English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#231

Post by orthoxerox » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111

inkyoto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things. You h…

Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse. Then there's the matter…

Some write "coöperate" in English, which looks like the same kind of pretentiousness.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#232

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #157

soldehierro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungari…

I disagree. I think English does have some inherent advantages. I can't say it's the "best", but it's certainly better than some alternatives. There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers. What also needs to be mention…

There are definitely accents in English. They are just not written down which makes written English very confusing as nothing written has proper prononciation rules.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#233

Post by CannisterFlux » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #12

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; wor…

I've lived in Spain for many years and speak pretty good Spanish. But there is one thing I still find relatively tricky in Spanish: the correct gender for nouns. The worst is when you're referring to something elsewhere in a sentence just by lo/la, well away from where the noun was, or have to make the adjective match the gender. If you get it wrong native speakers will not fully understand you or at least look at you weird.

For Spanish natives, the "his/her" relationship word when referring to family members can cause problems, since the "his" refers to the other person, whereas su/suya in Spanish refers to the main noun. e.g. "hermana suya" - the "suya" is female because of "hermana" (or "su hermana" the "su" is neutral), whereas in English "his sister" the "his" is male because the other person must be male, the gender of the sister doesn't matter.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#234

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #149

dragonwriter wrote: post #123

> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”) At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary: In English, the sense of the present continuous can be…

Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando , I am eating; io sto leggendo , I am reading; lei stava facendo , she was doing... It's just a form of gerundio . As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.

Yeah, the same applies to Spanish.

I remember I was surprised when I learned English at school, because they seemed to make a lot of emphasis on the present continuous and past continuous, and I found them trivial: they work exactly the same as in Spanish, i.e., at least off the top of my head, every English sentence analogous to "I am/was eating" can be translated literally into Spanish directly as "Yo estoy/estaba comiendo" without a second thought, and vice versa. It's not something where a native Spanish speaker learning English would make mistakes, even from a very basic level.

On the other hand, from the Spanish point of view it's much, much easier to make mistakes with the present simple, because there are many things that you can say with the present simple in Spanish but not in English. For example, to ask someone what they are eating in the present moment (not in general), in Spanish you could use both "¿qué estás comiendo?" and "¿qué comes?" (the second being more common in informal speech) and you could answer both "estoy comiendo kebab" and "como kebab". In English the first versions work ("what are you eating? I am eating kebab") but the second ones don't ("what do you eat?" "I eat kebab") and it's a super common error to make for beginner/intermediate learners, but almost no emphasis was made on that because we were busy doing a lot of exercises about writing sentences in present continuous.

I guess it was an effect of using British books written for a global audience (not tailored specifically to learners coming from Spanish) and the teachers following the books without questioning or adapting their methodology.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#235

Post by CannisterFlux » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

ternaryoperator wrote: post #48

leephillips wrote: post #12

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; wor…

While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points: In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object. And while there are more rules than in Engli…

Spelling = correct pronunciation in Spanish is like 99.9% correct. The exceptions are almost always imported words. Even the tildes help you out to know how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before completely correctly, with the right stresses on each syllable. English is an embarrassment in comparison. If we did a total overhaul and simplification of English to remove all the inconsistencies, it'd be far easier to learn for everyone going forward (albeit at the inconvenience of everyone alive today).

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#236

Post by cowboysauce » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

laurieg wrote: post #224

wccrawford wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like…

English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.

I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#237

Post by pja » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

laurieg wrote: post #224

wccrawford wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like…

English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.

Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”.

Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#238

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

flobosg wrote: post #45

leephillips wrote: post #12

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; wor…

> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.

Regardless of how linguists classify it, the truth is that there is a direct correspondence in that respect. Every time you can use the present continuous ("I am eating") in English, you can use the Spanish equivalent ("estoy comiendo") in Spanish as well, and vice versa. It's one of the easiest thing to learn for Spanish speakers, contrary to e.g. the present simple which has quite different usage in English than in Spanish.

So saying that Spanish has no present continuous might be true in some pedantic or stilted sense of the word or in a technical context, but it's not very useful otherwise. For all practical purposes, for speakers and learners, Spanish has present continuous.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#239

Post by rvz » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

nullsense wrote: post #40

rantwasp wrote: post #16

we don’t use the word master anymore.

English is relatively easy to learn, but not to main.

Yet here we are after the solidarity stunts, renaming of branches, the term 'master' is still used. As the change solved nothing, it can be described as a magnificent waste of time.

They are going to be fighting forever over a change that doesn't address the actual issue of what they are fighting against.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#240

Post by matt-attack » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

kh1 wrote: post #221

robotmay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Ja…

How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??