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Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

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Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#271

Post by joeberon »

monkeybutton wrote: post #252
joeberon wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's weird how quickly it has changed. I went to school almost exactly from 2000 to early 2010s and I saw it change before my eyes. Quite literally we were the exact school year (grade) where physical abuse became much less tolerated. I'm not sure what exactly changed, but it a stark contrast between looking at the upper years when young vs when I reached that point. The teachers verified it too, and our gra…

When I went to high school in the mid 2000s I remember it being the dawn of zero-tolerance policies for everything major and minor. Parents were also suing schools, and I think those policies were a bit of a to reaction that.

That wasn't a thing here at all. We didn't have any zero tolerance policies and suing a school in the UK was unheard of.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#272

Post by twic »

ljm wrote: post #105
brk wrote: post #79

I think some of the confusion is that "pone" is not a root word or term. So, the opposite of postpone is not prepone, in the same way that prepartum is the opposite of postpartum.

I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have three states: lime, sublime, and superlime. Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.

Subb! I suggest you make a backmal undertological antiposal about this.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#273

Post by jaywalk »

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…

Now we have swung so far in the opposite direction that college students will suffer an emotional breakdown if they hear an opinion that differs from one they hold.

I don't think we're better off.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#274

Post by ed312 »

caymanjim wrote: post #226
dukeofdoom wrote: post #133

Isn't this selection bias? It's like walking in on a flight to US, and seeing how poorly sloppy everyone is dressed. So you might assume that the US is some sort of third world country. But you would be wrong, because the US is rich enough that even the lower class can travel. So if you are talking with some native speaker, you just might be speaking with an idiot, because even idiots speak English as their first lan…

I think you're confused about how Americans dress. Even people with money dress casually, and we don't dress up to get on airplanes. In fact, most of us dress extra-casual on planes. I normally won't wear sweatpants in public, but I will on a plane, because it's far too uncomfortable to wear pants and a belt while crammed into a tiny seat. People who normally dress well will wear pajamas on planes.

That's true through an upper middle class level, then you get into always traveling business class (aka humanely-sized seats, better food). The bump from business/first -> private is not that much better.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#275

Post by notdang »

mariodiana wrote: post #111
pta2002 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with performant? (Non-native speaker here)

It's a neologism. Some people love it. (Actually, it seems like a lot of people do.) To others however, it strikes the ear as awkward sounding. I wouldn't say there's anything "wrong" about it. It's a matter of taste. It's a bit of a pet peeve for some of us. I bought a book a couple of years ago: iOS and macOS Performance Tuning. I took note that the author had not used the word "performant" even once in the book's…

Thank you for telling me. Having been using it for ages and never realized that it can be interpreted in this way.

In my native Romance language it is written the same and it's an usual word. I never thought that it's a neologism in English and perceived as pretentious.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#276

Post by D-Coder »

bluetomcat wrote: post #88

As a non-native speaker living in a non-English speaking country who has started learning English decades ago at school in my teenage years, the sheer richness of the English vocabulary never ceases to fascinate me. There are so many words with subtle and nuanced meanings (primarily of Latin and French origin) you can almost never hear in an American movie or a reality show. I have encountered them primarily in Briti…

This makes me lugubrious.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#277

Post by asveikau »

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…

I think the typical word probably has no cognate in English.

Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate to o lado that I can think of would be to suggest to move it laterally.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#278

Post by D-Coder »

input_sh wrote: post #38

Verbs that don't end with -ed in past tense. No rule, you just have to memorise all of them.

I think there is a rule (or more likely several rules), but knowing them involves learning the history of English, which is not what people usually want to do.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#279

Post by Metacelsus »

awillen wrote: post #113
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…

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :) Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication. Polish is a goddamn ni…

I'm also learning Polish. If you think declensions are fun, just wait until you get to the number system!

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#280

Post by dmingod666 »

js2 wrote: post #210

I’m a native English speaker. I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it. At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other. At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadia…

'Anti-Baby-Pillen' is the most absurd name of a medicine I've come across.
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