Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English • Hacker News Board

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#571

Post by orthoxerox » Sun, May 23, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

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…

My teacher of English once helped a group of Russian Baptists who were emigrating to the US with their English. They learned it themselves using the KJV Bible and verily I say unto thee, that who listeneth to them and keepeth a straight face truly hath no sense of humor.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#572

Post by atkailash » Sun, May 23, 2021, 11:36 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #361

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.

> A native English speaker would never have said that English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech". For example, someone from u…

Avenue and Boulevard have the same aristocratic history compared to street or road

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#573

Post by leoc » Sun, May 23, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

amake wrote: post #565

leoc wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much worse than using high-falutin' vocabulary (I might sometimes take advantage of 'utilise' myself) is using high-falutin' grammatical constructions AND USING THEM WRONGLY. Which takes us back nicely to the OP: > "Having lived in the U.K., I know many whose first (and only) language is English and who make routine errors when speaking and many more when writing," says Madani. The latest horror is people trying to u…

*highfalutin (without apostrophe)

That is not obviously so. Spellings and proposed origins are fairly all over the place.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#574

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Mon, May 24, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #508

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #288

>> Sergio Serrano has participated in many international scientific conferences across the globe. "In a typical situation, a group of foreign researchers are discussing a complex technical issue with very precise and elaborate formal English," Serrano says, "until an American joins the group." I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins th…

If your Chilean is having difficulties learning the local language to such a degree that people don’t tolerate his practicing attempts, then he might need to just sign up for a course where a teacher, paid to be patient, will work with him. I love language-learning, and I can usually bootstrap myself to a level where the locals don’t reply in English when I want to practice. However, with Dutch I found it difficult t…

This happened in conversation between friends and family and they were not Dutch but Greek. We are famous for our time-wasting culture, even more so than the Dutch are famous for being direct.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#575

Post by aikinai » Mon, May 24, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

refactor_master wrote: post #237

Bayart wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dynamic between Chinese and Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese in East Asia is very similar to the one between French and English, or more broadly Latin/Greek and all European languages. It's a good example to use for both sides (whether it is Easterners learning European languages or Westerners leaning East-Asian ones).

Japanese does take the cake though! If you thought silent letters or weird pronunciations were bad, try replacing every second word with an emoji and guess the pronunciation. Or if everything was spelled according to the rules of the English “ghoti” :p

I wouldn’t say Japanese is hard to pronounce once you get used to it. Obviously without kanji it’s perfectly deterministic, but even with kanji there are enough patterns you tend to just have a sense how to pronounce it.

Except for names. Maybe I’m just not at that level, but I’ve spoken it for years and still have no idea when I see most names unless I’m familiar with it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#576

Post by Tainnor » Mon, May 31, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

bradrn wrote: post #567

Tainnor wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ce…

> There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics) I know little about this as well, but there’s been some research done by…… John McWhorter, I think? A quick search through my Big List of Things to Read (3000 articles and counting!) gives https://elementy.ru/downloads/elt/mcwhorter_creole_grammars.... and https://benjamins.com/cat…

All of what you say may be correct, but

> Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data.

the state of linguistic data is appalling in general. We have over 7000 languages in the world and yet, most of them are barely described, with grammars often being terribly inconsistent. I don't really know how to solve that problem except, in fact, hoping that the errors somehow do cancel out as you suggested.