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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

#241

Post by GFischer »

airesQ wrote: post #237
GFischer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I was asking on behalf of some friends that had a startup idea about a language exchange community (say, I teach you Spanish, you teach me English). But I think they abandoned it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#243

Post by felxh »

forinti wrote: post #240
felxh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny, I was just googling for that :). The best I could find: http://www.quora.com/English-language/Is-there-a-thesaurus-t...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#244

Post by lutusp »

zedr wrote: post #242

I'm more intrigued about his statement "in 10 years I'll likely no longer write code professionally". I wonder if it's a personal choice, or if he thinks that there is age limit for the profession.

It could mean a number of things.

* He expects eventually to burn out, a risk for any programmer.

* He expects to write a best-seller and retire young.

* He expects to eventually no longer be able to keep up with changes in the software business.

* All of the above. :)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#245

Post by dasil003 »

btilly wrote: post #147
dasil003 wrote: post #53

Coming from almost the opposite background, I agree very strongly with the assertion that accent is almost beside the point. It's true that if your accent is too thick that will harm communication, but below a certain threshold native speakers will attune pretty quickly. For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properl…

So it's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary. That, in fact, is directly in line with pg's point. His point was that you have to get to "good enough" and not doing so is a real problem. However he went on to make it clear that if your accent does not i…

Yeah I don't think I disagreed with pg, more that I think he's focusing on the much less important issue. I would hazard a guess that the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who have perfect English but can't be understood because of their accent is dwarfed by the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who struggle with English at a more basic level.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#247

Post by notahacker »

blackcat wrote: post #20

Some simplifications were made by Noah Webster. Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most important…

Webster's choice of modifications has always puzzled me: he picked on perfectly harmless words like "defence" (but not it's cognate "fence") and that you'd struggle to mispronounce or misspell whilst leaving abominations like "Wednesday" alone, and reverting some of his better changes like "wimmen"

That said I think English would be much more useful as an auxiliary second language if someone as bold as Webster was willing to actively promote a distinctive "International English" with a more consistent orthography (I quite like Valerie Yule's, but even fixing though/through/tough/cough/bough would be a start)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#248

Post by egillie »

DasIch wrote: post #14

Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly. In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to…

I remember being surprised at people in Iceland using really American idioms. At one point I asked someone where he learned a particular idiom, he told me he was obsessed with the show "Friends".

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#250

Post by kaitai »

jtheory wrote: post #67
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…

This doesn't address the real problem, though, which is how exactly pg is supposed to filter out what is bias vs. what is an actual problem. It seems pretty obvious that both are true, so drawing the exact line may not be useful. If you're starting a company, your communication skills are possibly equally as important as your technical skills -- there are simply so many difficult tasks that you will need really great…

Yep. As someone who has taught in the midwestern US, sophomores can deal with all sorts of accents, while freshmen have varying levels of difficulty depending on where they grew up and their local prejudices. I profited on teaching evaluations from being white & having a Midwestern accent myself; less cognitive load for certain kids.
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