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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

#381

Post by kayodelycaon »

blt wrote: post #315

A lot of native English speakers think English is a difficult language to learn. It's true that English has a lot of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies caused by mixing German, Latin, Greek, etc. But English is structurally very simple: few subject/verb agreement classes, few tenses, modifications like "ask vs. command" or "desire vs. predict" are achieved by adding words instead of conjugation. There are no…

English also has the largest vocabulary. Granted, most of it isn't used in everyday speech but I encounter a lot of words in writing I don't see used in speech.

(Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from Calvin and Hobbes.)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#382

Post by teddyh »

hob_code wrote: post #116
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,…

Richard Feynman noted something similar in his story about traveling to Brazil and learning Portuguese[1]. People would compliment him for using larger elegant sounding words, when really he just couldn't remember simpler words. 1. https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html

At one standards meeting, Pete went out to dinner with the Italians, to discover that only one of them spoke a little English. In an attempt to be polite, he told them, “Machina ipsam culturam non habet” (Latin for “the computer has no culture of its own”). The English-speaker replied, “Pete, there’s nothing wrong with your Italian, except that you use all those archaic words.”

— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#383

Post by anoncake »

908B64B197 wrote: post #283
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 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 pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries. That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you ca…

You could still properly encode English using Latin by using more digraphs and trigraphs.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#384

Post by PartiallyTyped »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #170

My favorite example of one of the difficulties of learning English comes from my friend who's an adult ESL teacher. Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tw…

There are relationships that arise when you change the order, e.g. nylon blue sounds as if it's a shade of blue, but not a nylon that is some shade of blue.

However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker who has sufficient experience with the language.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#385

Post by fsniper »

anotherhue wrote: post #108
fsniper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Ireland 4 years ago. And for at least 2 years, I could not understand ( or hear ) a word my - not direct - Irish manager said. It was alien to me.

And you probably got off lightly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8

Ha ha :) That video is priceless. And I experienced this first hand. If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#387

Post by jll29 »

Linguists don't distinguish between "proper" and "improper" English, or "right" or "wrong", although they are very interested what native speakers think of "grammatical" or "ungrammatical" sentences.

In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of one and the same society.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#388

Post by kosievdmerwe »

xwolfi wrote: post #187
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…

I think English has large advantages over other languages. I'm French and live in Hong Kong, and the superiority of English vs both French and Cantonese is hard to deny. You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French. The genders make litt…

Japanese takes the Chinese writing system and makes it even worse.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#389

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

WalterBright wrote: post #374
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #368

My girlfriend recently enrolled in a university and one of the requirements was a certificate from one of the official places (TOEFL etc., I forget the rest). They exist just to leech money off non-native speakers. Anyone can pass an exam as long as they go to the right place and pay the fee, and besides, why do you need a long written and spoken test to test people's English? Someone's level of English is immediatel…

> How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language? By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like that, to uncover frauds.

I find it hard to believe one could go through the nationalization procedure and not speak English. It's a very in-person kind of thing, no way to con your way through it really.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#390

Post by hervature »

WalterBright wrote: post #361
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 English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech". For example, someone from u…

Very interesting. The connection to French is not immediately obvious as both "purchase" and "buy" would translate to "achat". However, "por chase" in French is "for the chase/hunt" which begins to resemble some definition of "purchase".
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