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Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

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Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#191

Post by joeberon »

benrbray wrote: post #140
lisper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I emigrated to the US at age five from Germany and learned a lot of my English from Peanuts comics. One of the words I learned from that strip was "incidentally" which I used for years before someone told me about "by the way". I got beat up a lot too.

> I got beat up a lot too As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about how culturally accepted it was for children to be physically abused at school in my parents' generation. People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking comic books. It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all…

I agree, it's weird how quickly it has changed. I went to school almost exactly from 2000 to early 2010s and I saw it change before my eyes. Quite literally we were the exact school year (grade) where physical abuse became much less tolerated. I'm not sure what exactly changed, but it a stark contrast between looking at the upper years when young vs when I reached that point. The teachers verified it too, and our grades were also much higher than previous years. I remember when I was in year 3 we used to literally fight on the playground and no one cared, it was _totally_ normalised.

As you said, most 90s cartoon media portrays it pretty clearly, because it really was normal. The idea of children having physical boundaries was just not really as prominent back then, at least in my experience.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#192

Post by andrewzah »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #178

I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report that speaks fine English but his written communications are just south of ideal. He asked me to help him by explicitly pointing out issues with his writing. I have been happy to do so but the process has really highlighted for him how refined my understanding of WHAT is right is contrasted to how poor my understanding of WHY it’s right is. More than half…

That's the difference of EFL/ESL and a native speaker. If you live in the US/UK you're probably aware of how pitiful the average person is at grammar. However, they can always tell if a sentence is right or wrong for their variant of English.

When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#193

Post by the_rectifier »

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

On various occasions I've been asked by native speakers to use shorter sentences and simpler words. Sigh.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#194

Post by e17 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #175
pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

Funny enough, a similar thing (using obscure, ten-dollar words instead of simple ones) happens with many Russians learning English. It happens for a totally different reason - obviously Russian is a Slavic, not Romance language. Turns out that most high quality translated material for Russian is old literature and scientific papers. So that’s what the translators are trained on, and that’s what many Russians speaking…

I have witnessed this phenomenon living in London as a native of the city. A new-to-London Russian colleague of mine used ornate phraseology and what I would consider as 'posh' words quite regularly. A major phrase for her was "It seems to me" as a precursor to saying virtually any opinion. I never knew the reason for it though, so TIL.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#195

Post by andrewzah »

milliams wrote: post #82

> I found out that "prepone" was not an actual word in English, based on the dogma that all legitimate words in a language must be found in a dictionary. I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.

Prepone is not a word in American Standard English. Or casual American English. Nobody uses it, although we should. It's totally logical from "postpone", but languages are not rational or logical.

If something is to become a word, people need to actually use it in the first place. Indian English is different than American English is different than Black American English is different than UK English.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#196

Post by joeberon »

doikor wrote: post #188
shayanbahal wrote: post #181

As a non-native speaker, and coming from "genderless languages"[1], Persian, it took me quite some time to get used to gender based pronouns. With the new pronoun restructure in the English language in north America, I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns) . [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...

As a Finn I can second this. It took me a while to remember to use the correct pronoun and still get it wrong sometimes (by defaulting to he/him if I don't pay attention to it)

I don't know Mandarin, but my Chinese PhD supervisor does this all the time, always accidentally using he/him to refer to women. Unfortunately that can be a pretty dangerous mistake to make

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#197

Post by rocknor »

slver wrote: post #186

I'm not sure why is this here. It's basically a teacher complaining that people don't like when she makes up words, and has a strong accent. Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't matter. What matters is being u…

Ah, nothing like telling people to change the way they have been speaking since childhood for your convenience...

Those words and accent is understood by more than a hundred million people, and that number is going to increase manifold in the coming decades. So if you need to communicate with this large group of people, it's better that you learn to understand them, or it will be your fault for not understanding.

Take your racism somewhere else.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#198

Post by benrbray »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #180
benrbray wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got beat up a lot too As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about how culturally accepted it was for children to be physically abused at school in my parents' generation. People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking comic books. It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all…

Uh, it's arguably worse than ever today. It just doesn't happen on the playground anymore. I contend the situation was better when it was out in the open and not on handheld devices.

Verbal and emotional abuse are certainly major problems faced by children today, but physical abuse is so so so much worse. Physical abuse has strong emotional / social repercussions as well.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#199

Post by mnw21cam »

meepmorp wrote: post #65
heurisko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a d…

> I haven't found such differences in English. Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.

My brother's wife is from the Shetland islands. He'd always know when she was on the phone to her family, because she would drop straight into the dialect without realising it. The thing is, the Shetlanders know that their dialect is sufficiently different, so they learn TV English as well so they can make themselves understood to outsiders.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#200

Post by Daub »

biztos wrote: post #55
pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

If you can do that in a British accent, no matter how bad it is, you will immediately be pundit material in the USA. And also more attractive!

Moving from a British university to an American one, I noticed this. People listened to me more. Scary.
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