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

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

#41

Post by IgorPartola »

gruppe_sechs wrote: post #2

Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…

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 more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?

2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.

3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.

4. English used articles the/a/an to indicate specificity. Russian has no such concept.

5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.

Those are just some of the more glaring examples of differences. Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English. Therefore as someone who knows Russian, I think it’s easier to learn English. This is like if you know Haskell you probably have an easier time learning Basic but not the other way around.

Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. I used to play this game when I was in high school where I would hand a sizable English/Russian translation book to a friend and tell them to pick any Russian word and I could translate it to English. I had a nearly perfect success rate. The vocabulary just isn’t full of obscure $5 words. And before you object that this was simply because the book didn’t contain all the words in usage, not so: the Russian language is just a smaller language where words’ meanings are changed with prefixes and suffixes more than by using entirely different words.

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.

P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive.

P.P.S.: “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough. Russian is a nightmare to learn, 0/10 would not recommend.

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

#42

Post by p1necone »

hnaccy wrote: post #34
torstenvl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.

If we're taking descriptivist approach wouldn't it also apply to ESL speakers? There is probably many more Indian english speakers than AAVE speakers so wouldn't any differences not be mistakes?

Yes, Indian english is another dialect of english that is just as "correct" as any other dialect of english.

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

#44

Post by torstenvl »

hnaccy wrote: post #34
torstenvl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.

If we're taking descriptivist approach wouldn't it also apply to ESL speakers? There is probably many more Indian english speakers than AAVE speakers so wouldn't any differences not be mistakes?

There are only about a quarter million native Indian English speakers, according to Wikipedia. Certainly, a native Indian English speaker does not make errors (though they may make mistakes) in Indian English. That doesn't necessarily mean that a native Indian English speaker and a native Standard American English will have perfect mutual intelligibility.

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

#45

Post by flobosg »

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…

> I was puzzled by the one about the present continuous tense, which does exist in Spanish

According to Spanish grammar, what would be considered the Spanish analog of the English present continuous is formally classified not as a tense, but a periphrasis.

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

#46

Post by kinghtown »

bsder wrote: post #6

> I know a few foreigners with great English, but they still make mistakes all the time. Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. Most foreigners with decent English are actually much better at "English" than most Americans.

I’ve seen this kind of attitude before in Taiwan many times over the years. I can’t help but feel that it comes from a place a bitterness due to being forced to learn English at a young age.

I would agree with you in full in certain edge cases (such as Vladimir Nabokov’s mastery of English which absolutely eclipses 99.9999% of native English speakers) but to suggest that most are better is a bit rich.

Average native speakers may be unaware of named grammatical concepts, such as tag questions or contrary to fact conditional statements, but they certainly understand how to use them.

Where you begin to see the gulf between native speakers and ESL people is in their swiftness in things like satire, asking questions which nudge conversation, effortlessly using articles correctly, communicating abstraction, making long sentences with numerous prepositional phrases which all use the right preposition. There are many tells.

A great number of people absolutely reach the level of being truly bilingual and integrated into the culture but it’s uncommon at least to become better than most native speakers.

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

#47

Post by cromka »

IgorPartola wrote: post #41
gruppe_sechs wrote: post #2

Something I've heard fairly consistently from people who've learned English as a second language is that it's relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spe…

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'll just add for anyone interested that you could replace “Russian” here with pretty much any Slavic language and most (if not all) of your observations would still stand.

As for the needles redundancy in vocabulary in English, this letter, which was discussed on HN recently, sums it up perfectly:

https://theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-l...

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

#48

Post by ternaryoperator »

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…

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 English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)

Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.

I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.

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

#49

Post by schrodinger »

After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable.

Think about these phrases:

* I go store now

* I hungry

* I wash car later

* I cook food grill tomorrow if no rain

These all immediately sound like a "foreigner" speaking, yet are completely understandable. Many other languages, relying on conjugations and implicit subjects & objects are way more inaccessible to new learners!

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

#50

Post by stan_rogers »

bsder wrote: post #22
torstenvl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listened to any native English speakers lately? At least in the US, the native speakers mangle the language to a horrible extent. That's literally impossible. Please don't confuse your classism for linguistics.

Subject/verb agreement is regularly mangled. A vs an is regularly hosed up. Run-on sentences and clauses are all over the map. I can go on and on. This is hilarious when two halves of a family come together and can't understand one another. It's not so hilarious when their children can't read certain books and can't spell for crap because their pronunciation is terrible.

"A" vs "an" depends entirely on whether you consider the glottal stop to be a consonant. "A" before a vowel is only wrong if it's elided into the following word.
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