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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

#541

Post by anoncake »

Clewza313 wrote: post #101
silicon2401 wrote: post #47

This article seems to take an angle that any of this is unique to English. Are things any different for non-native speakers growing up in India, China, Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc?

English is unusual for being polycentric. For the vast majority of the world's languages, there's exactly one prestige dialect (Parisian French, Mandarin Chinese, Tokyo Japanese, etc) and a bunch of "inferior" dialects, and the first scenario (highly educated professor goes to a different country and is tripped up by using the "wrong" word) would not be possible. As it happens, though, Arabic is also a notably polyce…

French is monocentric? I don't think the Quebecois agree.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#542

Post by saagarjha »

owenversteeg wrote: post #175
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,…

Funny enough, a similar thing (using obscure, ten-dollar words instead of simple ones) happens with many Russians learning English. It happens for a totally different reason - obviously Russian is a Slavic, not Romance language. Turns out that most high quality translated material for Russian is old literature and scientific papers. So that’s what the translators are trained on, and that’s what many Russians speaking…

I certainly wonder what kinds of conversations your friend was involved in given their choice of words…

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#543

Post by Tainnor »

bradrn wrote: post #202
jakub_g wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

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…

I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the verb) which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.

That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).

(I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#544

Post by Tainnor »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #325
jakub_g wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x…

>> Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages. I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do…

There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics)

What little I know of it does suggest a couple of things (but my knowledge might be slightly outdated):

- It's true that no language is fundamentally unlearnable, not even as an adult (although you can of course always debate what "fluency" means exactly - to this date, I'm fairly certain that there are certain kinds of mistakes I make in English which native speakers don't make).

- A lot of the complexity does come from things like vocab and usage patterns, so even for a language where the grammar is "easy" (whatever that means - suppose we have a definition for that) it's not like it would be "easy" to speak properly. English in particular seems to have this "easy to learn, hard to master" problem.

- when we talk about grammar, there are definite differences in complexity, at least when we focus on certain areas (such as complexity of words). English is really just very simple in that regard, so is e.g. Chinese.

- contrary to GP's assumption, there is some evidence to believe that the causality goes in the opposite direction: English is not widely spoken because it's easy, it has become easier as part of being widely spoken as a second language.[1]

- relatedly, it appears that languages with very few non-native speakers (such as indigenous languages spoken only by a couple hundred of people) tend to have rather complicated grammatical features

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#545

Post by Tainnor »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #368

My girlfriend recently enrolled in a university and one of the requirements was a certificate from one of the official places (TOEFL etc., I forget the rest). They exist just to leech money off non-native speakers. Anyone can pass an exam as long as they go to the right place and pay the fee, and besides, why do you need a long written and spoken test to test people's English? Someone's level of English is immediatel…

What's even worse is that these tests (I think except Cambridge English? but very few institutions accept that) expire after two years or so, and they cost a lot of money.

I moved to Switzerland to do a master's degree in Germany which was still, essentially, in German. Didn't matter that I'd already read research literature and written term papers in English, I still had to do a TOEFL for no discernible reason. But even worse, should I end up deciding to do another degree somewhere else, I'd just have to do it all over, even though I use English everyday at work.

I understand making sure that people speak and understand English properly in an academic setting, but TOEFL etc. are just money machines.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#546

Post by domano »

elric wrote: post #425
damagednoob wrote: post #270

> "I still encounter the situation when a stranger interrupts me after a few words I spoke to interrogate me: 'You have a strong accent. Where are you from?' It is a continuous reminder that you are forever an alien in your own country." Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time because of my accent. It has never come across as anything le…

I frequently ask speakers of my native Flemish where they're from because they have interesting regional accents or speak baffling dialects. And that's a language spoken by barely 6 million people. Feeling an "alien in your own country" because you don't speak a language in the exact same way as the people around you ... seems very counterproductive.

These people are natives with dialects. As an immigrant you face prejudices sometimes and being in a negative interaction makes you more wary of the other parties intent.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#547

Post by bradrn »

Tainnor wrote: post #543
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…

I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the verb) which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations. That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (…

> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme?

You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara:

ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka

But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well.

> Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.

Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well.

> I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).

I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t.

> (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)

Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/

(And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#548

Post by gverrilla »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #304
chris_j wrote: post #72

Earlier 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.

Portuguese sometimes has a strangely literary cadence and the sentence structure tends to formality. It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages. That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.

in Brazil the outskirts or suburbs of a city are called "periferia", and it might be that the person didn't know the english words for "lado" or "borda" so he used a close relative which is "periferia", sounds very plausible to me. nothing to do with fancy words, because "periferia" definetly ain't fancy (in pt)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#549

Post by another-dave »

damagednoob wrote: post #270

> "I still encounter the situation when a stranger interrupts me after a few words I spoke to interrogate me: 'You have a strong accent. Where are you from?' It is a continuous reminder that you are forever an alien in your own country." Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time because of my accent. It has never come across as anything le…

Asking where someone is from _could_ be polite interest if there's a lull in the conversation.

If they're cutting them off in order to change topic & bring it up, not so much!

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#550

Post by asveikau »

dsr_ wrote: post #367
asveikau wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the typical word probably has no cognate in English. Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate to o lado that I can think of would be to suggest to move it laterally .

To the side.

Side is not a cognate with lado. It's a translation.

Lateral is a cognate. They both come from latin latus.

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