Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English • Hacker News Board

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#231

Post by finnthehuman » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

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.

Ah but which "mother version"? American English is closer to the original spelling than British English, but getting the actual English to change their use of their own language because the Americans use it differently seems... odd. Plus there's no intrinsic reason to prefer the original spelling over later versions. So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English? But that would see a small mi…

>So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English?

I'm in. Just imagine stuck up californians suddenly speaking Geordie. Howay man.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#232

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

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...

It totally blows my mind that there are languages without gendered pronouns. It's like someone saying "mother" and "father" were the same word (just "parent", no specialized words by gender) in a language.

Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:

> Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven.

> سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#233

Post by andrewzah » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

MispelledToyota wrote: post #211

rocknor wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. My point is that "do the needful" is not a proper representation of Indian English, as the parent comment implied. There are a lot more pecularities that makes the dialect what it is, but people are just not aware of them (yet). A quick google search will tell you that.

"Howdy" seems like a successful synechdoche for American dialect to me. Seems like what makes something a proper representation is somewhat personal.

Not to derail the conversation more, but "howdy" is more of a southern American thing than just American. I never used that in the midwest/north until I moved to the south.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#234

Post by slver » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

rocknor wrote: post #224

andrewzah wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not advocating making any particular dialect universal. I'm simply asking people to look at the big picture instead of hating the person that you're talking to because of how they talk. We have the Internet now, IMO it's only a matter of time until we naturally converge to a universal dialect. It will be a long time, but still.

> I'm simply asking people to look at the big picture instead of hating the person that you're talking

I didn't advocate "hating" anyone. On the other hand, you showed up and declared me a "racist" for no reason. Maybe you should listen to your own advice and not jump the gun and hate the person you're talking to.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#235

Post by stavros » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

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.

Obligatory Limmy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfRbNipdOg

NSFW language, if you can understand it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#236

Post by JackFr » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

cafard wrote: post #163

JackFr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'gaol' always throws me for a loop when I'm reading something British. I need to remind myself it's pronounced 'jail'. (A quick google tells me that all the major British newspapers switched over to 'jail' by the 1990's - score one for the good guys!) I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and talking about it with my father and I said something about the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) loo…

One of my father's college classmates was in Navy ROTC, and deliberately pronounce "boatswain" and "gunwale" as spelled, in order to bug the regular petty officer.

Also forcastle -> foc's'le

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#237

Post by refactor_master » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

Bayart wrote: post #122

aikinai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese is similar. Chinese-origin words usually sound more sophisticated than pure Japanese words.

The dynamic between Chinese and Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese in East Asia is very similar to the one between French and English, or more broadly Latin/Greek and all European languages. It's a good example to use for both sides (whether it is Easterners learning European languages or Westerners leaning East-Asian ones).

Japanese does take the cake though! If you thought silent letters or weird pronunciations were bad, try replacing every second word with an emoji and guess the pronunciation. Or if everything was spelled according to the rules of the English “ghoti” :p

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#238

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

tcgv wrote: post #94

chris_j wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy to me. A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.

That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese: > "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue" That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue. I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterp…

So I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.

so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too. It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.

An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese with the same words in reverse!

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#239

Post by gadders » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

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 heard on a podcast the other day about people joining the US Military or Police that have never been in a fist fight in their lives. Being nearly 50, that is incredible to me.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#240

Post by eralps » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

brk wrote: post #70

FriedrichN wrote: post #41

There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American English. As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone

There is such a thing as Indian English If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.

I am a non-native English speaker. “Even I” would come to my mind first and then that.

For some reason it means “I also” in Indian English and it sounds weird to non Indian dialect.

Like “Even I don’t understand this” sounds obnoxious to me because in my mind it means “Even I, an almighty being, don’t understand this, who are you to think you can understand it” but it means “I also don’t understand” in Indian English.

According to google “Even” as adverb: used to emphasize something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at first is what native English speakers also think.

I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian colleague was talking down to her.