One thing I also noticed is that the general tendency to be welcoming and non-offensive makes it very hard to get corrections and feedback from people you are talking to. That is very much the opposite approach than what happens in my country of birth (also a Slavic country, as the OP) where people will almost always correct you. I now realise that receiving corrections and feedback, even if it is sometimes delivered harshly, is an important part of language learning.
I used to give language corrections on lang-8. I started to notice there are two types of corrections you can give. One type of error is a true grammar mistake, like saying “a apple.” Another is just making it sound more native. In those cases I would sometimes decide how to fix the grammar while keeping the original way of saying it, but also suggest a better way of saying it.
... And suddenly it seems so obvious! Thanks, fixed!
I don’t give “nativeness” corrections like this unless asked, but when I do, it can be fascinating to dig around in my unconscious language skills to try to explain why things sound “wrong”.
I was 17 years old when I arrived in the US, and after half a year there I could almost sense getting better by the day, it was an extremely exciting experience. My very naive illusion, however, was that this progress would stay linear until I caught up with the natives, but it unsurprisingly plateaued, in particular when it came to my accent and pronunciation. But again, that first half year felt amazing!
Still, great improvements can be made in niche areas - know you are traveling to Scotland for holiday? Watch video or two about the accent differences, few movies and you understand 95 % in no time.
I've been trying to express complex ideas at the limits of my own grasp of language (including my native one) since always. And so long as I've kept trying I have kept improving. Surely diction is difficult, but you would have probably needed some diction tutoring or other tips to better use your mouth to sound like a native. It is possible but it's work.
so this is my counter point to your counterpoint.
In New Zealand it is usually offensive to “correct” someone’s English, because the act of “correcting” pronunciation and grammar is often associated with status signalling (higher education is associated with high status by many stuck-up knobends). The same dynamic occurs in other English speaking countries too. I have seen the same thing in Spanish with madrileños too, and I am sure it happens in many other cultures.
Correcting someone is often fraught with issues:
* Foreign speakers have clammed up, or gotten upset, when I have carefully tried to help. It is very difficult to be tactful without causing embarrassment.
* Many native speakers are ashamed if caught out making mistakes, so we eventually learn to avoid correcting the mistakes of others, even humdingers.
* Usually we want to remain on the topic of conversation. It is hard to inject corrections without breaking the flow, even in a one-on-one conversation. Nearly impossible in a social environment.
* The mistakes of ESOL speakers are often ingrained and resistant to improvement. Trying to fix errors over and over again is tiring for both people.
I wonder how often English native speakers here on HN feel that some comments aren't clear or odd-sounding due to approximative English. It's something I barely have experience of in my native language, as there are comparatively fewer foreigner speakers. And when reading HN comments, I'm mostly incapable of guessing the origin of the commenter (with a few exceptions).
I remember taking a test that tries to gauge the size of your vocabulary fairly recently (it was linked and discussed on HN IIRC), and being somewhat disappointed that I, in my mid-30s, rank like a native ~15 year old. I’d like to express myself in more sophisticated ways, like an adult would, but the look-up method is at an end there. Hardly ever do I need to look up a single word when reading tech content, which is what I consume the most.
So for me it would take an effort to seek out such material, that pushes my vocab bounds. Kudos to you for getting active, it’s not that low of a hurdle to get started on!
(Corrections welcome)
> Why I start taking English classes at the age of 46
Learning language process is about > 50% mimicking / copying. I didn't realize until I graduated and worked with a British boss first time. I realize that 90% of schools in my country have taught english wrong all along. In school, they still teach student to mix and match a sentence on their own which is WRONG, resulting in weird non real world sentence with correct or incorrect grammar. Good speaking comes from listening to tons of real world audio / conversation / encounter any arbitrary context. This is akin to the process of training neural network. Good writing comes from reading a tons. And then we start to write and speak like those english speaker.
So at this point my english skills won't going anywhere because my adult's mental model commands me to stop mimicking and copying. For example, this phrase sounds good but I hate it and I won't use it: "that being said, ..." which sounds nonsense to me as non-english speaker, I prefer "however" which sounds mediocre writing but it's a straightforward meaning. Think about it when you translate "that being said" .. it doesn't give a twist hint at all, it sounds like "something is stated" that's it. Excuse me for long whining.
One of my direct reports is a non-native English speaker. He has a pretty thick accent and talks fast. Common feedback I get from customers we work with is that he can be hard to understand.
I plan on giving him some career advice that he should work on this. Talk slower, consider working on reducing his accent.
Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive?
My first instinct is just to say it, share comments I’m getting from our customers, etc. but I don’t want it to be hurtful. It’s really a “you could be more effective if … “ thing.
Offer him a course or private lessons paid by the company (with the company investing ideally both money and time). They are probably aware of their accent and shouldn't refuse the possibility to improve.
If they do refuse, then it's a bit questionable if you want to work with a person that is not open for feedback.
Wouldn't that depend on what culture he is from and what that culture considers offensive?
Either way, I've heard good things about "Accent makeover" classes, so if they are available to him, maybe it is worthwhile to pay for him to take such a course?
That would likely both be true and remove entitlement from the question.
First, the "sophistication" can backfire. There're a lot of comments about reading here, but there're very fine lines between
- "simple English", think a stereotypical ESL speaker
- "well educated" English, think a native posh college alumni
- "colloquially broken" English, the way native speakers speak to their friends
- "out-of-place highfalutin" English, a hallmark of someone who didn't have a chance to experience the variety of contexts growing up in an English speaking country.
It's quite hard to balance those, but I guess it just comes with time and practice while being mindful of it. For me personally it worked in waves, from unnaturally-broken to too-correct to feeling comfortable enough to break the grammar in natural ways to noticing more unnaturalness to… you got the idea.
Second, and I'm forever grateful to the person who first introduced me to this idea, is realising that high level language acquisition can only come with a new personality attached. It's very weird and disorienting if you're not aware of it happening, but it's a natural and necessary part of it. You need to grow a personality to feel in your second/third/etc language, to react to jokes on the spot, to make friends, to dream, to live in that language context. It often differs from one's identity/personality in the first language, and that's fine, it's just as valid. Embracing the process and the difference makes things easier.
I don't think it's possible to do that through learning though.
I liked the movie
I installed the new update
I installed the new Python
I installed ~the~ Python 3.11
I visited ~the~ Brazil
I visited the Amazon River
I visited ~the~ San Francisco
The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar. One of the most common mistake I make is forgetting to use sub-three letter words to my sentences like - to, is, and, or etc. Now the issue is that, this IS 80% of what English grammar stands for. My writing style is kinda keyword focused, if that makes any sense to anyone.
The internet as a whole has become quite tolerant and the spaces I dwell usually don't criticize me for my bad grammar. My keyword focused statements gets my ideas across. Also I found that, if I cared too much about something I end up not expressing it. So the only things I talk about are my impromptu ideas which are jumbled and careless.
I remember one time when I asked a native speaker to proof-read an article I wrote. Most of my mistakes were missing "s" in the present tense, one of the first thing you learn as a beginner.
> I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time.
Same here. My company would pay for English lessons (3h a week with an English coach). It's quite a commitment and I'm worried that I'm way past the diminishing returns and it would take tons of effort for barely noticeable improvements. On the other hand, I'd love to get better and it'd be helpful professionally for sure.
I think it should be "started" instead of "start".
I'm also ESL and have given up on learning English properly after 30 years of trying. Nowadays I just rely on grammarly/gmail (and it does catch this particular example).
Fortune, mxgrn!
This is an important distinction in languages where talking like, say, a newscaster, would sound extremely stuffy and awkward.
I love it. It helps some of their culture and personality show up in their writing. It reminds me how diverse and varied the world is, and what a delight it is that we can come together on the Internet.
English is flexible, adaptive, and with a rich vocabulary. In my experience is pretty hard to not be understood, no matter how poor your English. Don’t know what something is called? Just put two words together, I’m sure it’ll be good enough to be understood.
And of course English is a very irregular language, with stuff like articles being irrelevant to the vast majority of sentences, and some of the complexities like conjugations conveying very little meaning (as you say, verbs often don't change during tenses; think there are more irregularities with common words than actual shades of meaning conveyed by conjugating them), and many of the common "corrections" like objections to split infinitives actually being based on misconceptions
Actually, I think the prevalence of ESL speakers will eventually result in "standard" English variants on native-speaking TV losing quirks like nonstandard pluralisation and even articles, and it'll be much the better for it.
French is only stuffy and inflexible in France.
Travel the length of West Africa and you'll quickly learn it is extremely malleable and fun to play with. For many people it's their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th language, so they're making it up and playing with it too!
(It’s also not always true. While I’m relatively familiar with UK, Irish, Aussie, and NZ English and can often identify them in writing, Indian and Singaporean English still send me for a loop, and I likely mistag them. They have just as strong a claim to “native” as I have, of course, but they sound “foreign” to my ears.)
It's something I have experienced the other way too, living abroad as a native english speaker, I realised how much more perfect I had to get things, because there are very few foreigners learning to speak this language, so I have to be much more precise with how I phrase things, as people don't have the practise with parsing my broken language haha.
I've had a number of misunderstandings over the last decade where in hindsight, my communication was the root cause. My favourite: "I would". Meaning "in your situation, I would do X". And the person later came back and said "but you said you would do it".
In fact, even if I was in "speak simply" mode, I would still use "would" instead of, perhaps, "recommend," as "would" is a shorter word: I favor simpler words over multi-syllable versions when trying to be maximally understandable to someone whose native language is not English. I'm glad you brought it up!
"What Brits say vs what they actually mean."
The only think cracking me up regularly is getting asked "How are you?". I just can't get used to it. Every time I hear it I have a split second reaction of actually processing how I am feeling before reminding myself it was just meant as a phrase.
It is such a shitty thing to ask. It makes me more aware of my feelings but sets the expectations that I am not allowed to actually verbalize my feelings. Don't ask if you are not prepared for an honest answer.
And yes, I know it is just a ritualized thing. Still annoys me.
I test my fluency by attempting to pass off as a native speaker on the internet. If anyone ever suspected I'm not a native speaker, they never told me. I was once unmasked in an old video game though because of a mistake specific to that game and people from my country, a mistake I had internalized since childhood. That was quite shocking to me...
How does this work exactly? Do you explicitly say you're a native speaker and then wait until someone realizes you are not and tell you?
Because I don't see it happening that people will tell you they don't think you're a native speaker organically, in a conversation that's going on about something else.
I'm curious to know what the "mistake" was here. Is it something like referring to in-game items via their name in your native language, instead of English?
This can happen even in our native language.
Avid book readers of classic and Early Modern English literature have a much wider and expressive vocabulary, and are more likely to pepper their speech with socially-accepted literary references.
But for richer American language:
I especially love the colloquialism, grammar and accents across the American regions. They’re so vibrant, punchy and exciting. This is best experienced in person when traveling and stopping into local restaurants but can also be found in literature, music and social media as well but it requires effort to find which it what makes it fun.
In my case, I ask myself a question like what does a 40 year old blue class worker from New Jersey or a 19 year old Floridian rapper sound like, then the hunt is afoot.
Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing - a radiant, colorful flower in a sea of sameness.
East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, for example. Or collections of Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Asimov's Foundation series (skip the last couple of books!). Or Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Or Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke.
Or go through lists of famous opening lines of novels and maybe pick up a novel that you really like the beginning of ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times [...]", "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen", etc.).
It doesn't matter what it is, as long as the writing is good and you like reading it.
(And don't bother looking everything up. It shouldn't be necessary and it makes the reading process dull.)
Another option is to watch TV.
Watch something you never used to watch before, such as Grand Designs or Would I Lie To You (start with the clip "I accidentally bought a horse" on the "WILTY? Nope!" channel as it has fantastic subtitles... which you WILL need). Or maybe A Bit of Fry & Laurie, for example the sketches about language and the sketch with the pretentious tourists (it's on youtube as "A Bit of Fry and Laurie S02E04 Czech"). Or Jimmy Carr hosting I Literally Just Told You (season 1 episode 2 -- the others are not as good). Or Carr hosting The Big Fat Quiz of the Year/Decade/etc or 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown.
A third option is radio/podcasts.
The Unbelievable Truth (hosted by David Mitchell), for example. Or In Our Time (hosted by Melvyn Bragg) -- start with some of the older ones as Bragg is no longer as sharp or as clear in his speech as he used to be just five years ago.
This. In my little theory, that's exactly the watershed: will one be able to find something exciting to do. If succeeded, learning abilities and creativity follow the energy. It's akin to falling in love, really. But yeah, when you get older, you my need to try harder finding those things.
I couldn't find any tricks as to how to identify such areas of interest, but I "discovered" an indirect factor that raises the chances for that: regular physical exercise, ice baths, proper nutrition, and staying calm. When I feel great, the world suddenly becomes a fun place to live.
I generate utterances like I type: fast and with a lot of mistakes.
That being said, I have yet to make the sort of mistake which results in a couple of tons of manure being dumped in front of my house, so I could probably safely stand to loosen up even more...
You can think of it as a contraction of, 'despite that having been said'.
I've always taken the phrase "that being said" to be a variation of the phrase "that said" that isn't as assertive of what was said, relegating it to only "having been said" rather than set in stone
Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there.
It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that.
Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty.
It's just as much about perception as it is about accent.
It's really just whatever the tradition has dictated.
I liked the movie. In a conversation, "the" implies both you and the listener are referring to the same movie. e.g., I chatted with a girl in the pub about movies. I mentioned "Love, Actually"; she hated the movie.
I installed ~the~ Python 3.11. With proper names, "the" is sometimes used for emphasis. e.g., In the next deployment, we plan to upgrade our servers to Python 3.11. Yes, this is the Python 3.11 which is infamous among support circles.
There are several rules determining whether an ordinary noun should or shouldn't be marked by "the", but none of those apply to proper nouns. Those are names; they either include an article, or they don't.
I think one of the "mistakes" the English language makes is that adjectives preceed the noun they modify which "leaves you hanging" until you are listening/reading the sentence until you reach the noun and can now understand the last phrase.
It seems like your error here is partially due to that.
I liked the movie
I installed the update (new)
I installed the version of Python (new)
I installed Python 3.11
I visited Brazil
I visited the river of Amazon (river in the Amazon :))
I visited San FranciscoExcept there is a river called “The Amazon River”. Native English speaker here: I feel like rivers are always prefixed with “the”:
- The Rio Grande
- The Nile River
- The Columbia River
- The Yellow River
in a way, I understand that the function of "the" is some kind of emphasis (or something). The answer you seek is not syntactic, but semantic.
I liked the movie... But which one?
I liked Movie-Title. Now there's no doubt which one was it.
My point is that to say "I installed THE python 3" could be understood as a sort of emphasis... I installed THE python 3 could signal (in the appropriate context) that you did not install python 3 from the conda foundation but the one from THE PSF (this is a shoddy example, but this is a random comment on the internet)
I watched Star Wars. I watched THE ('complete', or 'original', or 'new') Star Wars trilogy
- He is in hospital
versus
- He is in the pub
Does this mean any hospital vs a specific pub? No! It's just the idiom, and you have to get a feel for it. On the plus side, it's these sort of crazy nuances that help make email scams more detectable.
"in pub", on the other hand, would never be right.
In my experience, when people think someone else is a foreigner, they ask them where they're from. The assumption that they were talking to an american was violated so they try to determine who they're actually talking to. So if I can manage to not violate that assumption, it must mean that my speech resembles that of an american native speaker.
So decades later I went a gaming community on the internet and suggested we all play this old game. Everything was fine until I said cooper shield. One guy immediately messaged me "br?" and I was shocked. No one else noticed it. Turns out he was also a foreigner who learned portuguese by playing the game together with brazilians and he recognized that specific brazilian mistake.
Let's throw in The Importance of Being Earnest and HHGTTG (don't watch the movie). Maybe also some Vonnegut books? My favourite is Hocus Pocus.
For the second person, "you start taking the bus at age 30" is an imperative statement, which has a totally different meaning from the observation "You started taking the bus at age 30".
And for the first person, "I start the project on Monday" refers to the future, "I started the projected on Monday" the past.
After re-reading I probably see the issue, but you never said "I will do X" which changes to would in reported speech:
I will do X -> You said you would do X.
Did they understood "I would do X" as "I will do X"?
The other day Duolingo did show me you can say "и A и B" ("и" being "and") to say "both A and B". Start a sentence with "and", a conjunction, without anything before to... "conjunt"... I still can't parse it without raising an exception.
Blue collar, a reference to the working class wearing blue-collared shirts as opposed to the professional class wearing white-collared shirt.
Blue class workers are sad students, or maybe Smurfs. :-)
> Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing.
On account of because of your comment, I think you'd really enjoy Ball of Fire (1941).
To this day, I am still not entirely confident in how I should respond with to the prior.
In regards to the English "how are you?" greeting, think of it as a formulaic inquiry meant only to ensure there isn't anything absolutely horrible going on with you at that exact moment - anything lesser equates to "fine" or "I'm well, thanks."
More broadly, it is an appropriate situation to note anything out of the ordinary going on - "oh wow, I am so tired this afternoon!" etc to scope the ensuing situation. The greeting really is a question that equates to being asked "is there anything particularly out of the ordinary going with you right now I should know about that would impact us talking?" If there isn't, "I'm well, thanks."
(I know you know all this, but your comment got me musing on the topic.)
The following are in the context of a workplace conversation; other types of conversations may vary slightly depending on the scenario.
Specifically, I am trying to understand how to set the tone for a conversation. If you are feeling stressed, busy, exhausted or frustrated, I may keep banter to a minimum, decide to ask for a meeting later instead of engaging a full conversation now, or even decide that whatever caused me to get your attention in the first place is less important and offer to help you instead of asking for your help.
If you are feeling bored, content or happy, I might ask for more direct help than limiting the conversation to simply getting an answer to a question.
No matter what the answer is, I'm also trying to use showing an interest in you to set the tone of the conversation to one of camaraderie and collaboration, rather than direction, accusation or competitiveness.
There's a ton of nuance involved, no set rules, and the actual amount of time I am expecting to spend on the topic correlates pretty strongly to how well I know you. I'm not asking to be your therapist or your friend, but I am hoping for an honest answer, and if anyone expresses that they are struggling, I will offer to help however I can.
Plus "Wie geht's" is more impersonal. It is more like asking "How is the situation?". It is not as direct as asking "How are YOU" (with you being the subject of the sentence instead your mood/situation being the subject) which feels much more intimate when directly translated to German.
I think this implicit communicative baseline is a huge, invisible barrier to communication among people who are apparently fluent in a common language. You can still understand the question as serious and answer it honestly conveying how you are to the speaker, and have it come off as fake or formulaic to people not aware of the baseline. I'm sure this is true for all languages. The problem, of course, is acquiring a knowledge of these baselines and the context in which they apply is extremely difficult, often even for native speakers. The native speakers find it difficult to introspect about this and explain why they interpret things as they do. Because it is invisible to them, it is difficult for them to teach this to someone else. And it is difficult for them to realize someone else is not doing this and therefore not be offended by non-natives, or people with ASD or whatever, not communicating relative to this baseline. A Dutch person saying something bluntly isn't "just being honest". They are just comporting themselves relative to the Dutch baseline. A Japanese person using non-confrontational polite formulations isn't being dishonest. They assume you are familiar with the Japanese baseline (while not necessarily even being aware this is their assumption).
I think it is common for people to believe people from their native culture come in all sorts but people from other cultures all have personalities in a tight range. They're all lazy or wily or emotionless or angry or cold. I think what they're perceiving is the way one communicative baseline deviates from another. They take this difference as a deliberate, communicative modulation away from their baseline, the honest, neutral one. To them, the other person's neutral state is not neutral. They always speak as they they're angry, say, or in a hurry, or trying to deceive. It is analogous to the way people perceive themselves as having a neutral, invisible accent and all other people speak in some quirky way.
I understand a plateau to mean that there's no more upwards
And certainly you have a point, devoting time and money may clearly help vigorously push the upward trend for longer, but I was just talking about my experience, those relatively effortless early moments. In any event, no matter how much you apply, I think it’s hard to argue that it’s quite rare to find foreigners that moved to a country as adults and sound truly native, and I don’t believe it’s due to half-hearted dedication.
In contrast, if you asked where my son is and I replied that "he's in school", I think that'd be fine, wouldn't it? Or "in prison"? (Well, that would be less fine, but not for grammatical reasons...)
US native English speaker, so this may depend somewhat on what variety of English is being used.
"in school" often means you're a student (primary, secondary, or post-secondary school) in general. "He's still in school" can mean either he hasn't finished learning for the day(and thus not home yet or such) or that his education isn't finished.(X more years of standard mandatory education or X more years of University to finish) But it can also mean you're actively engaged in the activity, which I think I've heard people even use for remote-learning, though I don't feel that good about using it for remote-learning.
But if you say you're "in the school" you deliberately mean the educational building.
"in prison" sort of does the same thing, but since someone is locked up in prison and unable to leave, the distinction is much more rare. Let's say you're on the chain gang on the side of the road, even though they're really rare now. You're still "in prison". If you said you were "in the prison", now you're not currently working a chain gang on the side of the road, but actively in a prison building.