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English has been my pain for 15 years

antirez.com

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#51

Post by decode » 

  hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not
  understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find
  people that, once your understanding limits are obvious,
  will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often
  even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same
  sentence repeated the same at speed of light.
This is an important point. There are a number of things that native speakers of English can do to be more understandable to non-native speakers. Some things I've found are helpful: speaking more slowly, shifting your pronunciation (especially of vowels) to be more standard, using different words (e.g. if you're talking to a native speaker of a Romance language, prefer words with Latin roots over Germanic ones), and being careful to pronounce all consonants. Things that rarely help: speaking more loudly and repeating the same phrase multiple times.

Making these changes to your speech in real time is a difficult skill that must be cultivated and practiced. I would encourage native speakers to work at this skill, as it can make a big difference. I was once speaking to a couple of Russians and an American from the same region of the US as me. The Russians said they could understand me easily, but had difficulty understanding the other American. The difference was that I was making an effort to speak more clearly for them.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#52

Post by sampo »

dsego wrote: post #16
nasmorn wrote: post #5

English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irreg…

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

And 'jilet' is 'razor' in Turkish :-)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#53

Post by dasil003 »

Coming from almost the opposite background, I agree very strongly with the assertion that accent is almost beside the point. It's true that if your accent is too thick that will harm communication, but below a certain threshold native speakers will attune pretty quickly.

For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properly learn until I was 12). Because I was exposed to Portuguese at a young age I have excellent pronunciation and decent grammar, but I never spent enough time living there to pick up a broad vocabulary. So actually my expressiveness Portuguese is quite weak even though people's first impression might be that it is perfect until we get into a serious conversation and I struggle to come up with the right words and expressions.

I often contrast this with my mother and father who learned the language pairs as adults, but did so in a serious academic setting. I have less of an accent than both of them in their opposing language, but they both have a much stronger overall command. Sometimes I meet someone with a very thick accent that is hard to decipher at first, but they speak very quickly and with excellent grammar and vocabulary.

So it's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary. Clearly I think pg touched on the important point that entrepreneurs generally talk fast about complicated and novel ideas, so an accent is more likely to get in the way as compared to normal interactions. However it's just the tip of the iceberg, and I think the average American lives a more sheltered life in terms of the reality of having to learn another language than any other country.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#54

Post by djm_ »

antirez wrote: post #33
DanBC wrote: post #7

This is a great post. Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about! ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs ) > The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically. It doesn't have…

Thanks for the interesting links, it is interesting that there is a debate about it. About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more. As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough w…

Have you taken a look at Duolingo[1]? It doesn't 100% focus on pronunciation but it certainly does provide them for all words. The app is great.

[1] http://www.duolingo.com/

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#55

Post by kome »

cliveowen wrote: post #46
DanBC wrote: post #7

This is a great post. Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about! ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs ) > The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically. It doesn't have…

Translating the documentation from English is akin to providing obese people with scooters inside chain stores: instead of facing the problem head-on you're just avoiding it and learning to live with it.

> instead of facing the problem

The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#56

Post by mjn »

beloch wrote: post #36

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers! Over the years, I've worked with a lot…

Mostly true, and good for me to the extent it's true (as a native English speaker), but it does depend on the field and country. A lot of robotics and EE research in Japan is published in Japanese-language journals, as one of the bigger remaining outposts of non-English technical literature. The journals are slowly moving slowly towards more English, at least to the extent of publishing English abstracts for the Japanese papers, and younger researchers will tend to publish more in English, but it's a pretty recent trend.

There is a lot of media-art / media-philosophy / electronic lit stuff published in German as well. E.g. I would love an English translation of any of Claus Pias's books, or of this generative-art book: http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/about

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#58

Post by rmc »

arethuza wrote: post #45
antirez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly. In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot. Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I u…

In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29 What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.

I remember seeing a new segement on BBC about socially deprived areas of Glasgow, and local youths were talking and it was subtitled.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#59

Post by forinti »

blumentopf wrote: post #38

English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up. I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example:

  I redacted a  text, removing the froufrou.
  Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru.
French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#60

Post by rjsw »

antirez wrote: post #33
DanBC wrote: post #7

This is a great post. Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about! ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs ) > The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically. It doesn't have…

Thanks for the interesting links, it is interesting that there is a debate about it. About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more. As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough w…

Your article reads fine to me, only a couple of places that gave away that you are not a native speaker.

If you can get it you might be better watching BBC World News than just listening to World Service on the radio so that you get the visual cues as well. My second language is French and it improved a lot through watching current affairs programmes each evening.

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