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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

#521

Post by Causality1 »

WillSlim95 wrote: post #436
Causality1 wrote: post #172

"I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with? The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it fluently but without the style of a native speaker.…

Uh if parents did not share the same mother tongue in India, it is a very good possibilty that English is one of those three languages.

The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. Had it been, he would have very likely said so, and talked about how the American was wrong for assuming that because someone speaks in an Indian accent their native language isn't English. Instead, he dodges the point entirely and takes offence that someone should care about the difference between being a fluent and a native speaker. Whether or not he's right about that, claiming you are a native speaker of a language when you did not speak it from earliest childhood is factually incorrect.

There's also the fact the title of the article is "Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English" which leads me to believe the people sharing their gripes are, in fact, not native speakers of English.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#522

Post by RickJWagner »

I work for an English-speaking company and deal with colleagues overseas every day.

I am constantly amazed by my co-workers abilities to think quickly over highly technical topics and make passionate arguments over complex topics-- in a second or third language!

Human beings are fantastic.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#523

Post by canadianfella »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #494
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…

How can one tell what country you are from based on the copper/cooper mistake? I don’t understand.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#524

Post by crazygringo »

hazemotes wrote: post #422
crazygringo wrote: post #415

> But this scenario doesn't fit with Serrano's experiences of English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers. In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate. English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nons…

I have noticed Indians using that phrase quite a lot: "I have a doubt." I think it may just be a quirk of Indian English and should probably not be considered incorrect, the same way British English quirks are not incorrect.

In my case it was Brazilians simply naively translating their native "Tenho uma dúvida".

Everyone was learning American or British English. No one was trying to learn Indian English ;)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#525

Post by angry_octet »

randompwd wrote: post #405
fsniper wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish. What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.

It comes across as more egocentric than "I had difficulty understanding them," but it is often the case that away from the more international areas it can become really difficult to understand the locals, whether that is rural Eire, Picardy or West Virginia.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#526

Post by JCharante »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #294
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'd take our spelling system over Chinese characters or hieroglyphics any day. English has weird exceptions but with spell check and autocorrect, I think it's manageable. Their they're there, where we're were, there are many bad combos that unfortunately do need memorization.

Chinese does have autocorrect and spell check based on statistical analysis of how often words are next to each other. Another benefit of such a system is that it's similar to romance languages where when characters are used in different languages, even though they are pronounced differently there is some mutual intelligibility. I don't speak french or portuguese but when reading the ingredients list (which they always put a sticker over the English section to show the local language) I'll use my Spanish knowledge to know what's inside.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#527

Post by bradrn »

xxpor wrote: post #281
bradrn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas: planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak ‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’ Or Wichita: kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks ‘by making many trips, he…

That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word. The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.

> if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word

This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk:

tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne

s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne

And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#528

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #434
crazygringo wrote: post #415

> But this scenario doesn't fit with Serrano's experiences of English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers. In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate. English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nons…

Isn't "I have a doubt" a way to say that you are not sure? Not that you do not understand it know, but that, well, you doubt. Like in "homeopathy is backed by science" to what someone would understandably say "I have a doubt" (in a mocking way in that case)

No. The problem here is that you're assuming that "doubt" is associated with not understanding, when it's actually associated with not believing, so you're essentially saying, "I understood what you said, but I don't believe you"

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#529

Post by painfulpox »

scrubs wrote: post #514
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…

See my post elsewhere ... I was pointing out there are three things I dislike in native English Speakers (I am one) that I have not yet detected with my Portuguese friends. Now, I can't understand it but I've asked about this and nothing was confirmed or denied: - Stalling mid-talking with "ummm" or "ahh" while one thinks of more words to say - Rising intonation to make a statement; usually rising intonation is for q…

Stalling noises are common. In French, the most common one is a sort of euuuuuuuu noise. This is one of the first things taught in intensive language courses to sound "native."

The rising intonation is just an evolution of the language. I doubt it will stick, but it seems to be mostly used in story-telling scenarios to express some exasperating or confusing scenario in which the question is the point of the story. Almost all meaning in English is in the grammar and diction, so intonation is much more of an aesthetic preference.

Like is just a stalling word. French for example will often use words like donc to take a pause and decide how to best continue.

There is all sorts of slurring going on in French, as well. You can certainly say gendarmerie, but you'll more often probably hear gendarmrie in day to day speech. Certain subgroups do tons of weird stuff like swapping syllables of words. Mon moto becomes mon Tomo. The language is pretty famous for not pronouncing the last syllable of tons of words.

I don't speak Portuguese, but I bet you will find the same or similar patterns in that language.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#530

Post by grozzle »

StavrosK wrote: post #312
dmnd wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also hilarious if you can understand it

I've watched the entire show 4 times and can understand everything by now, but I still can't say I get the humour.

Limmy's humour is wilfully niche even among Scots and the Scots-adjacent. He has no intention of appealing to a wide audience. He's a great example of Twitch being good at finding an audience for the long tail of creators.
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