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

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#241

Post by cogman10 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

e17 wrote: post #194

owenversteeg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, a similar thing (using obscure, ten-dollar words instead of simple ones) happens with many Russians learning English. It happens for a totally different reason - obviously Russian is a Slavic, not Romance language. Turns out that most high quality translated material for Russian is old literature and scientific papers. So that’s what the translators are trained on, and that’s what many Russians speaking…

I have witnessed this phenomenon living in London as a native of the city. A new-to-London Russian colleague of mine used ornate phraseology and what I would consider as 'posh' words quite regularly. A major phrase for her was "It seems to me" as a precursor to saying virtually any opinion. I never knew the reason for it though, so TIL.

I had an Austrian friend that learned all his English from star trek TNG and DS9... it was amazing :D

He'd watched the series in German and then in English and knew it well enough to pick things up.

To my ear, his English was pretty good.

That said, the 2 groups of non-native speakers that have impressed me the most are people from Sweden and Norway. I've mistaken more than one of them for native speakers (to their delight) :D

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#242

Post by heurisko » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:10 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.

I wouldn't find them "pretty much incomprehensible", although there might be one or two variations in accent or words that we might trip over once or twice.

It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#243

Post by Izkata » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

anbende wrote: post #209

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 ins…

The speed you replied, I think you might have missed the second paragraph I edited in (a habit I have of posting the comment, rereading it outside the edit box, then adding clarification). The edit should make it clear I'm not talking about native fluency.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#244

Post by carlosf » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #238

tcgv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly, periferia.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#245

Post by twic » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

e17 wrote: post #207

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 - Multi…

This is heavily tied up with class, though. My middle-class professional second-generation Indian and Pakistani acquantiances speak in a way that i don't think i could distinguish from the way middle-class professional white people speak. Meanwhile, if you visit ends where Multiethnic London English is widely spoken, you'll meet white people who speak it too.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#246

Post by cogman10 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

javierga wrote: post #221

karaterobot wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a really fascinating guide for English writing which is all about this: how the best writers in English have used the cultural connotations of Germanic and Latinate words for effect. When to using one or the other, but also playing them off each other, or using the tension between them, and so on. Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1]. 1: https://www.librarything.com/work/24739…

As a non-native English speaker, Farnsworth as a last name sounds very fancy.

Funnily, I think of it as more of a hillbilly name :D. Maybe because I think of Philo Farnsworth who was raised in rural western America.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#247

Post by TchoBeer » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

heurisko wrote: post #49

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…

> 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 grew up in an orthodox jewish community pretty near an even more, what might be termed "ultra orthodox" jewish community, and the dialect of english spoken there would probably be incomprehensible to native english speakers, both because of all the yiddishisms and also because of the accent.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#248

Post by oblio » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #230

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.

"A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education." There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious). One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize". Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing. I…

In Romanian "a utiliza" is "to use". I imagine it's the same in other Latin languages. So, see the original comment :-)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#249

Post by twic » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:18 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.

That phrase is so well known, i think some Indian speakers now avoid it when speaking to British or American speakers!

The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning "group". "We will club these events together into one message for efficiency".

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#250

Post by shayanbahal » Thu, May 20, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #232

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 ove…

Yes the second part of the sentence is mainly saying "that person", and doesn't indicate the gender.

You may be surprised on how this ambiguity can be beneficial, specially in teenage years when talking about your "friend" will not reveal their gender :)