Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

christopherwink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 330 posts

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#281

Post by wccrawford »

pja wrote: post #237
laurieg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.

Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”. Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.

On the other hand, all 3 of those can be used with "piece of". Slice describes something that was done to it, and sheet describes its form. (As opposed to scrap or some such term.)

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#282

Post by ternaryoperator »

the_gipsy wrote: post #215
ternaryoperator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points: In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object. And while there are more rules than in Engli…

It's either Mexico and Texas, or Méjico and Tejas. Someone might mix across languages, but that does not mean that there is actually a formal exception to the rule.

Not at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound.

The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#283

Post by ccpcx »

sershe wrote: post #279

Comparing Russian (my native language), English, and Turkish (that I've learned to lower-intermediate level 15 years ago and have since forgotten)... English has very simple rules, and tons of irregularities and exceptions everywhere. And as some have mentioned, tons of vocabulary. Aspects of Turkish sometimes felt to me almost like a programming language, it's very modular with complex rules compared to English (for…

Do you mean understanding what the words are or what they're talking about? I can understand the words in Two Ways to Play, but I would have had a lot of gaps in Poke Chop Sandwich if I hadn't already looked at the lyrics. I have little, if any, idea of what either of them are actually talking about. I get the vague sense that Poke Chop Sandwich might be their version of Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen ("waiting in the sack" and "gonna get some" might support this). Two Ways to Play is probably about a relationship, but I can't tell for sure what the problem is or what the singer is saying he wants to do about it. In any case, it seems like he wants to try again, but I can't entirely grasp what he's expressing about his philosophy of relationships.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#285

Post by anticensor »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
inkyoto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things. You h…

Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse. Then there's the matter…

> Unless of course they make a point of writing in the "polytonic" system that includes the diacritics, which they will invariably tell you is because "that's more correct". In truth, it's not more correct, it's anachronistic and archaic, but it marks the person out as someone who is e r u d i t e.

Indeed, Greek language definitely needs a spelling reform.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#286

Post by onemiketwelve »

fader wrote: post #272
orthoxerox wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some write "coöperate" in English, which looks like the same kind of pretentiousness.

I'd argue that it's less pretentious and more helpful to non-native speakers, as it indicates pronunciation. It's a marker that the word is pronounced "co-op-er-ate" and not "coop-er-ate". The diaeresis works much like vowel markers in Hebrew to make the words easier to pronounce for people reading a word they might not have heard pronounced. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

So why don't they just leave the dashes in, you know, like co-operate? I think a dash is much easier understood than an umlaut. Especially for native speakers

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#287

Post by charcircuit »

matt-attack wrote: post #240
kh1 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Ja…

How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??

The easiest way is just using OCR which for example the Google Translate app lets you do. After that you can search by drawing it or search by the radicals that you recognize in it.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#288

Post by sedeki »

simias wrote: post #110
IgorPartola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts: 1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much mor…

I think there's a lot of bad linguistics in the linked article and in these comments, but your comment being more substantial than most I decided to focus my criticism there, sorry if that comes of as a bit adversarial. I just think that the general point that $language would be objectively easier/harder/more efficient/less efficient than $other_language based on arbitrary factoids is almost always at best irrelevant…

I disagree with your view (= that languages are objectively incomparable w.r.t. difficulty of learning them, and instead only depends on your native language), but I'm not going to try and argue about this.

However I am curious to know whether you have the same view on Esperanto?

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#289

Post by charcircuit »

kh1 wrote: post #221
robotmay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Ja…

>Those kanjis are the easy ones

One thing to note is that the order they are learned is not from easiest to hard. The order is more based off the complexity of the meaning of the kanji.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#290

Post by D-Coder »

leephillips wrote: post #12

I am, at the moment, learning Spanish and also teaching English to native Spanish speakers. The languages present almost opposite sets of challenges. English is chaos: the connection between spelling and pronunciation is so random that one practically has to memorize how to say every word, as if they are ideograms; there are few conjugations to learn, but in place of that many rules for modal and auxiliary verbs; wor…

> almost any verb can be combined with any preposition to form a phrasal verb with a meaning that needs to be memorized (put up, put down, put out (!), etc.)

I knew someone who came to the US from Latvia. His observation was that in English, first you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up.

Post reply on HN