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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

#4

Post by ludoo »

Your English has improved tremendously since I've known you.

You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#5

Post by nasmorn »

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 irregularities out so that the language can be read after learning the alphabet. I was always against this in German but then I realized most current spellings are just a snapshot in time, it all used to be spelled differently. So now I am dor either use the original form an pronounciation or go fully local. Computer is fine as it is still english but will and should eventually become Kompjuter. It looks really wrong to me but it is readable as a German word and much better to learn for children.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#7

Post by DanBC »

This is a great post.

Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about!

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs)

> The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically.

It doesn't have to be people from different countries! People in England can have very very different accents. It can be hard to understand some of the stronger accents.

Sometimes people keep a regional difference for some words but not others. I say "bath" with a short a, but "path" with a longer a.

> My advice is that if you are learning English now, start listening as soon as possible to spoken English.

BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming. It had a variety of interesting short documentary, long news reporting, and variety of British culture shows. Now it's just rolling news. Idiots who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing ignored the real "soft power" benefits of the old World Service programmes.

> I always advice people against translation efforts in the topic of technology, since I believe that it is much better to have a common language to document and comment the source code, and actually to obtain the skills needed to understand written technical documentation in English is a simple effort for most people.

I gently disagree with this part.

For creating code I strongly agree, you're right. We do need a common language.

But if I had the money I'd set up a foundation to improve the man pages and documentation for projects, and to then translate these documents into the big languages - Portuguese, Spanish, French, some form of Chinese. Etc. I feel that this is important for poor people in developing nations.

Finally, your written English is good. I knew you're not a native speaker, but I didn't have any trouble understanding what you were saying. Many people speak only one language.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#8

Post by robotmay »

I'd actually say that the English most Europeans learn is very compatible with British English, and I very, very rarely struggle to understand them. However I do quite regularly cause issues when speaking with Americans, as the difference between our dialects is quite large; the British in general have a very diverse array of accents and colloquialisms, and we tend to speak pretty quickly in comparison to the US (personal experience, YMMV). This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers. While at conferences I've found that people from Germanic countries have very little trouble understanding me (we do have a shared heritage, after all) but anyone more eastern or southern definitely have issues when I start wittering about something.

I don't hold it against someone if they can't understand me though; the British can't even understand each other, so I can imagine how difficult it can be for people from elsewhere :)

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#9

Post by sker »

Spoken English has been the major barrier for me. All these articles from this and last week resonate with me, but this one hits the nail on so many heads.

It's especially discouraging when so many job ads require hyper-ultra-mega-puts-Bill-Clinton-to-shame communication skills for software development positions. I understand the value of communication, but I've successfully done remote gigs for companies where we don't even talk to each other. Just hand me the spec and I'll build it. If I have any doubts I'll write you an email, with the added benefit of having everything in writing and being able to re-read it later.

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