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English has been my pain for 15 years

antirez.com

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#71

Post by tragomaskhalos »

nasmorn wrote: post #5

English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irreg…

There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform:

1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good.

2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent example of this. This is only frustrating for foreign learners learning pronounciation, but otherwise has a lot to commend it.

3. Our historical orthography creates a link with our history and our culture; I can read Shakespeare even though Elizabethan pronounciation was startlingly different to today's.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#73

Post by ddlatham »

antirez wrote: post #64
voltagex_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the card game work? It sounds like an interesting idea.

There is a common game to learn new words of a foreign language consisting of a set of cards with the word translated in your native language in the back, and the word translated in the target language in the front. You have to pick the cards you are not very sure, and remember the translation before flipping the card. At this point you can flip the card for confirmation. I would love to have the same, but with the a…

They are called flash cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#74

Post by narag »

kome wrote: post #55
cliveowen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translating the documentation from English is akin to providing obese people with scooters inside chain stores: instead of facing the problem head-on you're just avoiding it and learning to live with it.

> instead of facing the problem The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

I don't think so. I can talk with Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Russian... etc. people, without knowing all and every of their languages (or without them knowing Spanish for that matter.)

The fact that the common language is actually English is not really relevant to me. I don't care if Spanish has more native speakers, or Chinese. The value of English is as a common language.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#75

Post by willyt »

beloch wrote: post #36

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers! Over the years, I've worked with a lot…

Cockney is relatively easy compared to some other local UK dialects/accents. My wife's family is from Stirlingshire in Scotland and they say stuff like:

'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'.

'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food'

It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#76

Post by nmeofthestate »

I have a French colleague with the strangest attitude to his strong accent when speaking English. His accent is strong enough that it makes understanding him a bit tricky sometimes, and when I mentioned it, he said that this accent was part of his identity and he wouldn't be trying to improve it. He was weirdly taken aback when I said something in a 'good' French accent.

This attitude was really surprising to me.

For me, when speaking your non-native language, the aim should be to sound like a native (or with the accent of some subset of the native-speaking population).

I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#77

Post by coldtea »

>So starting from 1998 I slowly learned to fluently read English without making more efforts compared to reading something written in Italian. I even learned to write at the same speed I wrote stuff in Italian, even if I hit a local minima in this regard, as you can see reading this post: basically I learned to write very fast a broken subset of English, that is usually enough to express my thoughts in the field of programming, but it is not good enough to write about general topics. I don't know most of the words needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example, or the grammar constructs needed to formulate complex sentences, hypothetical structures, and so forth.

Well, have you tried to properly study English, as in, with a teacher and a course book? From your description I understand that you merely tried to casually pick up English.

If so, it's not particularly fair to assess the difficulty of English compared to your own language (that, besides, being your native language, you were taught it's grammar and syntax for years on end at school).

I've studied English for several years and have no trouble speaking or reading it -- despite not having had many opportunities to speak it with native english speakers until much later in my life. Reading a lot of books/magazines/etc helps a lot. Reading for like 1-2 hours per day.

I found out I could pick a specialized subject I was interested in, like, say, electronic music production, and just by reading the magazines (Future Music, Electronic Musician, Keyboard etc) for a couple of years I could go from a total newbie to understanding all the specialized vocabulary used (from simple stuff, like "knob", "fader" and "slider" to "dither", "LFO", "frequency cutoff" etc).

Watching movies and tv series without subtitles also helps tremendously. In Italy this is even worse, because they don't just add subtitles, they usually dub the whole thing with Italian actors (ugh).

(OTOH, ho studiato Italiano per tre anni, in un gruppo picolo, e questo e tutto che lo ricordo, ho dimenticato quasi tutti gli parole e la majorita de la "syntax" e gli tempi -- damn, that got bad quickly)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#78

Post by arethuza »

willyt wrote: post #75
beloch wrote: post #36

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers! Over the years, I've worked with a lot…

Cockney is relatively easy compared to some other local UK dialects/accents. My wife's family is from Stirlingshire in Scotland and they say stuff like: 'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'. 'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food' It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

Aye, it's a sair fecht! ;-)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#79

Post by Oletros »

d0m wrote: post #70
kome wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of PG (and yours) it's the lack on empathy, simply as that. Like "antirez" says, English is not a hobby: English is pushed down the throat of a growing share of people around the world today. And they need English to live a normal life, not for fancy careers. Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be…

First of all, I'm a foreigner, English is clearly not my native language and I have problems every day because of it. So yeah, native english speakers have it easier. But so what? Nobody said life was supposed to be easy and that everyone was created with the same skills and weaknesses. Some people are prettier, others are taller, other speak better english. Not acknowledging this is only hypocrisy. What PG said is t…

And how to show a totally lack of empathy and missing the point

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#80

Post by DanBC »

cliveowen wrote: post #69
kome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of facing the problem The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

The problem is not being willing to learn an essential skill.

So a 12 year old in Brazil not only has to learn how to install an OS, and then how to install Python, and then how to program with Python, but also has to do all of that in a different language?

Pretty easy to call it an essential skill when English is your first language.

How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only Japanese documentation?

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