17 ms·

Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

• brk 5y ago
  I think some of the confusion is that "pone" is not a root word or term. So, the opposite of postpone is not prepone, in the same way that prepartum is the opposite of postpartum.
  • oytis 5y ago
    Why? The stem is from Latin ponere, to put, so could theoretically work both ways
    • brk 5y ago
      I probably should have said "a commonly used or understood root word".
  • ljm 5y ago
    I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have three states: lime, sublime, and superlime. Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
    • gota 5y ago
      Apparently it could have been like that, as it comes from 'sub'+'limen' ("threshold") Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"
    • smhenderson 5y ago
      My favorite is "why is no one ever whelmed?". I've seen this many times in popular culture over the years. People get overwhelmed and underwhelmed but no one ever seems to just get whelmed, even though it's really the same thing as overwhelmed.
    • twic 5y ago
      Subb! I suggest you make a backmal undertological antiposal about this.
  • dasyatidprime 5y ago
    It shows up rarely in that form in "standard" English, but the related morpheme "-ponent" shows up more often: component (put+together), exponent (put+out), proponent (put+forth). And then the "-pose" variants come from the same Latin root but modified via French: compose, expose, propose.
• qart 5y ago
  "prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around when the Indians did it.
  • maartenscholl 5y ago
    In Google's Book Ngram Viewer, prepone shows up in a higher percentage of texts in the early 1800s than in text from the past two decades. However, I don't know how accurate the corpus is for those old texts.
    • tokai 5y ago
      If you look through the documents from that period it looks like they are a mix of words split over lines, non-english words, and ORC errors. G'Ngrams is very unreliable when it comes to the oldest materials. One clue to that is how the occurrence goes from max to min and back again in less than a decade.
    • JackFr 5y ago
      'antepone' seems to have the advantage for the latter half of the 19th century and then around 1965 'prepone' blows it away. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+antepone&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cprepone%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cantepone%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant...
  • Telemakhos 5y ago
    And yet preposition has long been a word.
  • dmingod666 5y ago
    With it's usefulness it's a surprise it's not picked up as an actual word. Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.
• bovermyer 5y ago
  "Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not used as a standalone.
    • minxomat 5y ago
      > moving down a date I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
    • no_one_ever 5y ago
      Rather than 'up and down', I think the visual is supposed to be 'up and back' (like forward and backward). English is fun
      • quietbritishjim 5y ago
        More usually (in the UK) it's forward and back, which make more sense as direct opposites. It's a little confusing though because pushing something back means move it later and bring it forward means move it earlier, whereas when talking directly about time the meanings are usually reversed (e.g. "back in time" means earlier).
        • kbutler 5y ago
          Does "back in time" mean earlier when speaking of future events? Or only past events? A future meeting "moved back" is definitely postponed. (US English)
        • 5y ago
• tgb 5y ago
  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.
  • azangru 5y ago
    > the first seems to be a native speaker What makes you think so?
    • telesilla 5y ago
      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.
    • tgb 5y ago
      It might depend upon what you count as native (as the article talks about later), but she certainly seems to have had constant English exposure since early childhood. Anyone more familiar with New Dehli might have a better guess, but to me it felt like the article was doing what the second speaker complained of: > "I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with? I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language." It's my (possibly mistaken) assumption that anyone from India, self-described as a linguistic "have", and majoring in English and teaching English now, probably has been speaking it since before they started school. It seems strange that article doesn't actually clarify anything about her language education and the second interviewee specifically shows that the authors didn't only select for non-native speakers. I assume the editor wrote the title without sufficient thought and the author would have chosen something else.
      • jxramos 5y ago
        I didn't even understand what that sentence meant > But that day in the classroom, my incomprehensible English taught me that being an linguistic "have" is unstable and delusional at best. What does it mean to be a linguistic have? Is this a reference to the haves/have-nots. Is she trying to say someone with linguistic fluency? Seems like the "an" is misapplied there too which mucks up the sentence.
• nine_zeros 5y ago
  Anyone who's actually been to India (and other British colonies with natives, like Singapore, Hongkong) knows that the English out there has branched into its own language, with own slang, own spelling and own colloquial phrases. Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking world (not too far fetched considering the population of English speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
• lambainsaan 5y ago
  Wait prepone is not an English word, what!? I use it all the time.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    I have never heard it or even seen it in my life.
    • bigbillheck 5y ago
      Me neither, but it's a perfectly cromulent construction.
      • incrudible 5y ago
        My thoughts exactly, it would embiggen our vocabulary.
  • krona 5y ago
    If you use it, then it is a word. If other people don't understand you, then that's your problem.
  • rsynnott 5y ago
    In English, which lacks the sort of central control that, say, French has, if people use it, it's a word. It's just a word that isn't commonly used in some dialects.
  • bobsmooth 5y ago
    It's a perfectly cromulent word.
• prvc 5y ago
  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.
  • gmfawcett 5y ago
    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.
    • rikroots 5y ago
      > 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 https://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/solresol/sorsoeng.htm [3] http://www.ithkuil.net/ http://www.ithkuil.net/
  • krona 5y ago
    I think you've missed the point of English, which is a collection of languages that evolved over time. Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above. The dictionary is post-hoc, and long may it stay that way.
    • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      > Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above. What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is not the same as France French. And while French may be one of the roots of English, there are also French words with their roots in English. It's all a mishmash.
• Y_Y 5y ago
  Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • BlameKaneda 5y ago
    When I saw the title I pronounced it as "NON-nah-tiv" (like "normative"), and didn't realize it was non-native until your comment.
  • phillc73 5y ago
    Lack of hyphen use drives me nuts. "Cooperation" is a prime example. Without the hyphen, my internal monologue pronounces the word like "chicken coop"[1]. Whereas, "Co-Operation" makes pronunciation much clearer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_coop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_coop
    • cafard 5y ago
      Doesn't the New Yorker still hold the line, and print it with a dieresis? On the other hand, I knew a women who belonged to a food cooperative, and referred to it as the "coop", pronouncing it as if it were a chicken coop.
      • Y_Y 5y ago
        I think I would be satisfied with the New Yorker-style: "nonn̈ative". That's a neat solution, thanks! (Please address complaints about putting a trema over an 'n' to Spın̈al Tap.)
  • livre 5y ago
    I don't know about "non-native" but words tend to lose the hyphen over time when their usage becomes more common. A recent example is e-mail, old texts contain the hyphen but more recent books and articles will likely omit it. It doesn't stop just there though, even the word tomorrow used to be hyphenated, you can find it as to-morrow in the book "The adventures of three Englishmen and three Russians in Southern Africa." To-day and to-night too https://episystechpubs.com/2020/05/19/editors-corner-to-day-to-morrow-to-hyphens/ https://episystechpubs.com/2020/05/19/editors-corner-to-day-...
• ape4 5y ago
  I prepend() things to arrays sometimes.
  • JackFr 5y ago
    And yet you probably never 'postpend'. And why do we computer people have prefixes and postfixes, when the world was just getting by fine with prefixes and and suffixes. (I realize we did have to invent 'infix'.) And why is it antebellum and pre-war, but postbellum and post post-war. Why does no one ever use postdeluvian and only antediluvian? sigh
• pdpi 5y ago
  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, there is a very sudden phase change where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English" to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between — all of a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more mundane words into it. 1. https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
  • Bancakes 5y ago
    That looks fantastic, wish Anglish was more widespread.
  • biztos 5y ago
    If you can do that in a British accent, no matter how bad it is, you will immediately be pundit material in the USA. And also more attractive!
    • Daub 5y ago
      Moving from a British university to an American one, I noticed this. People listened to me more. Scary.
    • trashtester 5y ago
      I wonder if that also applies to someone from the Hebrides. I used to have a supervisor from there, and even his English coleagues often had problem to understand his dialect.... Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
      • kadoban 5y ago
        I think in this exact usage it's a euphemism for some kind of specific London accent that I don't actually know the name for.
• biztos 5y ago
  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 pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries. And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true. I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest. Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU (Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
  • heurisko 5y ago
    > And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
    • meepmorp 5y ago
      > I haven't found such differences in English. Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
      • mnw21cam 5y ago
        My brother's wife is from the Shetland islands. He'd always know when she was on the phone to her family, because she would drop straight into the dialect without realising it. The thing is, the Shetlanders know that their dialect is sufficiently different, so they learn TV English as well so they can make themselves understood to outsiders.
• mwcampbell 5y ago
  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, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.
  • bserge 5y ago
    Written communication is getting weirder (in a good way) by the day thanks to translation software. With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all. Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.
    • kthejoker2 5y ago
      We are all Chinese rooms now.
      • adolfojp 5y ago
        For the uninitiated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  • alistairSH 5y ago
    "Native" is such a weird construct with language. I'm Scottish, and while I've lived in the US since early childhood, I still retain a few pronunciation "quirks" inherited from my parents. At least in my case, it's mostly to the amusement of friends (haha, you say "wheel" funny or "ooh, that rolled 'R' is sexy"). But still so strange, since I think my pronunciation is closer to "correct" than American's.
• input_sh 5y ago
  Verbs that don't end with -ed in past tense. No rule, you just have to memorise all of them.
  • D-Coder 5y ago
    I think there is a rule (or more likely several rules), but knowing them involves learning the history of English, which is not what people usually want to do.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• FriedrichN 5y ago
  There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American English. As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone
  • brk 5y ago
    There is such a thing as Indian English If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
    • rocknor 5y ago
      Then you need to learn more about it, Indian English is more than just that one phrase. That's like saying, "if there is one phrase that, to me, defines American English, I think it would be "Howdy".
      • MispelledToyota 5y ago
        that would be a fine thing to say. Seems like everything is fine.
        • rocknor 5y ago
          No it's not. My point is that "do the needful" is not a proper representation of Indian English, as the parent comment implied. There are a lot more pecularities that makes the dialect what it is, but people are just not aware of them (yet). A quick google search will tell you that.
          • MispelledToyota 5y ago
            "Howdy" seems like a successful synechdoche for American dialect to me. Seems like what makes something a proper representation is somewhat personal.
• david422 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yQbpoQ0hY Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.
  • lebuffon 5y ago
    Or... You think I know f__k nothing, but I know f__k all!
  • bdefore 5y ago
    As a native speaker, I don't remember anyone teaching me the rules of adjective order but I have internalized them and definitely notice when someone violates my expectations. I rarely witness a native speaker do so. https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/order_of_adjectives.htm https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/order_of_adjectives....
• milliams 5y ago
  > I found out that "prepone" was not an actual word in English, based on the dogma that all legitimate words in a language must be found in a dictionary. I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.
  • MispelledToyota 5y ago
    doesn't really hold up. If there was one person left alive on Earth they would still speak a language, and there would be observable rules about it all the same.
  • andrewzah 5y ago
    Prepone is not a word in American Standard English. Or casual American English. Nobody uses it, although we should. It's totally logical from "postpone", but languages are not rational or logical. If something is to become a word, people need to actually use it in the first place. Indian English is different than American English is different than Black American English is different than UK English.
• silicon2401 5y ago
  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?
  • Clewza313 5y ago
    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 polycentric language, although it has a single prestige dialect too (MSA). And English is the closest thing India has to a prestige dialect, since all other languages are regional.
    • anoncake 5y ago
      French is monocentric? I don't think the Quebecois agree.
      • Clewza313 5y ago
        I don't think even the Quebecois think Quebec French is a prestige dialect.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • andrewzah 5y ago
    No. I had similar experiences when learning Korean in Korea. There is a trend by native English speakers to bash english, and treat it like no other language can have any of these issues. The only major difference is noted in the other response; English has a lot of different dialects. Korean has Standard Korean that everyone learns now, and unofficial regional dialects. With English you have people randomly learning American English, UK English, Indian English, etc, which all have various differences in vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.
• mariodiana 5y ago
  I can't fault Indians for "prepone" when so many of my fellow programmers say "performant."
  • biztos 5y ago
    Maybe we can productionalize it.
  • pta2002 5y ago
    What's wrong with performant? (Non-native speaker here)
    • mariodiana 5y ago
      It's a neologism. Some people love it. (Actually, it seems like a lot of people do.) To others however, it strikes the ear as awkward sounding. I wouldn't say there's anything "wrong" about it. It's a matter of taste. It's a bit of a pet peeve for some of us. I bought a book a couple of years ago: iOS and macOS Performance Tuning. I took note that the author had not used the word "performant" even once in the book's 400 pages. Maybe I'm a snob, but it made the author seem the more credible to me.
      • etripe 5y ago
        Additionally, it might be cross-pollination from Germanic languages, which I think all have the word.
      • notdang 5y ago
        Thank you for telling me. Having been using it for ages and never realized that it can be interpreted in this way. In my native Romance language it is written the same and it's an usual word. I never thought that it's a neologism in English and perceived as pretentious.
        • mariodiana 5y ago
          You're welcome. But I have to say that I think one of the other replies to my post makes a better case than I. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223555
• dqv 5y ago
  Postpone, prepone, cornpone Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
  • saxonww 5y ago
    For people who don't understand this: in the US (mostly in the South), 'pone' is a type of unleavened quick bread usually made with cornmeal. It's almost never used as-is; I've only ever seen 'corn pone' (or 'cornpone'). It's not a root word in American English that you would naturally want to modify with pre- or -post-, unless maybe you were joking about being hungry (pre-pone) then eating a lot and needing a nap (post-pone).
• yosito 5y ago
  > I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language. I've noticed that it's quite common for monolinguals to be judgemental about people's English if it doesn't sound exactly like their own dialect of English. But the lack of linguistic ability often lies with the monolingual listener in these cases. I grew up monolingual, so I understand how easy it is to judge someone who speaks in a way that is less comfortably understood. But communication is a two way process, both the speaker and the listener have to develop the skill and put in the effort for successful communication to take place. There are countless dialects of English, and a lot of variety even among people who speak English as their first language. It seems that many people are unaware of this.
• bluetomcat 5y ago
  As a non-native speaker living in a non-English speaking country who has started learning English decades ago at school in my teenage years, the sheer richness of the English vocabulary never ceases to fascinate me. There are so many words with subtle and nuanced meanings (primarily of Latin and French origin) you can almost never hear in an American movie or a reality show. I have encountered them primarily in British news articles and documentaries. Using them among other non-native speakers even seems snobbish and counter-productive. I mean stuff like "subjugate", "rejuvenate", "reverberate", etc.
  • D-Coder 5y ago
    This makes me lugubrious.
  • ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
    > Using them among other non-native speakers even seems snobbish and counter-productive. Non-native here, but I have an opinion on your choice of examples. They aren't posh or counter-productive, on the contrary, they are just specific to fields under-represented in popular culture (political history, fantasy/longevity research, music/acoustics). I don't see any obvious ways to convey the same meaning using more common words.
• fortran77 5y ago
  It's the richness of possible sentence construction that gets me. Nearly any word order can be made to work. And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been speaking some English every day for 50+ years.
• awillen 5y ago
  I can understand why it would be annoying to constantly be asked about your accent, but on the other hand, it's someone taking a bit of information they have and using that as a starting point to learn more about you. That's a good thing! Obviously it shouldn't be asked in a way that derails an existing conversation, but we could use more people trying to learn about each other these days, not fewer.
• not2b 5y ago
  The word "prepone" is commonly used in Indian English, with the obvious meaning. On my last trip to Noida (near Delhi) the manager I was visiting saw how jet lagged I was and asked if they should "prepone my cab" (act the driver to come early to take me back to my hotel).
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Isn't this selection bias? It's like walking in on a flight to US, and seeing how poorly sloppy everyone is dressed. So you might assume that the US is some sort of third world country. But you would be wrong, because the US is rich enough that even the lower class can travel. So if you are talking with some native speaker, you just might be speaking with an idiot, because even idiots speak English as their first language. Where as English speakers from other countries, might be well educated, since it's their second language.
  • croh 5y ago
    Agree. In my native language, we use tons of slang and ignore grammer all the time. In fact lot of talk is based on context, you literally don't have to finish sentence, still other person understands meaning behind it.
    • notdang 5y ago
      It's the same in the majority of the languages. I noticed that the usage of slang, correct grammar is an indication of the position on the social ladder and education.
      • croh 5y ago
        It used to be like that but not any more. These days upper people mostly speak 'accented' english.
  • caymanjim 5y ago
    I think you're confused about how Americans dress. Even people with money dress casually, and we don't dress up to get on airplanes. In fact, most of us dress extra-casual on planes. I normally won't wear sweatpants in public, but I will on a plane, because it's far too uncomfortable to wear pants and a belt while crammed into a tiny seat. People who normally dress well will wear pajamas on planes.
    • ed312 5y ago
• williesleg 5y ago
  NPR sucks donkey dong and is controlled by china.
• InfiniteRand 5y ago
  It’s interesting when a phrase has slightly different meanings between cultures. For instance, I have seen several Indians use “too many” to mean “a lot”, Americans use “too many” to mean a lot sometimes but there is a negative connotation for Americans where “too many” means “a lot and there should be less.” Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter but there are cases like an Indian saying, “there are too many Mexicans in this neighborhood” and meaning “This neighborhood has a lot of Mexicans” in a neutral sense, but an American hearing that might interpret it as “The number of Mexicans in this neighborhood is a bad thing”
  • kayodelycaon 5y ago
    > American hearing that might interpret it I think most Americans would interpret it this way given it plays directly into the stereotype of "All Indians/Asians Are Incredibly Racist/Sexist."
  • anoncake 5y ago
    I was taught that "there should be less" is the plain meaning of "too many".
• cecilpl2 5y ago
  My favorite example of one of the difficulties of learning English comes from my friend who's an adult ESL teacher. Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it! If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker. Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
  • thethought 5y ago
    Thank you for this. I did try a few combinations and it does sound funny in my head. Wondering how this ordering evolved for a non-native speaker like me. I did not hear or know about this rule.
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    That word order this is not a hard and fast rule doesn't stick out at all if it's shifted.
  • PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    There are relationships that arise when you change the order, e.g. nylon blue sounds as if it's a shade of blue, but not a nylon that is some shade of blue. However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker who has sufficient experience with the language.
• Causality1 5y ago
  "I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with? The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it fluently but without the style of a native speaker. Perhaps the difference in that position would be irrelevant, such as a STEM job. There are positions, however, it would matter, such as sales or public relations where that last one percent can mean everything.
  • dmingod666 5y ago
    STEM is taught in English so kids that aren't taught English growing up have a particularly hard time adjusting with both language and the content.
  • WillSlim95 5y ago
    Uh if parents did not share the same mother tongue in India, it is a very good possibilty that English is one of those three languages.
    • Causality1 5y ago
      The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. Had it been, he would have very likely said so, and talked about how the American was wrong for assuming that because someone speaks in an Indian accent their native language isn't English. Instead, he dodges the point entirely and takes offence that someone should care about the difference between being a fluent and a native speaker. Whether or not he's right about that, claiming you are a native speaker of a language when you did not speak it from earliest childhood is factually incorrect. There's also the fact the title of the article is "Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English" which leads me to believe the people sharing their gripes are, in fact, not native speakers of English.
• andrewzah 5y ago
  There -is- a difference of natively learning a language and learning it later on as EFL/ESL. It has nothing to do with politics, or being perfect. In fact, many ESL/EFL speakers have better grammar and vocabulary than the average native speaker because they have to focus on those things in order to learn the language. However, a native speaker won't struggle in speech, and they'll know the various idioms used all the time in colloquial speech. Of course native speakers don't have to take the TEFL/TOEFL! They don't consciously think about grammar rules, they just employ them nearly always perfectly in speech. Of course not every native speaker is good at writing at an academic level and we should be aware of that. This phenomenon is also not unique to English! This article and the one linked are basically following the trend of bashing one's own English; how dare native speakers speak their language like they have been their entire life? Part of learning any language is learning the cultural idiosyncrasies and idioms. Of course, native speakers should strive to make sure they're not overusing idioms with a EFL/ESL audience, but knowing "grammar" and "complex technical terms" doesn't actually mean you can speak [American/UK/Indian/Black American/etc] English. Humans are just curious when someone has a different accent than the local area. There are various American accents. I've had that question asked a lot when I was living in Korea. Getting upset about it is entirely a personal choice.
• jdlyga 5y ago
  I've heard from multiple people that learning what words should be singular and plural in sentences is confusing. For example, "garbage" vs "garbages"
• the_lonely_road 5y ago
  I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report that speaks fine English but his written communications are just south of ideal. He asked me to help him by explicitly pointing out issues with his writing. I have been happy to do so but the process has really highlighted for him how refined my understanding of WHAT is right is contrasted to how poor my understanding of WHY it’s right is. More than half the time I’m forced to say “ that isn’t right, this is how it should be worded instead but I don’t really understand why”. Language is a crazy thing.
  • andrewzah 5y ago
    That's the difference of EFL/ESL and a native speaker. If you live in the US/UK you're probably aware of how pitiful the average person is at grammar. However, they can always tell if a sentence is right or wrong for their variant of English. When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".
  • dcminter 5y ago
    I think the royal order of adjectives is the coolest example of this. Native speakers of English know it intuitively without (usually) even knowing it exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order
• shayanbahal 5y ago
  As a non-native speaker, and coming from "genderless languages"[1], Persian, it took me quite some time to get used to gender based pronouns. With the new pronoun restructure in the English language in north America, I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns) . [1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless_languages#Persian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...
  • doikor 5y ago
    As a Finn I can second this. It took me a while to remember to use the correct pronoun and still get it wrong sometimes (by defaulting to he/him if I don't pay attention to it)
    • joeberon 5y ago
      I don't know Mandarin, but my Chinese PhD supervisor does this all the time, always accidentally using he/him to refer to women. Unfortunately that can be a pretty dangerous mistake to make
  • finnthehuman 5y ago
    >I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns) If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.
    • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      And then they'll be offended that you are a bigger minority than them
  • 3pt14159 5y ago
    It totally blows my mind that there are languages without gendered pronouns. It's like someone saying "mother" and "father" were the same word (just "parent", no specialized words by gender) in a language. Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous: > Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven. > سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.
• slver 5y ago
  I'm not sure why is this here. It's basically a teacher complaining that people don't like when she makes up words, and has a strong accent. Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't matter. What matters is being understood. So you need to use words people know. Sometimes you're in a position to make up a new word, when you need to. Talking to students about when their exam is... is not one of those situations. And a heavy accent literally corrupts your communication. On top of making it hard to understand what words you say, your intonation becomes completely unintelligible, because you're speaking English, but intonating in another language. You're literally not speaking entirely in English. Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen to and understand. And by the way, made-up words and strong accents are ESPECIALLY annoying to OTHER non-native English speakers, because we have an extra hard time parsing this on top of understanding a non-native language already. I should know, I'm a Bulgarian, so... (I have slight accent).
  • rocknor 5y ago
    Ah, nothing like telling people to change the way they have been speaking since childhood for your convenience... Those words and accent is understood by more than a hundred million people, and that number is going to increase manifold in the coming decades. So if you need to communicate with this large group of people, it's better that you learn to understand them, or it will be your fault for not understanding. Take your racism somewhere else.
    • slver 5y ago
      > Ah, nothing like telling people to change the way they have been speaking since childhood for _your_ convenience... Look this is not a conversation about feelings. It's a conversation of what's necessary so we can understand each other effectively. Speaking the language of the people you're trying to talk to is a basic requirement for communicating. Being super-respecful of someone's origin doesn't make you comprehend the sounds coming out of their mouth. By your logic, I've been speaking Bulgarian since childhood, I should talk to you in Bulgarian and be super-offended when you don't understand, because millions of people speak Bulgarian. Instead, I'm using English, because it's an English-speaking board. That's called "common sense". > Take your racism somewhere else. My God... that's so ignorant, I just feel bad for you. You're trying to turn this into a moral debate, and it's not about morals. It's about understanding each other, get it? BTW, I'll be responding to you in Bulgarian only from now on. Because you're clearly not "racist" and you respect my culture and heritage, or don't you?
• Izkata 5y ago
  > "In one instance," he said, "while working at a large Swiss firm, an American manager quibbled at my CV asserting that English was my native language. > " 'Why not?,' I asked." > " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look." Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion, not from a class or relating words to another language" - which is how all children learn their first language, but is far less common as adults. So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post + pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely. (Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local version of "prepare")
  • anbende 5y ago
    So a cursory google search shows this definition of “native speaker” in several places: “a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood” And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means: “associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth” So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition? Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?
    • Izkata 5y ago
      The speed you replied, I think you might have missed the second paragraph I edited in (a habit I have of posting the comment, rereading it outside the edit box, then adding clarification). The edit should make it clear I'm not talking about native fluency.
      • 5y ago
• js2 5y ago
  I’m a native English speaker. I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it. At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other. At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadian colleague in French. My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them to understand (I don’t think it does). In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen". I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then to be understood. Shrug.
  • dmingod666 5y ago
    'Anti-Baby-Pillen' is the most absurd name of a medicine I've come across.
  • vharuck 5y ago
    >I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it. I asked my high school English teacher the proper way to contract "should not have" in writing; I was trying my hand at short stories, and I wanted it in the dialogue. She said it wasn't a thing. Not that there's no standard convention, but that it's not a thing. Despite me saying and hearing "shouldn't've" all the time.
• goatcode 5y ago
  1. English is made up of several languages; 2. "Language changes" pretty much equates to people making mistakes, and those mistakes becoming part of the language. Since English has spread over so much of the world, in addition to it not having a central authority that is looked to for its structure (as does French), many mistakes have come in, and made the language weird. This overlaps a bit with (1).
  • anbende 5y ago
    Regarding (2), now that there are on the order of a billion non-native speakers of English who often talk to each other, we will see more and more changes to the language from THEIR mistakes. English will belong less and less to native speakers as time goes on. Wild!
    • goatcode 5y ago
      Or new languages will spawn from it combined with whatever of the numerous other-language-speakers use it. Steven Fry talked a bit about "Panglish" on QI, was interesting. The question becomes: Will we call English English, or will some other language per above be called English? I for one don't use "nother" nor place periods before consequents, so I might be speaking my own language right now, based on what people online seem to have done with English :)
• dmingod666 5y ago
  'loot', 'dacoit', 'blighty', 'juggernaut', 'punch', 'chappals', 'verandah', 'bunglow' and too many to count all have Indian origins. 'blighty' is a misheard vilaiti(foreigner). It's a tango, that's how the sausage is made and there are no wrong answers. You make a mess of yoga and Indian cuisine. We add liberal modifications to english. It's all good. Interesting thing is, if there is a time when are a lot more Indians speaking English and all making the same 'mistakes' than other people, how long till the mistakes are part of the language.
• damagednoob 5y ago
  > "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 less than interest.
  • dsr_ 5y ago
    In my experience, it's usually interest and friendliness -- but after the first time you hear it used aggressively, you'll never forget that can happen.
  • elric 5y ago
    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.
    • domano 5y ago
      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.
      • elric 5y ago
        Yeah, I get that. But at some point you have to let go of that fear & wariness. Arseholes are pretty universal, and whether they're having a go at you because of your accent, your immigration status, or the colour of your hair doesn't matter all that much. Arseholes gonna arsehole, and they'll find a stick to beat you with if they so desire. The vast majority of people, thankfully, aren't arseholes, and their intentions tend to be on the "good" part of the spectrum.
  • 5y ago
• YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> 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 the group" there would be a twitterstorm. What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't quite share it. I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase, everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks would reply in English. Then the process looped back to the second phase. The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could - because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable speaking in English. Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!". Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it. Everyone does it.
  • ot 5y ago
    > If an American author had written This is a common pattern of false equivalency, like "reverse racism" and the likes. The analogy is invalid because the harms of discrimination come from the power imbalance. In this case, immigrants in the US are in a position of disadvantage, due to linguistic/cultural struggles and the perception issues they cause. Perpetuating stereotypes that reinforce that perception causes harm.
• Brajeshwar 5y ago
  English has been adapted by many communities as common medium in India, where none are native-speakers. The Indianized English that we speak are understood well by other Indians and it can vary/struggle a bit as you move across the country (north-south, east-west). Now, we Indians find it hard to understand when others non-native speakers speak English just as others for Indians. I had had my experiences being the "English Translator" for Indians and Japanese speaking, well, English. I enunciate, use simpler words, and shorter sentences. I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread. Our schools fined us ₹0.50 in my times if we do not speak in English since very early grade. During early 2000s I started visiting countries outside India, such as US, and UK. Then I realized, that my English sucks. I have been learning a lot more since. Working mostly with Native English Speaking clients did do a whole lot of fast-forward into "speaking English" the proper way. Unfortunately, I feel my own language is limited and very complex. My family switch to English if we need to understand things faster and better. My daughters are learning our original language but they sounded very funny and kinda "language-retarted" to their counterparts (cousins, relative back home). The interesting thing is I can speak and understand a minimum of three languages (English, Hindi, and our Language) like most Indians. I can also get away with exchanging info with people speaking in Marathi, Gujarathi, and a bit of Bengali, Punjabi, Haryanbi, etc. Attempting and preparing to learn Japanese soon.
• blt 5y ago
  A lot of native English speakers think English is a difficult language to learn. It's true that English has a lot of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies caused by mixing German, Latin, Greek, etc. But English is structurally very simple: few subject/verb agreement classes, few tenses, modifications like "ask vs. command" or "desire vs. predict" are achieved by adding words instead of conjugation. There are no genders to memorize. It's probably easier than the average language to construct grammatically correct sentences.
  • kayodelycaon 5y ago
    English also has the largest vocabulary. Granted, most of it isn't used in everyday speech but I encounter a lot of words in writing I don't see used in speech. (Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from Calvin and Hobbes.)
• dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  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 immediately obvious from even a brief conversation. If they can't speak it, they'll fail out after the first exams or learn it anyway. I guess it bothers me even more as someone who wasn't born in an English speaking country but spoke it nearly exclusively after childhood. It's a common sentiment - one of my old history teachers lived in England for 20 or so years, and was asked if he can provide some proof he can speak English for his citizenship. How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language?
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    > How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language? By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like that, to uncover frauds.
    • dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
      I find it hard to believe one could go through the nationalization procedure and not speak English. It's a very in-person kind of thing, no way to con your way through it really.
  • Tainnor 5y ago
    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.
• darth_avocado 5y ago
  It is great that this is being addressed. I think English is a language which has been evolving over time. Especially in the colonial era, the language spread and a different branch of English emerged. A lot of words from English became mainstream in local languages and a lot of words from local languages made it back to English. However, the dark underbelly of this phenomenon is that there are some serious racist undertones that come with this. Some words are "proper English" because it came from specific parts of the world, meanwhile similar words from other places are "Wrong English". Certain speakers have accents that are "beautiful" and rewarded even if they completely butcher the language, it is completely understandable and held in high regard. Meanwhile others are considered "funny" or "stupid" and the speaker's intelligence gets questioned because of the accent. As a non native speaker, I've had so many experiences where my intelligence is insulted and get shut down, because of my accent. Meanwhile the French guy next door gets applauded for saying the same thing again and gets a promotion. Language politics is real and it has severe consequences.
• user05202021 5y ago
  >I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread. Hindi should be that common thread instead.
  • WillSlim95 5y ago
    If in North India that is the common thread, not the case for rest of India.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jll29 5y ago
  Linguists don't distinguish between "proper" and "improper" English, or "right" or "wrong", although they are very interested what native speakers think of "grammatical" or "ungrammatical" sentences. In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of one and the same society.
• tbenst 5y ago
  There is a notion of General or Standard American English [1]. Similarly, in Britain there’s Received Pronunciation [2]. Of course these are a social construct, but it’s not unfair to characterize that: “General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
• crvdgc 5y ago
  As a “non-native” English speaker, the single most influential class I took for learning English is lexicology. Each student is required to recite 500 Latin roots and 200 affixes. It's hard, but after that, the vocabulary capability grows exponentially.
• tasogare 5y ago
  > The whole concept of "mother tongue" is a political construct to keep certain people out, says Madani. I'm starting to be very tired of reading this kind of statement everywhere. No, not every existing concept is a conspiracy to discriminate against some people. Not everything is a social construct (few things are). You [article author] are not a victim of a grand linguistic scheme established by men/White/English speakers/whatever to make you feel bad about your English level. The concept is valid and useful in language education.
• crazygringo 5y ago
  > But this scenario doesn't fit with Serrano's experiences of English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers. In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate. English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply. I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule. I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews, which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that were taught. It actually can become a serious source of tension between foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly", while you the native speaker are making "mistakes". I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help either, since definitions often don't capture the actual subtleties of usage and connotation. I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native) English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt" rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand something... and often there's literally no convincing them, because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of teaching be wrong...?
  • hazemotes 5y ago
    I have noticed Indians using that phrase quite a lot: "I have a doubt." I think it may just be a quirk of Indian English and should probably not be considered incorrect, the same way British English quirks are not incorrect.
    • res0nat0r 5y ago
      Likely in the same vein as "please do the needful", just a common translation / usage quirk.
    • 5y ago
• WalterBright 5y ago
  The author complains about being discriminated against because of his accent. Of course it's unfair, but there is a practical reason behind it. The more someone's accent differs from what I'm used to, the more difficult it is for me to understand. I notice that on the phone, I can understand an accent like mine over a bad connection. The further one's accent is from mine, the better quality connection I need. It's also significantly more work to understand a presentation the more distant the speaker's accent is. That means the less interesting the presentation is, the more likely I am to not make the effort. It's not fair, but it's a fact of life.
• korethr 5y ago
  On that first example, "prepone" might not officially be a word, yet, but I encourage them to keep at it. Its construction follows the same structure as its intended antonym, even back to the etymology of "postpone". Unlike some of my English teachers in elementary school, the lexicographers at Oxford are not a bunch of solely prescriptivist assholes. Get the word into common enough usage that there are multiple sources for the editors of the OED to cite, and you just might get "prepone" added to the next edition. The story about an argument with Tolkien over the correct spelling of the plural of "dwarf" notwithstanding, I think included-in-the-Oxford is a standard few can argue with for an English word being officially real.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Funny story while waiting in the Observation Area after getting the COVID vaccination: In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry". After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel, Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames. I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When it was almost closing, there were only two of us left. "Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!
• Arete314159 5y ago
  Shit, I'm a native speaker and I complain about this trash language all the time.
• traceroute66 5y ago
  Non-native English vs Native English is nothing compared to European French vs Canadian French. To a EU French ear, Canadian French is a horrible butchery of the beautiful language that is French. The Canadians don't roll their R's properly and all sorts of other unspeakable things. ;-) Meanwhile, an EU French person visiting the French speaking parts of Canada will often have a significant amount of difficulty being understood. This is not because of their lack of mastery of the French language, but because their true pronunciation of French is not what the Canadian ear expects.
• daveslash 5y ago
  "So when I realized [preponed] wasn't "proper" English, I was dumbfounded, flummoxed, astounded, nonplussed," ~ "nonplussed" is a word, but "plussed" isn't. Thought that was interesting given the word being discussed is preponed (vs. postponed).
• yumraj 5y ago
  And what about business English? :) Use of words/phrases such as "thought process" (mostly incorrectly), "sync up", "paradigm shift", "disrupt", "blue/green ocean", "ballpark" and so on and on...
• shkkmo 5y ago
  I think that the authors ideas about what it means to know a language are implicit to the whole article but never directly discussed. There is knowing the meaning of a word and then there is knowing the contextual usage and conotative meanings. On their face, "expensive" and "costly" have the same meaning, but in many circumstances they aren't fully interchangeable. To me, your "mother language" is simply the language that your mother, or other primary caregiver, spoke to you as a child. It is certainly plausible to have more than one in multilingual households. A native speaker may not have spoken that to language with their parents, but they learned it natively from other speakers at a young enough age that their phonemes adjust. In my opinion, native speakers tend to have a much deeper understanding of the meanings and connotations of the words/phrases they use but may indeed have smaller volcabularies than fluent, but non-native, speakers. The difference between "costly" and "expensive" is obvious to a native english speaker, but might not have been learned by a fluent speaker with a larger volcabulary. If you listen to linguists, grammar is descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is not a fundemental trait of language, but a model of language use that helps us think about how language is used. I do think it is important to be aware of how we use language to enforce economic and cultural segregation. Language use is often used as a proxy for class and education and those who don't fit the "standard" are faced with discrimination.
• anotherevan 5y ago
  “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” — James Nicoll I think this aspect of English is what makes it so complicated. For instance, words are spelt with an "f" or a "ph" depending on what language we originally stole it from.
• scrubs 5y ago
  Native speaker: repetitious usage of stock phrases by other native speakers has begun to bug me recently. Some examples: * Listening to market business analysis one will often hear "And this way the customer tries to gauge the value of THAT bag/watch/car..." where the word 'that' is emphasized with an almost implicit nod in the direction of the object. It's not so much grammar usage (which v. that). Rather it's a cloyingly emotional hustle (as I see) it to both magnify, mystify, and focus on the object in question. * "... That said ... " / "...that being said..." appears often in writing, and even HN. * Listen to any pitch in the software world. See if you can get through one without hearing any of these words or phrases: "... experience ...", 'actually' as in " ... Now press OK and it actually [does XYZ which was the whole point anyway]"; or "All we wanted to do was simply [some in, in fact, quite complex task] ... so we set out to [save the world]". More abstractly modern marketing emotionally plays on the feelings of connectedness or family in an insincere way. If you know Absolutely Fabulous you might know the Patsy line: "Get your dry cleaning back and it's a revolution" ... you know because the dry cleaners are practically your close loving family looking out for your chores so you have time to save the world / be a teacher ... so now everything is practically either an act of magic or Old Testament level miracles. * In verbal conversation the word "like" is used far too much * Finally, I have a number of friends for whom Portuguese is their native language. I don't understand it. Still I have tried to listen carefully for the parallel in English when we say "ummm" or "ahhh" to buy time while we think of the next line or the "like" example to start a sentence ... or the rising intonation to make a statement, and not asking a question. For a great example of rising intonation: look for the Noon dieting TV commercial and listen for the African American Lady who's got a line: "It's amazing how the little things ...". By the time she's done she's talking quickly at high pitch. I don't hear this in Portuguese.
• shannifin 5y ago
  I may be postjudiced but it's no use posttending: I am postpared to postfer the word "prepone". (Sorry. Seriously though, I'm surprised "prepone" never caught on before, it makes intuitive sense!)
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  I work for an English-speaking company and deal with colleagues overseas every day. I am constantly amazed by my co-workers abilities to think quickly over highly technical topics and make passionate arguments over complex topics-- in a second or third language! Human beings are fantastic.