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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

#231

Post by crassus »

antikirez wrote: post #216
crassus wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

> When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history

Not to worry! If you are as eloquent as the best orators in history, you'll do great in Silicon Valley!

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#232

Post by kyro »

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…

Let's stop being intellectually dishonest for a second and look at what PG actually said. He said accents are an issue 1) in the context of startups when 2) it hinders communication.

He is looking at it from his point of view of what running a startup and startup culture encompasses, that is: an environment rife with competition built on extreme uncertainty that can be transcended with the appropriate communicative abilities to fool investors, founders, employees to believe in what you're doing. In that context, it would seem that having an accent that hinders others' ability to understand you is a huge disadvantage.

I do not know about the beginnings of Intel, but Apple in the startup stage had a founding team whose native tongue was English. Steve Jobs was fluent in English and could deliver these great orations about his stupidly crazy ideas to his friends and investors who also spoke English. You can't say that didn't help him. Having a thick accent that prevented him from communicating clearly would've had a multiplicative effect on the unwillingness of others to even listen to his ideas.

PG never just stopped at "people with accents can't succeed or be successful in business." And it's incredibly disingenuous of you and others to continue to label him as anti-accent when he has repeatedly stated the context and details of his position.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#233

Post by crassus »

walshemj wrote: post #195
walshemj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Paul needed is some one to have taken his shovel away when we was up to his neck in the brown stuff instead of digging himself in even deeper.

Thought that would get modded down - guys if you went to any FTSE 100 DJA 30 HR director he would tell you exactly the same thing.

It is my observation that most hackers aren't fans of FTSE 100 DJA 30 HR directors, and they don't want to live in that world.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#234

Post by Dylan16807 »

nekopa wrote: post #130
DanBC wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bend, send, spend, friend. Rough - 'ruff' Cough - 'coff' Bough - 'bow' Though - 'tho' Through - 'throo' hiccough - 'hiccup' Bought - 'bawt'

I'm still waiting for HN member ghotifish to show up, as his name is pronounced fish fish: gh as in cough o as in women ti as in nation

Thankfully you're not actually allowed to pick pronunciation arbitrarily in new words. Especially if they violate common or semi-common patterns.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#235

Post by galawa »

nekopa wrote: post #130
DanBC wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bend, send, spend, friend. Rough - 'ruff' Cough - 'coff' Bough - 'bow' Though - 'tho' Through - 'throo' hiccough - 'hiccup' Bought - 'bawt'

I'm still waiting for HN member ghotifish to show up, as his name is pronounced fish fish: gh as in cough o as in women ti as in nation

the internet is full of every one censorship,from government,politics and economic sanction. when do you think will the internet world be totally free for everyone?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#236

Post by gojomo »

npalli wrote: post #230
gojomo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg’s family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why? In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ab…

When you have observed a similar number of founding teams close up, your impressions will have similar credibility.

Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#237

Post by airesQ »

GFischer wrote: post #225
airesQ wrote: post #108

Over the past year I have improved my spoken English immensely, here's how: - I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it. - Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one h…

How did you contact your tutors? I know of some startup attempts, was it something more prosaic like a classifieds ad?

I got in contact with my tutors through livelingua.com. The first tutor was excellent, the second one was reasonable. I can't say that I really recommend the site (as the quality is somewhat inconsistent), but it did work for me.

The first lesson is free, so one can always give it a try.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#238

Post by YuriNiyazov »

Not quite the main point of the article, but this stuck with me: "I don't know most of the words needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example"

I grew up in the Soviet Union; I learned the names of trees, and birds from my grandma, and the names of tools in a shop from my dad. We emigrated to New York; It's been 20 years; I am fluent, I speak with a slight accent, but no one ever claims they can't understand me; yet, only now, barely, have I started to learn things like names of birds, trees and tools. I, of course, don't mean the basic ones like "owl" or "pigeon", or "wrench" and "screwdriver", but things that are slightly more obscure like "bluejay" or "vicegrip" eluded me for a long time.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#239

Post by justin66 »

> My long term hope is that soon or later different accents could converge into a standard easy-to-understand one that the English speaking population could use as a lingua franca.

I'm puzzled by this comment. The generic midwest accent that most people on television use would seem like a good, obvious candidate. Even newscasters in Europe seem to target this when using English.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#240

Post by forinti »

felxh wrote: post #187
forinti wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example: I redacted a text, removing the froufrou. Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru. French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.

English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England ). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).

I know, I receive Webster's Word of the Day and most of them are Latin words: really easy for anyone who speaks a Romance language. The last five were: incipient; indissoluble, indoctrinate, infantilize, inscrutable. So maybe Webster should have two mailing lists. One for anglo-saxons and one for speakers of Romance languages.
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