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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

#491

Post by saltcured »

kadoban wrote: post #332
jpindar wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any antenna that's parabolic in shape that isn't designed/used to communicate with a satellite is just called a satellite dish is common usage, but technically really shouldn't be.

It's funny, I can't recall every hearing anybody say "satellite dish" for a terrestrial antenna in my years in metro and suburban California. I've heard "reflector dish", "dish antenna", "microwave dish", or "directional antenna" (which could also apply to YAGI and other non-dish structures).

I wonder if it is regional or has other socioeconomic factors? Actual satellite dishes weren't common structures when I was growing up, outside either a sports bar with satellite TV feeds or more commonly large dishes on industrial, military, or scientific facilities. Other, smaller directional antenna were more commonly seen on radio towers etc.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#492

Post by henvic »

myohmy wrote: post #369
tcgv wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, I'm from Brazil! The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal. As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language. Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usa…

Honestly we need the same for English.

No. Just let the language naturally evolve. This "agreement" was an awful thing forced down by political forces.

Context: I'm Brazilian and during high school I studied Portuguese "one official version behind". It had more rules, but the language itself was way nicer, and people used to write more close to it, than nowadays.

It's better to have a few mistakes due to some archaic rules than to force everything to be sterile and complicate how you pronounce things IMHO

Just let people evolve the language naturally instead...

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#493

Post by ncpa-cpl »

FabHK wrote: post #404
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,…

> Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the "difficult" words being explained were of…

I can relate to this as a Spanish speaker that used English text books in high school. Many of the advanced words in vocabulary and spelling were easy to understand and spell for us.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#494

Post by matheusmoreira »

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,…

Word choice is vital. I was once outed as a non-native english speaker because of a single word.

There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and mispronounce the item as cooper shield. We had no idea what copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We all know what copper means now, but that didn't change our understanding of the shield.

A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private message in my native language from a guy who learned it by playing the game with us. Because of that highly specific misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but also which country I was from.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#495

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #399
hervature wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Norman/Saxon meat/animal word pairs are interesting; the saxons were the hunters and farmers, and the normans ate the meat. This led to a bunch of word pairs: Beef/cow Poultry/chicken Pork/pig Veal/calf Mutton/sheep There are other areas of English vocabulary with dual Saxon/Norman words as well. Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_T…

Please don’t recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. Bryson has no actual background in linguistics and there is a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page of that book. There are loads of pop-sci “history of English” books written by people who were actually competent in the subject.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#496

Post by cosmodisk »

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.

English isn't my mother tongue and my vocabulary is rather simplistic but I had some situations where I had to simplify it even further,as some native English speakers didn't know the meaning of certain words: e.g. acquire, kitsch,etc.

As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can immediately understand because it's either used internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#497

Post by pessimizer »

xxpor wrote: post #432
qart wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that Indian English exists almost entirely as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language. Especially kids born in cities, whose parents' linguistic backgrounds differ. > it'll never sound as natural It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here. > It's not the language of the street or the discourse. Wrong. India is not homog…

>A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language "The 2011 Census showed English is the primary language—mother tongue—of 256,000 people, the second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million people, making it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi" https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-e... 256K is not a huge amount. Even…

> I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.

That's no different than the US.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#498

Post by projektfu »

Y_Y wrote: post #15

Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.

Usually publishing organizations have house rules and the copy hews to these rules. NPR uses the spellings in Webster’s New World College Dictionary Fifth Edition, and then has a few rules of their own.

A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...

Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related resources.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#499

Post by cosmodisk »

StavrosK wrote: post #217
tcgv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm Greek, and "periphery" sounds fancy here too :P We'd just say "to the edge".

I'm Lithuanian and the main use case for "periphery" is to describe everything else outside the major cities:) E.g. : they live in periphery, aka in a small village.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#500

Post by yosito »

biztos wrote: post #102
yosito wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.

Sorry, I should have emphasized really. Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions! I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.

I just noticed your username is Hungarian for sure. Pun intended. :) If you've spoken to a lot of Hungarians, as I have, I think some of the distance between "school English" and "street English" for Hungarians has to do with the distance between English and Hungarian. I haven't noticed any school/street difference with Germans speaking English. Most of the Germans I've met I could swear speak English as a first language. For what it's worth, I speak intermediate "school Hungarian", but "street Hungarian" still feels a lifetime away for me. When I learned Spanish I feel like I went from "school Spanish" to "street Spanish" in 3-5 months.
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