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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

#201

Post by Izkata »

> "In one instance," he said, "while working at a large Swiss firm, an American manager quibbled at my CV asserting that English was my native language.

> " 'Why not?,' I asked."

> " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look."

Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion, not from a class or relating words to another language" - which is how all children learn their first language, but is far less common as adults.

So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post + pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely.

(Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local version of "prepare")

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#202

Post by bradrn »

jakub_g wrote: post #136
awillen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :) Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication. Polish is a goddamn ni…

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas:

planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak

‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’

Or Wichita:

kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks

‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’

These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#203

Post by finnthehuman »

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...

>I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns)

If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#204

Post by dcminter »

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…

I think the royal order of adjectives is the coolest example of this. Native speakers of English know it intuitively without (usually) even knowing it exists!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#205

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

sandworm101 wrote: post #36
prvc wrote: post #12

As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants, each with a small number of differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler to simply take the mother version to be definitive.

Like when I committed that greatest of Canadian sins: using the work 'labour' in a document read by an American client. The reaction was ridiculous. Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant turban , but that's just how Americ…

As a person whose spent my entire life in the US, I've never heard that pronunciation of turbine. Looking into it, it seems like some people do pronounce it that way but typically it's tied to a specific region AND industry. It's certainly not the widely accepted way to say it here south of the border.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#206

Post by slver »

rocknor wrote: post #197
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. Tak…

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

Look this is not a conversation about feelings. It's a conversation of what's necessary so we can understand each other effectively.

Speaking the language of the people you're trying to talk to is a basic requirement for communicating. Being super-respecful of someone's origin doesn't make you comprehend the sounds coming out of their mouth.

By your logic, I've been speaking Bulgarian since childhood, I should talk to you in Bulgarian and be super-offended when you don't understand, because millions of people speak Bulgarian. Instead, I'm using English, because it's an English-speaking board. That's called "common sense".

> Take your racism somewhere else.

My God... that's so ignorant, I just feel bad for you.

You're trying to turn this into a moral debate, and it's not about morals. It's about understanding each other, get it? BTW, I'll be responding to you in Bulgarian only from now on. Because you're clearly not "racist" and you respect my culture and heritage, or don't you?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#207

Post by e17 »

biztos wrote: post #29

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not prono…

It's not true that one cannot hear race in British accents, it is actually quite overt. I've lived in London and Manchester and the vast majority of established Black British and South Asian British communities do speak with a noticeably different accent to other ethnicities of the same economic class living nearby. The type of London accent mostly influenced by Caribbeans since the 60s even has a proper name - Multiethnic London English

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#208

Post by andrewzah »

rocknor wrote: post #197
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. Tak…

Or both parties can work together since there is no True English. Indian English is different than English. It is wrong for the author to expect their English to be universal, and it's wrong for English's speakers to expect -their- English to be universal.

Thick accents are frustrating in any language. I have had to work hard on removing my American accent when learning Korean; it made understanding what I was saying much easier for everyone.

I think what people take issue with is when native speakers (who only speak 1 language, and maybe 1 local dialect of it) start demanding things from ESL/EFL learners.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#209

Post by anbende »

Izkata wrote: post #201

> "In one instance," he said, "while working at a large Swiss firm, an American manager quibbled at my CV asserting that English was my native language. > " 'Why not?,' I asked." > " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look." Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's…

So a cursory google search shows this definition of “native speaker” in several places:

“a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood”

And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means:

“associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth”

So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition?

Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#210

Post by js2 »

I’m a native English speaker.

I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it.

At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other.

At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadian colleague in French.

My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them to understand (I don’t think it does).

In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen".

I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Shrug.

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