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

Weird English

nationalreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: Weird English

#51

Post by elboru »

mlinhares wrote: post #46
nkrisc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear…

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese…

You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.

Re: Weird English

#52

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

nkrisc wrote: post #38
altacc wrote: post #12

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…

Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear…

Oddly enough, I actually learned more about the mechanics of English through learning Spanish than I did through high school English class. The English curriculum was geared towards reading literature and summarizing the morals and themes rather than learning the rules of English language.

Having to understand the concept of grammatical tense through conjugating verbs in Spanish made me actually think about things like past tense, the present participle, the fact that English does not have a future tense, and much more. I’m really thankful for the realization but a little disappointed now that I realize our English curriculum in the United States is basically a culture class more than it is a language class.

Re: Weird English

#53

Post by yorwba »

soneil wrote: post #47
bradrn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can speak fairly good English with no knowledge of any of these complications Well, this is very dependent on exactly what you mean by ‘fairly good English’. I’d say that getting to this level is hardly trivial — I’ve seen many non-native speakers whose writing is nearly unreadable. Though then again, there are a fair number of native English speakers who also have terrible writing. As a monolingual speaker I c…

The way I've always understood this is that you can speak surprisingly bad English and still be understood. To a large extent you can just throw most of the right words in a sentence together and be largely understood - even if it sounds fantastically wrong. I'm thinking of things like .. in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička. If you don't understand how they mutate the word endings - and as far as I can…

> in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička

Isn't that just the diminutive? The English equivalent would be a "spoony." You might get looked at foony if you use that word to ask for a teaspoon, but if an English speaker understands what you mean, it's because they know their language well enough to guess the meaning based on a handful of words and the context.

Similarly, I'd expect a Slovak speaker to understand "lyžiča malé", "malinká lyžiča" and "čaju lyžiča", even though they probably sound horribly wrong. (BTW, my dictionary says it's spelled "lyžica".)

Re: Weird English

#54

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

elboru wrote: post #51
mlinhares wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese…

You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.

English spelling is also inconsistent with diacritics. You can write ‘facade’ but also ‘façade’, just like ‘naive’ and ‘naïve’.

The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.

Re: Weird English

#55

Post by azangru »

altacc wrote: post #12

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…

> I do pity anyone trying to learn it.

Depends on the age of the learner and the duration of the instruction. If you start learning a second language in elementary school or even in kindergarten and spread it out over the rest of the school years, then there's nothing to it. If, on the other hand, you start as an adult and want to learn a language over a short period of time, then my pity goes to you regardless of which language you are learning.

Re: Weird English

#56

Post by ziml77 »

mlinhares wrote: post #46
nkrisc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear…

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese…

The flip-side of that pronunciation thing is that we're flexible on how things are pronounced. Just listen to the differences between British and American English or even regional differences in those countries. Us native English speakers know all the different ways our letters can sound, so differing pronunciations tend to remain recognizable as long as you don't form a homophone with another word that would work in context.

Re: Weird English

#57

Post by Asraelite »

Borrible wrote: post #24

Blame on you. That happens, when you make your own language open source. They tinker and fork it without any shame.

A funny thing is that there do exist "closed source" constructed languages whose use it legally restricted, like Loglan.

Re: Weird English

#58

Post by eesmith »

stickfigure wrote: post #43
eesmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tenses in English are quite nicely organised into a Cartesian product of {past, present, future} x {simple, perfect, continuous}. http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms: - auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow") - auxiliary verb going to for intentio…

Do those future forms really matter? You could just use will or going to in all cases and nobody would know you aren't a native speaker: * The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow * We will buy a new car next month * I will meet my mother at the airport tomorrow * The train will depart in 10 minutes All perfectly fine.

What really matters is that there isn't a single simple "Cartesian" future tense with only {simple, perfect, continuous} forms.

Here's an example where "will" cannot be substituted with "going to".

"If you sit down then the movie will start." "If you sit down then the movie is going to start." In the earlier list, that's "will" because it's a prediction or statement of fact.

Re: Weird English

#59

Post by kaesar14 »

jamil7 wrote: post #19
altacc wrote: post #12

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…

From my perspective, despite inconsistencies it's one of the easier languages to learn at a basic level as you can ramp up and start using a working subset of it pretty quickly. German in comparison has a steep up-front learning curve and requires a lot of investment to get anything out of.

I'd just like to point out that everyone saying English is easy to learn in this thread is from a self-selecting population that's good enough at the language to participate on this forum.

For this example specifically though, I do agree with other comments saying the "MVP" of English is quite small, but frankly English is just everywhere. Comme quelqu'en qui apprend le français maintenant, it's just hard to find content to immerse myself with in America, and that's with one of the most popular languages in the world. Could you say the same of English, in almost anywhere else in the world?

Re: Weird English

#60

Post by ziml77 »

elboru wrote: post #51
mlinhares wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese…

You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.

Try "segue"! I was either in my late teens or early 20s before I learned that was pronounced "seg-way". It didn't help at all that Segway transportation devices were getting lots of news coverage at the time.
Post reply on HN