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English has been my pain for 15 years

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#211

Post by argumentum »

phrasemix wrote: post #116
malandrew wrote: post #101

The 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…

This is a fantastic idea! Do you mind if I share that with my English students?

I wouldn't take the risk .. he might sue you for copyright infringement.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#212

Post by lazyjones »

samatman wrote: post #135
nasmorn wrote: post #5

English 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…

What you're referring to is not a problem of orthography, per se. It is a quality of the English language called "Sandhi"[1], and is fundamental to how we construct grammar. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi The fact that Sandhi is often not reflected in our orthography is a mixed blessing. Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combi…

> Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

The pronounciation of the separate words doesn't preserve their etymologies either. This is my main gripe with (spoken) English: greek and to some extent german words (and probably most other words taken from foreign languages) are completely and randomly mutilated, the result confuses everyone who knows what they mean and how they're pronounced properly.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#213

Post by argumentum »

mbesto wrote: post #43

I was born in America, raised learning English, and to this day, my written skills are nowhere near perfect. Nor are my verbal skills. I am constantly writing and rewriting sentences because the intangibles of communications, such as tone, style, prose, format, are extremely important and often overlooked. Not to mention, my grammar after 29 years is still far from perfect. I've attempted and now partially understand…

I don't think a "business" co-founder is any more likely to have good communication skills than a "technical" co-founder.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#214

Post by npalli »

defen wrote: post #209
npalli wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of your examples are relevant. Andy Grove did not found Intel, and his accent is not incomprehensible. Likewise Tim Cook did not found Apple in China.

Grove not being the founder of Intel is a very pedantic point. He was there since day one of the company and had the biggest influence on Intel’s domination of the industry since it was startup (more than anyone else in the company’s history). Also, you need to have a distinct definition of what a strong accent is. If Grove has a clear accent not sure who we are talking about. Every time someone gives a counterexample of a founder with a strong accent, the pro-PG retort is that he actually doesn't have a strong accent (presumably because he is successful).

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#215

Post by AYBABTME »

npalli wrote: post #192
crassus wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok. So when Groupon and Uber are expanding abroad with investor capital, is someone checking if their accent fits with the local population? Their entire international expansion has been funded by external investors not their own capital.

The situation can't be flipped on it's top like that. English is the lingua franca, people can speak it everywhere. This is not a symmetric relationship where you can say that if A -> B then B -> A.

I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business speak English. If you speak French too, great! Then when you start selling your product, that product will have to be translated. But you as a business woman/man coming to Quebec and dealing with people, you'll be just fine speaking English.

Now if I go in the Bay Area and start expecting people to do business in French with me, I doubt anybody will bother listening to me.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#216

Post by antikirez »

crassus wrote: post #200
npalli wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. So when Groupon and Uber are expanding abroad with investor capital, is someone checking if their accent fits with the local population? Their entire international expansion has been funded by external investors not their own capital.

I'm sure that when they are striking deals with local politicians, regulators, and partners, they are careful to do so through representatives intelligible to the local populace. The founders of both firms speak American english well and raised bunches of money in America, so language and accents were not a concern for them with regards to fundraising. Indeed, America is the best market in the world for raising specu…

I seen plenty of american founders with diction problems, lisp or some other speaking impediment.

Those are real communication problems recognized by professionals for decades if not centuries, and happens all over the world.

However accents are strictly a cultural and socioeconomical difference: someone coming from a very remote country is of course going to have a considerably different accent, and in countries like england the difference between classes has created some very different accents all over the country.

In the old days in england having a posh accent was a good way of working your way up the social ladder because being the best steam-engine engineer mattered little if you sounded like an illiterate irish. Same in the usa where even president Clinton got some bs from east coast journalists for his southern accent.

Did I say at any point that bad accents mean you are dumb and unintelligible? no, because that's not true. What it does is make you a target of xenophobia because it makes it very clear that you are "not from around here"

When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history because if your public already has a demeaning attitude towards you they are not going to care one bit about what you have to say, after all you are just one dumb foreigner! hearing you is a waste of everybody's time!

pg could have gone for speech impediments instead which are a problem no matter where or what language you speak, and of course if english is your second language those problems are just going to compound. But pg went for the accents and the accents alone, as if the number of white american dudebro founders out there saying your instead of you're all the time were perfect.

Then again maybe when they are speaking pg is actually paying attention to what they say.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#217

Post by notahacker »

malandrew wrote: post #101

The 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…

I'm surprised this works for pronunciation: surely it's easier to emphasize the first syllable and then add syllables with soft or altogether lost vowel sounds (-es, -ed, -able etc.) rather than starting with clearly enunciated suffixes and then progressively de-stressing and mangling them I'd be more comfortable going from com- to comf't'bl than from table to fort-abl to comf't'bl

For the exact same reason I can see how your method works well as a means of teaching spelling by forcing native speakers to voice all the vowels that native speakers replace with the -schwa sound when pronouncing the full word.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#218

Post by OvidNaso »

crassus wrote: post #206
subsystem wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is the really the "thought police" here? You're the one trying to ridicule people whose opinion you don't agree with while hiding behind some "warm and fuzzy" sarcasm.

WTFPD is about people forbidding ideas because they are offensive , rather than having an honest debate about them. I'm perfectly willing to debate any idea with an honest opponent who's not going to get offended and start calling me names like "xenophobe" and "racist". Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

>Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#219

Post by gojomo »

npalli wrote: post #182
doomlaser wrote: post #30

The 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…

I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913).

Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents.

One of the points I was making with the My Fair Lady-themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue.

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg

That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play (Pygmalion). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures.

Of course, an uneducated native (or disadvantaged local group dialect) accent is a different thing than a non-native accent. A non-native accent is more likely to indicate someone with the education and drive to dare operating in a non-native language environment. But, it takes a bit of familiarity to internalize that understanding, and stronger accents still signal a risk of slower and more error-prone communication.

When someone honestly points out that the strongest accents have been problematic, based on significant observational experience, they haven't "slipped", they've done the listeners a favor by sharing a perceived truth. Even if for some reason their observation is in error (and here I doubt it), by sharing the lesson they're helping, not hurting, the process of describing and understanding the world.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#220

Post by iframe »

I'm good reading and listening English but when it comes to talk with somebody it feels like I forget it all I have to think twice before talking and I my pronunciation sucks I've been practicing that .. if there are good sources for improving this please share it , I'm currently using livemocha but I already lost interest on it, I also recommend listening to podcasts.
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