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

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#321

Post by katsura » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:13 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…

You can always say "Once there, the girl put the chicken in the oven.".

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#322

Post by awillen » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #136

awillen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

Spanish is easier because there's just the two - an action is either discrete or not. There's some ambiguity as to which to apply in some cases, but the fact that there's just the two forms means there's basically an order of magnitude less to memorize.

But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but it's just so difficult to go through the process of constructing words while speaking.

Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint. If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through sentences :)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#323

Post by dnautics » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #241

e17 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I desperately want to do this in the other direction, but I can't figure out how to stream foreign dubbed trek in the states and I don't have a DVD player anymore... It may take a bit more effort.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#324

Post by potta_coffee » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

chris_j wrote: post #72

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

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 sounds like the kind of phrase I would use as a mild joke while hanging out with someone. It's my sense of humor sometimes to be intentionally fancy because it sounds pretentious.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#325

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #136

awillen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

>> Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.

I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in other languages you have to manage both at once.

But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand people over a few generations, I guess that every language is eventually optimised to be learned and used without trouble given the average linguistic ability of human beings.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#326

Post by trashtester » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #55

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

If you can do that in a British accent, no matter how bad it is, you will immediately be pundit material in the USA. And also more attractive!

I wonder if that also applies to someone from the Hebrides. I used to have a supervisor from there, and even his English coleagues often had problem to understand his dialect....

Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#327

Post by kkoncevicius » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

The part about spelling being inconsistent with how it sounds is likely due to "great vowel shift" [1].

My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#328

Post by mumblemumble » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

jpindar wrote: post #285

mumblemumble wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically in English you'd only use "satellite dish" to describe a parabolic antenna that's being used for satellite communications. In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.

What else does anyone use the term satellite dish to refer to?

Parabolic antennas that are used for terrestrial communication.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#329

Post by Diederich » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:23 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's funny, because as a half a century long US native speaker, I started using that phrase a couple of years ago because I thought it sounded neat and everyone understands what it means.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#330

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #311

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also say "Perifereia Attikis" for the municipality (?) of Attica. I don't find it fancy, just not often used.

It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς", that sounds pretty fancy.

It does. To be honest, I don't know how I'd phrase "on the edge of the barbecue". "Στην απέξω μεριά"?

We also use "περιφέρεια" for the circumference of a circle so I could say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς" to make a nerdy joke... but that supports your point.