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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

#71

Post by rikroots »

gmfawcett wrote: post #21
prvc wrote: post #12

As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants, each with a small number of differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler to simply take the mother version to be definitive.

Taking your point to its limit, all contemporary languages are a useless waste of energy. Let's adopt a terse and efficient esperanto so that the billions can easily conduct business.

> Let's adopt a terse and efficient esperanto

That made me laugh! If forced to learn an IAL[1] I'd probably choose Solresol[2] because what sane person could resist the chance to yodel their complaints to Customer Services?

Or, if "terse and efficient" are an immovable part of the specification then I'd suggest Ithkuil[3] ... or maybe Rust?

[1] International Auxiliary Language

[2] https://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/solresol/sorsoeng.htm

[3] http://www.ithkuil.net/

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#72

Post by chris_j »

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,…

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.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#74

Post by yosito »

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…

> For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it.

I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#75

Post by david422 »

Reminds me of that scene from Die Hard where the non-native German speaker says "feels like it's gonna rain like, dogs and cats" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yQbpoQ0hY

Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#76

Post by telesilla »

azangru wrote: post #27
tgb wrote: post #7

Strange choice of interview subjects given the article title: the first seems to be a native speaker and the second asserts he is a native speaker. They're just not from the US.

> the first seems to be a native speaker What makes you think so?

Perhaps because they have accents not associated as 'native' of that area. I moved away from my home country a long time ago: when I get back, people I don't know ask where I'm from because my accent has changed. After a few days it comes back and I blend back in. I believe this is very common to migrants, so not only do they have an accent not from 'here' but maybe they have a twinge of the local sound.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#77

Post by mwcampbell »

meheleventyone wrote: post #60
mwcampbell wrote: post #31

As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices. For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferrin…

People’s writing ability is really variable as well though. Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff in English purely because everyone thinks they know it well because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers as well but probably with smaller variance.

Fair point. But, and I might be wrong here, I figure people can much more easily control their writing than their speech, especially if they're not expected to send an immediate written response (e.g. in chat). Perhaps my mental model of foreign accents is wrong, and forgive me if I'm being an ugly American here, but I've often thought of a foreign accent as a disability, as if the person had a stutter or other speech impediment.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#78

Post by aikinai »

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,…

Japanese is similar. Chinese-origin words usually sound more sophisticated than pure Japanese words.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#80

Post by bryanrasmussen »

meheleventyone wrote: post #60
mwcampbell wrote: post #31

As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices. For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferrin…

People’s writing ability is really variable as well though. Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff in English purely because everyone thinks they know it well because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers as well but probably with smaller variance.

I think that is common, when someone needs to translate something into English you know they just hand it to an intern with Word. I see the evidence of it on every public sign and document here in Denmark, but also traveling around in the rest of Europe.
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