounced the same as "кот" (cat) but spelled differently.)
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#185The 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…
Raising capital for a startup in a particular geographic place and selling a product there from a multinational megacorp are very different propositions. When you have the capital to hire an entire local sales division you're in a very different world than when you are trying to raise your first capital investment. But of course you knew that.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#186English 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…
And to keep it complicated every once in a while we make it so you need to respect the origin words. One that always makes me think twice as a native English speaker is "infrared". I always have to stop myself from saying it such that it rhymes with "compared".
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#187English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up. I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.
English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example: I redacted a text, removing the froufrou. Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru. French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.
English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#188The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words. Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this: on... ono... onomat... onomato... onomatopei... onomatopeia Try saying it out…
Finally, somebody confirms for me the way that I've always used to learn to pronounce very long words.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are assuming everyone has the same goals, context, and motivations for doing things as you do. The answer for how best to live one's life is still very much an open problem.
Edit: Even more so, ignoring the problematic assumptions laid out above, others have stated elegantly that if efficiency, etc was your true goal, then we should focus on learning the most effective and efficient language, not simply the most widely used (currently English)
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years
#190Earlier 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.
In environments outside of tech hubs like the Silicon Valley bubble, I would strongly agree. For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.
In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.