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.
I don't know about "non-native" but words tend to lose the hyphen over time when their usage becomes more common. A recent example is e-mail, old texts contain the hyphen but more recent books and articles will likely omit it. It doesn't stop just there though, even the word tomorrow used to be hyphenated, you can find it as to-morrow in the book "The adventures of three Englishmen and three Russians in Southern Afri…
Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
531–540 of 576 posts
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#532Earlier 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.
Sorry If I sounded that way. As it's clear I am not native and meant "I can unfortunately hear gibberish with my untrained ears", not "they don't know how to speak proper". It's my dumbness.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#533Earlier 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…
Having studied in convent boarding schools, it was the norm for my classmates to not be able to speak any language except English. I was too young to care about census data back then, so I did not ask my classmates. But extrapolating much later on, I have the impression that there are millions of monolingual English speakers here. I don't trust the linguistic census of India. The instructions for census agents are complex [1], and I don't trust that the people who are forced to go door-to-door would have the energy to explain this at each house.
> It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point was: who decides, and on what basis? There was a time when Australians did not consider their accent acceptable on their own news channels. They adopted RP [2]. Would you consider John Bishop's scouse accent [3] unnatural? How about all the other accents of UK, like Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.?
> Why no Indian?
No idea. The vagaries of business decisions and culture. Most Indian programs are terrible, IMO. Many of my female cousins watch Korean soap operas. Among my younger cousins, anime is the norm. All with subtitles.
> when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not.
To the contrary, it would depend on the locality of the cafe, the topic of the conversation, their interpersonal dynamics, and so on. My school required us to speak just English on the premises, and would scold us if we used Kannada. Fining kids [4] is pretty common too. It eventually leads to school kids using English with each other after school too. In a city like Raichur or Kolar, the odds of Kannada being the default language are good. In Bangalore, while I think I can predict the language, my prediction would depend on a lot of local factors.
[1] https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not so much about English and Americans, but about learning a first language as a child versus learning a second language later in life. Learning a second language usually involves learning the grammar, and explicitly learning the rules that native speakers "just know". I think it is quite plausible that, for any language, speakers that learned it as a second language will know the grammar and grammatical terms…
Why do you think being able to classify the parts of speech would make someone more authoritative on correct usage than native speakers? Imagine documenting a language you don't know, identifying the tenses and the verb order, and finding something surprising so you decide it's the speakers who are wrong and not your model!
Here the quote from the article that GP was objecting to:
> 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.
That is the proposition I wanted to support: more explicit knowledge about the language. Who is "correct" is a whole other ballpark.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
American English: "I doubt that" or "I have doubts" is much more natural. "Doubt" is almost never singular.
Yes, I was just quoting OP (as a non-native speaker of English I also prefer "I doubt that" or "I have doubts" (except when in singular).
This said, some may copy from their language 1:1 - in French you say "j'ai un doute" (I have a doubt) so this may also be the reason. There are also other versions ("j'en doute" - I doubt that, or "j'ai des doutes" - I have doubts)
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education." There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious). One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize". Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing. I…
> try to use fancy words
As a non-native speaker of English, one that I have never grasped is the overuse of the word "vehicle" to mean "car". It's extremely common, but not sure why. It's just a car, why call it a "vehicle"?
I understand it in the very generalized context of, say, the DMV. It's the dept. of motor vehicles because they handle cars but also trucks, vans, commercial haulers, even boats.
But not sure why someone says "I bought a vehicle" when really they just bought a car.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard on a podcast the other day about people joining the US Military or Police that have never been in a fist fight in their lives. Being nearly 50, that is incredible to me.
I'm one of those people. I joined the Marines in 2005 and have still never been in a non-sparring fight at 33 years old. Given sufficient training, I think it could be preferable. When training with rifles/pistols, the people who'd never used a gun before usually did the best because they didn't have bad habits.
When I was about 6 years old, I got into an argument with a neighbouring child who hit me. I walked back over the road crying to my Dad who was working on his car on the drive. He showed me no sympathy and immediately sent me back over the road to hit the kid back. I did (I was more scared of my Dad than the other kid) and the other kid then went off crying.
Not sure I'd do the same with my son (if I had one, I only have a daughter).
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It sounds more natural Weeeell, there's more to it than that. English has a rich vocabulary, why not use it? Just like there is more to a palette than primary colors, why restrict yourself? Me, I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and color. Wakarimasu ka? My father was felled by Alzheimers. What…
I'm from a lower class background; I learned from early on to adapt my language to that of the upper/upper-middle class, and it has 1000% earned me more credibility than my intellect or experience deserve. This isn't to say that this kind of implicit classist gatekeeping is merited--it's not--but this is the reality of the world we live in. So the scenario in question is "someone trying to fit in with the upper class…
I still need to grow out of the opposite. I had a typical lowish middle class upbringing, not poor, but parents were teachers so I was ahead of most classmates just by being around that environment and reading a lot. Being a country town this of course attracted teasing. I learned to talk plain and dumb it down. It's still hard for me to talk otherwise, but writing is OK. Only the teacher saw that so I never changed how I wrote too much.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education." There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious). One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize". Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing. I…
> try to use fancy words As a non-native speaker of English, one that I have never grasped is the overuse of the word "vehicle" to mean "car". It's extremely common, but not sure why. It's just a car, why call it a "vehicle"? I understand it in the very generalized context of, say, the DMV. It's the dept. of motor vehicles because they handle cars but also trucks, vans, commercial haulers, even boats. But not sure wh…
People here wouldn't do that so maybe it's more of a US thing. It seems to be a common affectation from police to sound authoritative by using words like this, and that's all over the news and TV. Maybe it leaked from there into the general population.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#540It’s interesting when a phrase has slightly different meanings between cultures. For instance, I have seen several Indians use “too many” to mean “a lot”, Americans use “too many” to mean a lot sometimes but there is a negative connotation for Americans where “too many” means “a lot and there should be less.” Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter but there are cases like an Indian saying, “th…
I was taught that "there should be less" is the plain meaning of "too many".