21–30 of 308 posts
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 is one of the first things one professor said to us at his first lecture when I went to faculty.
I think this is especially true for native speakers of languages derived from latin. Why ? Because in classical latin to pronounce a word you just pronounce every letter in the standard way. So you tend to associate the written word strongly with the way it is spoken. However in the real world languages are spoken first, and the way words are written only follows later (or does not always, which can cause a whole lot…
> Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)
100%
The main issue with the the usual approach of language learning is the focus on grammar, like if doing useless grammar exercises would improve your grasp of grammar and sentence construction rules. It doesn't help much actually. I've learned more grammar watching tv series than actually studying grammar for years in school, and my pronunciation improved too. Now many things just come naturally. And i can understand t…
Although opportunity of living here is somewhat luxurious for many. So I would say that listening to as much native English as possible is really good for grammar :)
Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly. In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to…
In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot.
Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I used to do that, the only problem is that it is a time consuming task.
I think this is especially true for native speakers of languages derived from latin. Why ? Because in classical latin to pronounce a word you just pronounce every letter in the standard way. So you tend to associate the written word strongly with the way it is spoken. However in the real world languages are spoken first, and the way words are written only follows later (or does not always, which can cause a whole lot…
That's true but French is kind on an exception among latin languages, it is a phonetically complex language compared to Italian or Spanish.
Your English has improved tremendously since I've known you. You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)
What makes me sad is that by being honest and wanting to help founders, PG just got a new shit load of problems from people over-reacting. Do you really think he'll give great, but controversial, feedback in his next interviews/articles?
This sentence is so true "My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language."
"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 has covered rather thoroughly, your "empirical evidence" isn't some blind sample - it's a walking demonstration of confirmation bias.
The larger problem is something you've explained yourself, in your essay on "Investor Herd Dynamics". Another name for this essay might have been, "Venture Capital is a Cargo Cult". In that essay, you lay out several reasons why an investment becomes more attractive when other people are already investing in it. And here's the crux of your argument:
'But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups. Judging startups is hard even for the best investors. The mediocre ones might as well be flipping coins. So when mediocre investors see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason.'
Do I need to spell this out? Your bias is a cancer on your industry, because it becomes part of the voodoo nonsense that less astute investors use to pick their horses. Your decisions may seem rational to you — but if you talk about how you don't like to back people with strong accents, it becomes less likely that other people will back them as well. You can be better than this.
Look deeper."