
English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) - jacquesm
http://antirez.com/news/61
======
petke
Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak
English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs
Italy.

Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually
dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They
simply put subtitles on.

Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids
dont read but just listen, and automatically learn to understand English at
home in front of the TV. By the time they get to study English at school, they
already know how to speak it. English spelling is another thing though. Im
still struggling with that.

~~~
xixixao
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit:
see the map on wiki[0]

The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better
English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing
foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important.
People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that
necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language
should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed
to win as the international communication platform).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29)

~~~
Vomzor
I think you're wrong. Dubbing or subtitles make a big difference. In Flanders
(Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) we have 8 years of French in school and only
5 years of English. Even though France is our neighbor and 40 % of Belgium's
speaks French, most young people their English is still much better than their
French. It's because we grew up surrounded by English; English songs, English
tv shows and movies with subtitles. Older generations speak better French
because the media used to be more focussed on France.

Young Flemish or Walloon people even speak English to each other..

~~~
wvh
English is a lot closer to Dutch though. We learn Dutch, French, English,
German and even Latin in school, so we are culturally habituated to the
importance of languages. I coincidentally also speak Finnish and Swedish
(which feels almost like a Dutch-Limburg dialect), and like the other poster
said, it's not a surprise to me the Swedish speaking population in Finland
thinks English is easier to learn.

As to Antirez: if only my C would be as good as yours...

~~~
duaneb
> English is a lot closer to Dutch though

I suspect this doesn't as much role in Europe. Sure, there are difficulties
unique to learning any language, but English has a _lot_ of shared ancestry
with any germanic or romance language. It's not like, say, Mandarin or
Punjabi.

------
robochat
As an Englishman living and working in Paris for a few years, my eyes have
been opened to the difficulty of working in another language. I used to be a
little bit dismissive of foreigners who hadn't completely mastered English but
now I realise that they were almost fluent. On the other hand, I haven't
really managed to master French at all.

His observation about becoming introverted in a foreign language is something
that I experience too. Something that he didn't mention though is that often
people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language
fluently, this is made even worse since you are indeed dedicating 80% of your
brain just to following the conversation, so that in a sense they are correct
in their judgement at that moment in time. It's painful to be on the receiving
end of this and again this is something that I was unconsciously guilty of
when I lived in London.

We just need to occasionally remind ourselves when the other person is not
speaking in their native language that they are having to do a lot of extra
work just to communicate with us.

~~~
wwwater
Oh, I like you mentioned that. It reminded me of a quote I'd read recently and
which I'd liked. Here it is:

"For me, the hardest thing about functioning in a foreign language was not the
long hours it took me to get through a text, not the heightened anxiety,
accompanying every social interaction, but the sense of reduced personality
that comes with limited verbal expression. For someone who prided herself on
writing music criticism for one of the largest Russian newspapers Vedomosti, a
branch of The Financial Times, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Even though
I communicated perfectly fine, I missed being able to say more with less, to
say the same thing in several ways, to express character, not only literal
sense. What came out of my mouth felt crude, stiff, and trite."

(from
[http://www.rma.ac.uk/students/?p=2646](http://www.rma.ac.uk/students/?p=2646))

It is so true for me, this thing about reduced personality.

------
xanderstrike
As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native
English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english,
the point gets across).

I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly
hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no
fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken?
It, like Italian, has a very simple set of rules for pronouncing words. But
even so, clearly different groups of people have different ideas about how
these words should be interpreted (not to mention just straight up dropping
syllables).

I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his
learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with
English. Yeah we have lots of whacky accents and exceptions to pronunciation
rules, but if a language is spoken by huge swaths of people across the world
there's going to be a lot of variety.

~~~
DanBC
> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with
> his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with
> English.

ough:

Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough
(off), hiccough (up)

That's broken.

~~~
stevekemp
And don't forget words that are pronounced differently with identical
spelling, for added hilarity:

* Polish people live in Poland.

* Polish your boots.

~~~
tricolon
Obligatory link to Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos":
[http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)

~~~
stevekemp
New to me, thanks for sharing.

Some great examples there, such as "minute" and "minute". heh.

~~~
leoc
'Feoffer' is probably the worst word there. But just maybe the worst snare in
English is 'positive' — the other 'positive'
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_organ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_organ)
. Yes it's obviously some kind of loan-word, but then so are most English
words...

------
toyg
Another Italian checking in, agreeing with everything Antirez says. I've been
living in England for 13 years, but talking to inner-city-ghetto youth to
order a mcburger can still be a hellish experience.

English is the QWERTY of languages: historically messed up for reasons that
don't matter anymore, but an imprescindible standard enjoying unmatched global
popularity. It's simple enough to allow non-natives to achieve good
productivity very quickly, but mastering it phonetically is harder than in
most other languages. This complexity means that it's constantly getting
stretched by people with limited formal education, and effectively enforces
class separation.

Anyway, I'll never forget when I started studying it and realized that words I
was familiar with because of gaming experience (LOAD, FOR, NETWORK etc) were
_actual everyday words_ that programmers simply borrowed. Suddenly, coding
made so much sense! To this day I value language clarity so much, I prefer
Python to everything else ;)

~~~
kansface
imprescindible is not a word (in english at least) :P

~~~
toyg
That will teach me to post on mobile without spellcheck :) still, I'd never
confuse it's / its, their / they're / there, have / of... so I'm already
better than a lot of native speakers ;P

------
tailgate
As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with
phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot
of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often
treat me as if I am retarded.

I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.

~~~
frooxie
English is my third language; I've read and written English almost every day
for 30 years, but I've only ever spent two weeks in English-speaking
countries. I sometimes find myself unable to pronounce words that I've used
for decades in writing – often, it's the type of more formal vocabulary that
doesn't often come up in movies or TV series. For instance: cuticle, paean,
echelon, emaciated, heinous, comely, disreputable, hearth, dearth, contumely,
beatify, subsequent, etc.

~~~
grecy
English is my first language, I've spoken it all of my 33 years, and I am an
Engineer.

I have no idea what "contumely" means, or how to pronounce it. You're doing
great :)

~~~
selimthegrim
contumely means an insult, it almost exclusively comes up in Shakespeare. 99%
of people on the street would not know that word

~~~
bshimmin
I'm guessing 99% of people wouldn't know what "beatify" meant either, and a
significant number would think it was a typo for "beautify". Those two words
also rather nicely express the vagaries of English pronunciation (the latter
is pronounced to rhyme with "pew", the former "bee-A...", which almost feels
like it deserves a diaeresis, except we don't do those in English).

I leave the gentle reader with the English place name Beaulieu, which probably
isn't pronounced anything like you'd expect, or how it should be.

~~~
vacri
There's a lot of Catholics out there. They might not know how to spell it, but
most of them would know what _beatify_ is about. To be fair, _beatify_ is more
'Catholic jargon' and less 'standard English' \- I wouldn't expect anyone
unfamiliar with Catholicism to know it.

As for names, my favourite wtf is _Featherstonehaugh_ , pronounced fan-shaw.
Then there's _Chalmondley_ (chum-lee)...

------
Mikeb85
> There is just one problem, it has nothing to do with the real English spoken
> in UK, US, Canada, and other countries where English is a native language.

"Real" English is a bit of a misnomer. There's really no such thing. English
has developed, over time, from a mix of various other languages (French,
German, Anglo-Saxon, Norse), and also split several times throughout its
history, developing dialects that have different points of divergence from
'UK' English.

For instance, I speak Canadian English, which is very much 'textbook' English
that would probably be equivalent to a 1930's or 1940's style of British
English plus a few Americanisms, and one or two native quirks.

My wife speaks Caribbean creole (as well as more 'proper' English now), but
also learned an earlier version of British English, which leads to some
hilarious misunderstandings (she knows lots of archaic words, doesn't
understand some of the more modern, technical words, and of course Caribbean
creole adds all sorts of words, grammar, and pronunciations).

I also speak French, which in many ways is easier - more consistent
spellings/pronunciation, grammar, but can be difficult at times because there
are so many French words in English, but we change the meaning of many of
them. There's also English words that have no direct equivalent in French, and
vice versa. You need to 'think' differently to speak each. Plus, as French
modernizes, it adds more and more Anglicisms, French people cheat on grammar
all the time, and of course slang evolves rather quickly.

Anyhow, while English is a pain due to its history, I think as the world
becomes more and more cosmopolitan, these 'quirks' just get absorbed into the
language, and aren't really a problem. After all, there was a point when the
language of nobility in England was French, that changed, likewise the notion
that 'proper' English is the only real English will change over time too.

------
shockzzz
> One of the things that shocked me the most with my experience with the
> English language is how not mastering a language can switch you into an
> introvert.

Too real. I've spent some time in Italy where, due to my broken Italian, I was
very much so an introvert. People noticed it too when Americans would come by
and I'd talk to them - they said I "became a different person."

~~~
vorg
When I studied on a Chinese language course last year, they encourage you to
"speak Chinese only" and most of my classmates spoke better Chinese than me,
so I ended up not speaking much to them so as not to burden them.

------
bshimmin
Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me:

 _Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or
even from a Switzerland canton._

I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a
reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later -
but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and
Venice. It's not _just_ the differences in pronunciation: there are also
vocabulary differences.

If it's any consolation, I understand that North Americans find Glaswegian
quite challenging, especially when watching "Trainspotting" (eg.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4)).

~~~
bazzargh
Of course _none_ of the accents in that clip are supposed to be
Glaswegian...they're all meant to be from Edinburgh (though Robert Carlyle was
born in Maryhill in Glasgow). For the full Glaswegian effect, try this bit of
Rab C Nesbitt, parodying the fact that previous series of this show had been
shown subtitled in England

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9LT7R60kU#t=6m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9LT7R60kU#t=6m30s)

on the other hand we from Glasgow don't seem to have problems understanding
accented US stuff (eg The Wire)...I guess because we're brought up on imported
TV. The Glasgow accent is nothing though compared to full-on Geordie and
Aberdonian dialects, with lots of non-English vocabulary.

~~~
DonaldFisk
A Glaswegian here, who learned phonetics for a text-to-speech project. A
Glasgow accent actually has the closest correspondence between spelling and
pronunciation of any accent of English.

We don't all speak like Rab C. Nesbitt. The reason you might find it difficult
to understand some Glaswegians is not so much lack of familiarity with their
accent, but because they don't speak Standard English. What you're hearing is
a mixture of English and a variety of Scots. Scots
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language))
is a distinct language, though it's very closely related to English. So when,
for example, you hear a word like mair (meaning more), it's not a different
accent, it's a different language, just like German mehr or Dutch meer.
Glaswegians pronouncing "more" in Standard English don't sound that different
from Canadians or most Americans.

~~~
kibwen
You can't in good conscience link to the Wiki page on Scots without linking to
version _in_ Scots. :)

[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_leid](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_leid)

------
ekidd
I sympathize, because I occasionally try to pair program in French, and yeah,
it can be a struggle—and French spelling is far more rational than English
spelling, despite the silent letters.

But if you're having trouble with listening comprehension, there's a fairly
rapid way to improve that seems to work for many people: Watch lots of TV. A
couple of years ago, I started buying DVD box sets in French, and just
watching entire series straight through (both native French series, and dubbed
US ones). My comprehension still isn't 100%, but it got a _lot_ better, and I
was pleasantly surprised when I started understanding a lot more people in
Montréal, who tend to have strong accents related to European French speakers.

As a general rule of thumb, to improve a specific language skill (reading,
listening, speaking), you're going to have to actually do a bunch of it.
European programmers read a ton of English, so they can usually read it just
fine. But unless your country shows a lot of subtitled US television, you're
going to have much weaker listening skills.

~~~
delecti
> French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the
> silent letters.

I would argue that French is far more _consistent_ , which is really the
helpful part. Patterns of letters in French pretty much always work the same,
whereas in English you don't have that luck. The "ough" part of words in
English is a good example. There's a joke that highlights that. "Yes, English
can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though."
[1]

[1]
[https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/594168269759623168?l...](https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/594168269759623168?lang=en)

------
Drup
Being an academic, I often hang out with people of various nationalities,
usually each with it's own english-based language, slightly modified by
grammar quirks and foreign vocabulary. A linguist friend call that
"international english", which I like quite a lot. After a while, you can play
"guess the nationality" based on the grammar quirks.

And everyone is still easier to understand than Scottish people. :)

I got lucky in that I learned english not only by reading, but also by
watching a lot of series (both american and british). Watching english series
with english subtitles was a huge help for me, and I think it's a decent way
to learn nowadays, much more effective than english classes.

~~~
fridek
I'm from Eastern Europe and I've heard from native speakers that we use
perfect tenses more often than a native speak would.

It is interesting to see how much easier it is to communicate with other non-
natives in English than with natives. I always struggled with UK accent and
considered the US version simpler. However it seems British have developed
more tolerance for varying accents over time, while Americans have often
trouble understanding anything I said. For them, there was only one version of
any given word and I was not using it.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Britain has had a lot of people immigrating to the country from all over the
world for hundreds of years so a little tolerance in the biggest cities and
towns is a necessity. But also accents used to vary dramatically over the
British Isles so just talking to someone from the next county could require a
little adjustment and conversing with a person from the other end of the
country could be a very slow business.

And of course the language and vocabulary evolves. I've been out of the UK for
almost 30 years now and I find that a lot of current slang is completely
incomprehensible on first hearing.

------
gamesbrainiac
> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact
> that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain
> is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really
> don't exist in the actual language.

Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn
japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently
before learning to write it.

~~~
jzelinskie
Do you mean "write it fluently"? Are you just skipping out on memorizing kanji
and their onyomi an kunyomi? Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn
grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. I feel like you get
another level of understanding what's being said out loud if you can imagine
the kanji. For example, you might not know that みる has multiple forms with
slightly differing meanings depending on how it's used ( i.e. 見る and 観る ).
Speaking and reading/writing our two very distinct skills that need to be
individually practiced. However, they benefit each other and should probably
be practiced in tandem to progress as fast as possible.

~~~
graeme
>Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is
taught from a written source.

Actually, you don't. I've learned several languages with Pimsleur, which is
audio only. I took the lessons to their end and then progressed just by
talking to people. You learn the grammar intuitively.

I'm doing Pimsleur for Japanese now. Though I'm learning the writing system as
well, because I've heard that written Japanese lets you make more progress
than, say, written portuguese would, since Kanji let you grasp some of the
meaning of words before you know them.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Some people, including myself, find it much easier to speak when the grammar
is more advanced than the speaking - or at least conversations. Reading aloud
for the sake of learning how to say words, was the sole exception. I'm in my
second year of language classes now. Once I got a good sense of grammar - more
than just basic - the ease of speaking jumped.

In contrast, my brother really does well with audio learning - such as the
pimsleur method. Immersive environment methods do well for him. He also
benefits more from things like classroom lectures than I.

My sister is somewhere in between, but since she does well with inter-personal
communication, she would pick up on sayings and slang and dialects a bit
faster.

These sorts of differences, along with differences in learning difficulty, are
noticable in class.

------
lovboat
I am also learning English, don't know whether my suggestions or corrections
are appropriate.

Also, sometimes I watch a TV series in which police is trying to solve a 50
years old closed case. What I find interesting is how sad the life of that
people are, never a joke, sharp sound, short sentences, never a smile.
Perhaps, it is a mirror of a society. In Spain the eyes of people are full of
life, the doom is outside of our frontiers (or so I think).

"I'm still not great at English but I surely improved over 15 years": => (I
have surely improved) or: I haven't mastered English yet, but I am sure I have
improved a lot in the last 15 years.

Without to mention how trivial is to go back in the learning process as long
as you stop talking / listening for a couple of weeks… => To top it all, if
you stop talking/listening for a couple of weeks you begin going backward in
the learning process.

My long term hope is that soon or later => My long term hope is that sooner or
later.

Another reason I find myself. => Another reason why I find myself.

NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound. => (how it sounds)

~~~
lovboat
I must apologize, I think that surely people lives must not be so doom as in
that series, but I find it difficult to watch a film in which people are
really happy enjoying life. I can adventure an hypothesis: That many people
has so high a goal that they never can reach that high mountain, hence is no
wonder films are about killing criminals, war films, or enjoy life in prison.

~~~
lovboat
Another hypothesis I can adventure is that my karma will be soon below zero,
at this moment I have six (6) points, not a big deal to me.

------
atmosx
I can related with the OP. I guess most non-native English speakers can.

> Before 1950, when the "TV Language Unification" happened, everybody was
> still taking with their _dialects_ and italian was only mastered by a small
> percentage of people. Sicilian itself, the language talked the most by my
> family, predates Italian by centuries.

For a hands-on example about what he is talking about, those of you who
learned Italian try to understand what this song[1] says, without actually
studying the lyrics. It's an awesome Sicilian tune by an ethnic group
Messinese[2] group called Kunsertu (concert).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQSoTGwun4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQSoTGwun4)

[2] Messina is the port-city that gates the most beautiful island in the
world: Sicily! :-)

~~~
antirez
I love this song btw :-) It's 20 years I listen to it from time to time.

~~~
atmosx
Yeah, I love it too!

------
tyho
I can relate to this despite being a native English speaker from the UK. I
misspent my childhood in IRC and messing around with dozens of UNIX machines.

I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I
met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I
mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in
conversation, people have no idea what I am talking about, I have only ever
been exposed to them via text. I realised that I have never heard people say
them before. This was probably not helped by the fact that I prefer an essay
to a videoed talk any day.

~~~
colanderman
That's very common. No-one knew what the heck I was talking about the day I
first spoke out loud about Ess Queue Ell.

~~~
Zancarius
I think the jury's still out on that one. I've always spelled it out (and I
always will, dammit!), I've had professors either spell it out or pronounce
it, and it very much seems to be a mix of regional preference and past
experience. Of course, there's two arguments here: One is that SEQUEL was
changed to SQL to avoid possible trademark issues (thus implicating that this
also necessitated a change in the pronunciation), the other is that the
original intent was to call it SEQUEL (thus this is the Only Way). Which is
more correct? No one knows!

There's an interesting write-up on the differences[1] which I find
interesting. There's even a fellow who asked one of the original developers[2]
how to best pronounce it (spoiler: no resolution).

Come to think of it, I spell out most acronyms under 4-5 characters much to
the chagrin of my peers (unless the intent was clearly to make it a word). I
think it ought to boil down to preference.

[1] [http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/notes-from-the-lab/sql-or-
sequ...](http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/notes-from-the-lab/sql-or-sequel)

[2] [http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-
or-...](http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-sequel/)

------
kawera
An interesting related article, _English is not normal_ \-
[https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-
different-f...](https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-
from-other-languages)

------
mannykannot
I like the idea of Globish, though I have to admit both that I have not
studied it, and, as a native English speaker, my enthusiasm is somewhat self-
serving.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_(Nerriere)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_\(Nerriere\))

John McWhorter's 'magnificent bastard tongue' has many quirks to trip up
anyone learning it as an adult, and which could be simplified without making
the language unintelligible to those who already speak it.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3143472-our-
magnificent-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3143472-our-magnificent-
bastard-tongue)

------
ajmurmann
One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the
mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in
European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I
school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that
in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got
an apple" instead of just "I have an apple". I live in the US now and have
never heard that and also don't recall ever having heard that in the UK
either. What's up with that? Sounded like BS even to my fifth grade self who
knew nothing about English.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Wow. You have made me remember that I also learned it like that at school. I
don't think I've ever heard anyone say that since school (maybe once in a blue
moon, but it seems to be really infrequent), so I just forgot about it and say
"have". It would be interesting to have the opinion of native speakers on
this.

For the record, I'm now learning some Mandarin Chinese and apparently this
kind of phenomenom is even stronger in that language (I say "apparently"
because my Chinese level is still very basic, but that's what people who know
more say). The first word you learn when studying Chinese as a foreign
language is 你好 (nihao) for "hello", but apparently no one says that in China
in real life, and the same goes for 你好吗？(how are you). There is also a
controversy about a tone which is taught as a falling-rising tone but it
doesn't actually rise unless the syllable is pronounced in isolation (and you
hardly ever pronounce a syllable in isolation in real life...)

Weird stuff. I wonder what similar absurdities foreign students of Spanish (my
native language) are subject to :)

~~~
chenster
People do say "你好" in formal, like "How do you do?" such as greet someone who
just met for the first time. "Hello" is more like "嗨", casual greeting.

Having said that, learning spoken and writing English are hard for countries
that have complete different language system such as Japanese and Chinese,
Korean etc. Two reasons:

First, there’s no argument that they all have completely different style of
writing and pronunciation. Nothing to piggyback on like Dutch or German. The
English teacher in my school doesn't even speak good English, more like
"Chinglish" as we mostly emphasize in writing. Many do write English well but
have hard time communicate verbally. That’s a BIG problem.

The second thing is that the in the old days, kids don't get to learn English
until in middle school. The best time to learn language is when one is still
very young. It then becomes a second nature rather than a skills to master
later in life. I think that it's different now. Kids are learning English
early in school now. However, they don't get to practice outside of school.

------
coldtea
> _In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact
> that I started reading English without never ever listening to it._

The Italian practice of overdubbing English language movies and TV series
doesn't help either.

------
tokenadult
One of the great benefits of the Hacker News community compared to most online
communities is that Hacker News is truly international. We are blessed here
with comments by participants from all over the world, many of whom did not
grow up speaking English. But English is the common language (ἡ κοινὴ
διάλεκτος, as the Greeks would say) here, so learning English is an interest
of many Hacker News participants.

I had to learn Chinese up to a high level of proficiency as I studied Chinese
as a major subject at university, lived for three years in Taiwan in the early
1980s, and then worked for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter all
over the United States. I'll try to share here some information that helped me
learn Chinese as a second language after starting out as a native speaker of
English, in hopes that it will help readers here learn English better.

Any two languages, even closely related languages like Spanish and Italian or
standard Thai and standard Lao (and, for that matter, different regional
dialects of English or of Italian) differ in sound system, so that what is a
phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.[1]

But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will
usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the
language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in
phonetics. Disregarding sound distinctions that don't matter in one's own
language is part of having a native language (or native languages). You can't
imitate what you can't even perceive, so learning to perceive the sound
distinctions in the language to be learned is the crucial first step in
learning a second language.[2]

For most people it is brutally hard (especially after the age of puberty, and
perhaps especially for males) to learn to notice sound distinctions that don't
exist in the learner's native language. That is extraordinarily hard when the
sound distinction marks a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in
the learner's native language. To give an example, the distinction between "I
speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a
syllable, and in Mandarin Chinese there are no such consonant clusters at the
ends of syllables at all. Even worse for a Chinese person learning English,
Chinese has no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and
"third person singular" for inflecting verbs, so it is difficult for Chinese-
speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and
to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical
phrase in spoken English).

If software authors who write foreign-language-learning software simply
included information about the sound system of the language to be learned,
such as a full chart of the phonemes in that language, with descriptions of
the sounds in the standard terminology of articulatory phonetics,[3] that
would be a big help to language learners. Even better would be for all
language-learning materials to teach the notations needed from the
International Phonetic Alphabet[4] for each language to be learned.

Language-learning books, sound recordings, and software always need to include
a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in
the language) in the language to be learned. No software program for language
learning should lack pronunciation drills and listening drills like that. It
is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a
learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation.
That's a hard problem that needs more work.

Even before learners think about learning pronunciation, they think about
learning vocabulary. But the vocabulary lessons in many language-learning
materials are very poorly focused and ineffective.

The typical software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially
to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated
for vocabulary acquisition. The map is not the territory, and words don't
match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate
languages. Every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into
a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar
meaning.

The best way to learn vocabulary in a second language is day-by-day steady
exposure to actual texts (recorded conversations, stories, songs, personal
letters, articles, and so on) written or spoken by native speakers of the
language. The late John DeFrancis was a master teacher of Chinese, so I'll
quote him on this point here. In the section "Suggestions for Study" in the
front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, DeFrancis writes,
"Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the
interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ,
READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can
only be well acquired in context and the context must be a genuine context
produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my
personal website,

[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to
take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word
broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives
you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s,
I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-
language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can
gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of
unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language.
That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with
vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which
is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every
language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known
explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a
foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to
understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring
and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native
speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick
books reporting the grammatical rules of the language.[5] It is well worth
your time to make formal study of the grammar of your native language and of
the language you are trying to learn, especially in materials for foreign
learners.

[1]
[http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...](http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm)

[2]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics)

[4]
[http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html](http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html)

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Soluzioni-Practical-Contemporary-
Routl...](http://www.amazon.com/Soluzioni-Practical-Contemporary-Routledge-
Grammars/dp/1138018481/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Italian-Grammar-Practical-
Gramm...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Italian-Grammar-Practical-
Grammars/dp/0415671868/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Modern-Italian-
HRG/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Modern-Italian-
HRG/dp/0340913398/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-
Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/0582517346/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/0521431468/)

~~~
jacquesm
> But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will
> usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the
> language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in
> phonetics.

I had one very clear example of that at one time: The difference between the
Polish words for switching something on and switching something off.

włączyć -> to switch on

and

wyłącz -> to switch off

When you see them written here they look very different but when you hear them
in spoken Polish conversation they're all but impossible to tell apart (at
least, to me!).

------
WalterBright
I enjoy watching foreign movies with subtitles, and then trying to learn a few
words in the language that way. I watched a French movie a few days ago that
way, and was surprised at how many French words I already knew.

I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big
enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with
Dutch subtitles.

~~~
masklinn
> I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big
> enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with
> Dutch subtitles.

IIRC that's the case in all scandinavian countries, I'd also expect it in most
of eastern europe (but having started much more recently).

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Norway dubs childrens showsm including things like Disney. It was helpful; At
one point in my learning Norwegian, I was watching Spiderman cartoons because
the language is always very simple and clear. Children start learning English
in school formally around age 6. It helps that video games and popular more
adultish movies only have subtitles. A few workplaces are English-dominant,
but in general one can't find job with english skills alone.

The actual effect of this is that I'm easily understood when I speak english
by many and get advantages like being able to use an english word when I am
unsure or being greeted by many words that i only need remember pronunciation.
But not everyone can actually speak english well, or they are just as unsure
using english as I am norwegian - which weirdly, doesn't seem to be such a
problem speaking english with other non-native english speakers.

------
DrScump
I don't know what is typical in the rest of the English-speaking world... but
note that in the USA now, it is _law_ that all broadcast programming be
closed-captioned in English (at _least_ ). There are two CC "channels" for
every program; the second may be populated by captions for another language,
e.g. Spanish.

A growing number of network shows also have live audio in Spanish via a
selectable Separate Audio Program (SAP).

Even older programming broadcast in syndication is typically captioned. (Heck,
I'm watching a series episode from 1964 on MeTV right now that has been
captioned.)

Point being, if you are in the USA and are an English learner, turn on CC for
any programming you watch. Most captions are placed such that they don't
disrupt you viewing very much. (The exceptions are kind of comical... many Fox
sports shows, for example, have the CC overlay the scoreboard block more often
than not.) I generally leave mine on most of the time, since modern TV dramas
often "drop" a critical phrase or two of dialog in background noise, to my
ear.

------
mhartl
As a native English speaker learning Spanish, one thing I've found especially
helpful is watching Spanish programming with _Spanish_ subtitles. Such
resources used to be difficult to find, but with SAP on cable systems [1],
YouTube videos [2], and streaming programming [3], it's never been easier. And
Spanish is easy to spell; I'd bet the returns to watching English programming
with _English_ subtitles would be even higher, given that English spelling is
a bit, um, _tough_.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_audio_program).
I particularly like watching children's programs, which focus on vocabulary
acquisition for everyday terms.

[2]: See especially [http://www.bookbox.com/](http://www.bookbox.com/).

[3]: E.g., _Club de Cuervos_ and _Narcos_ on Netflix.

~~~
StavrosK
Club de Cuervos looks nice, I've been looking for a Spanish comedy, thanks!

------
pzagor2
I'm from a small Europen country. I watched a loot of English cartoons and
movies when I was in primary school. I never really put time into studying
English, and my grades were below average. But I was always able to understand
and communicate in English better than my friends. I still struggle with
spelling and forming proper sentences. Sometimes I found myself stutter, or I
get lost in the middle of a sentence. I work for an English-speaking remote
company, and I communicate with coworkers on a daily basis. I think I'm pretty
introverted in my native language. Usually, I just don't pay enough attention
when speaking to people. But when I use English, I have to put that little
extra effort into following a conversation that is showing up as me asking
more questions and being a more active participant in the discussion. This is
no a 100% rule, but something a noticed over the years.

------
pizzeys
I think this fact (and he's obviously not wrong, though I don't know if I'd
label it a secret - everyone knows this about English, I thought?) is
inevitable from any language which gains the reach English did, or at least,
gained the reach English did at the time English did... whether it would be
different now we have global communication all the time remains to be seen I
suppose.

How do you have a language spoken by so many wildly different people, who
bring in their own vocabulary with each generation, and _not_ end up with
irregularity in spelling and pronunciation?

English is a mongrel, certainly, but that is a product of it being so widely
'deployed', not an inherent feature of the language. Sure, Italian is regular.
Italian also doesn't have germanic roots all over the place mixed in with the
latin and chinese and whatever else.

~~~
umanwizard
English has been "weird" for the reasons you're describing since before it
spread anywhere.

It has more to do with the number of different cultures that have conquered
England, combined with the fact that written English has existed for a very
long time compared to most European languages. The fact that there isn't an
authority that can dictate major spelling reforms doesn't help either.

~~~
kwhitefoot
> The fact that there isn't an authority that can dictate major spelling
> reforms doesn't help either.

Nor is there any need for it. An authority that could dictate spelling would
soon start dictating pronunciation. It's bad enough that the pernicious
influence of Estuary English is levelling pronunciation over the whole country
but at least people, theoretically at least, have a choice. The only influence
such an authority has is to artificially slow the development of the language
and to try to shoe horn regional variations into a single formula.

People often complain that written English doesn't correspond with
pronunciation. But no one ever says whose pronunciation that the spelling is
supposed to reflect.

I'm from the south west of England and my pronunciation of words like house,
boat, castle, book, etc. is quite different from that of, say the North East.
So how would you like us to spell house? Should it be /'haʊs/ which is
probably about what I would say and is also regarded as RP. Or should it be
/'hu:s/ which is the best I can do for the pronunciation that at least used to
be common in the North East and in parts of Scotland.

Would the spelling authority also specify which syllables to stress? Then how
will it deal with American English which stresses the final syllable in cases
where most Brits would stress the penult.

------
unsignedint
I have been using full time English for a 23 years now.

I think the biggest struggle for me is it's hard to tell what's right from
wrong. While I completely understand that I'm not anywhere perfect in grammar,
things that Ginger won't catch is the ones I have often had problems with,
perhaps the sort of thing that makes my composition very obvious that it is
written by a non-native. (Probably people can even tell that by reading this
comment...)

While I never had so much of problem in operation side, it is a bit
frustrating for me when I am forced to work with public relations matters (I
work for a very small company) considering I know that I am way under-
qualified.

------
superplussed
I agree with the sentiment regarding how important talking/listening is in the
language learning process. I came to Germany from the U.S. a year and a half
ago and have spent that time trying to learn a foreign language for the first
time. I definitely found a lack of online resources that were centered around
conversational fluency, and so started working on one of my own:

[http://seedlang.com](http://seedlang.com)

They take influence from some of the resources I found most effective like the
Michel Thomas and Assimil audio books which gave me the biggest boosts in
terms of my German listening and speaking abilities.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Oh, I so completely understand the lack of resources, though imagine you are
in Norway instead. I took a year of french and a couple years of German in
high school, unfortunately that was years ago. I've been here 2.5 years, and
tried to teach myself. I started my second year of language classes in August,
which has worked out much, much better.

------
microcolonel
Well, we need a common language. If it's not your native language, you'll be
at a relative disadvantage if it _is_ somebody else's.

Would Esperanto be preferable? Some people would have the jump on you for that
as well.

------
geococcyxc
"The nonsense of english spelling":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjeoQ8gRmQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjeoQ8gRmQ)

------
zick
> _in 10 years I 'll likely no longer write code professionally_

why?

------
potatote
The introvert vs. extrovert part just sounds like what I experience. I
consider myself decent in writing and reading skills, but when it comes to
speaking and communicating ideas, it doesn't come natural to a non-native
speaker like myself. Worse is when people expect you to think and speak out
loud during programming interviews. Then, my brain is tasked to do two things
at once under a lot of pressure.

------
ldesegur
Someone fluent in English should rewrite antirez's post and submit it as a
diff to the author. I for one, would really enjoy learning from it.

------
rachbelaid
I had a similar experience. And event after living in a UK/US for 6y and my
partner being a native english speaker, sometimes I struggle. One other
frustration that I had, when you have to argue for your case. If you have to
justify a solution against a native english speaker that can create some
frustration as finding the right wording for the arguments can be sometimes a
challenge.

------
anon4
That's weird. I have pretty much the opposite experience from the author. I'm
talking with americans, canadians, english people, australians and a few
slavic europeans in english (myself being from a slavic country) and the only
ones I have a little bit of trouble understanding are australians. And that
one guy with the lisp.

~~~
satori99
As an Australian, the only English speakers I have trouble understanding, are
the Scots.

------
scientes
Phonetic English: [http://unspell.it/](http://unspell.it/)

------
lazyjones
I've found
[http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=either](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=either)
useful for clearing up some mispronunciation issues / doubts. Link also shows
some English awkwardness...

------
0xFFC
I am struggling with it right now.Some time I think my language part of my
brain does not work.

------
daddykotex
This post is more than 2 years old and still very relevant.

------
c3534l
English isn't unique by any means in that people from different countries
speak different dialects which can sometimes be marginally difficult to
understand. In fact, this is how new languages are created in the first place.
At one point Italy, France and Romania all spoke Vulgar Latin. And French used
to be considered the lingua franca to such and extent that it's in the damned
name of the thing. But no one complains that the Portugese have difficulty
understanding the Spanish who can't understand the French who can't understand
the Italians who can't understand the Romanians. I've been to a few different
English-speaking countries now and I can understand everyone's English just
fine unless they're from a rural area. Doesn't matter if it's rural Ireland or
rural Georgia, I'll have to ask them to put on a fake accent, no matter how
poor it is.

English is not particularly strange or unique on most measures. Phonetically
it has a few unusual sounds, but every language has one or two (and our most
odd sound "th" is found in everything from medieval Japanese to ancient
Greek). Grammatically English approaches an analytic language, though nothing
quite like Chinese. That means we have fairly sophisticated syntax (meaning
attributed to the order of words), but our morphology (the actual words
changing according to grammatical meaning like for tense or plurality) is very
simple. People from countries where the speak languages with all sorts of
genitive and ablative cases with verb agreement on prepositions with an
animacy hierarchy (I'm exaggerating here, obviously) seem to see English as
simple.

Of course, English isn't particularly well-suited to be a lingua franca. If
anything our shift toward analyticism is more of a result of England being
repeatedly conquered in it's early settlement by Germanic tribes followed by
English speakers repeatedly conquering everyone else, while embracing
multiculturalism. But like most lingua francas, they gain status because of
their economic importance and then you have to learn them simply because
they've become the lingua franca.

I am not optimistic on the idea that a language should emerge that is actually
well-suited and designed to be a lingua franca. Esperanto has been around for,
what, over a hundred years now or something? And I'm sure Amiga was
technically superior to IBM and in a thousand other format wars the
technically superior option never took hold.

I'm just glad that I don't have to learn the bastard version of Latin that has
grown up in academia and instead my own native language is the standard.
There's very little you can do to convince me that an 8-syllable compound word
formed from the roots of a language that did not allow compounding using word
meanings that are grossly different from their original meaning for a common,
everyday concept or thing for the sake of "universal standard" is a superior
method of doing things.

------
foggy80
The only country where English is the native language is the UK.

~~~
toyg
Wrong: the only country where English is the native language is England.
Wales, Scotland and Ireland were taught the language at the point of a sword.

Worse: English is a somewhat arbitrary set of different local dialects with
heavy Icelandic and Scandinavian influences, and formalized by French and
German ruling classes. Many things it might be, but hardly "native" of any
given region.

~~~
leoc
> Wales, Scotland and Ireland were taught the language at the point of a
> sword.

AFAIK this is somewhere between very incomplete and clearly wrong in the case
of Scotland, and to a lesser extent Ireland. It may actually be a bit more
accurate to say that of England, come to think of it: it's just that the
pointing of swords happened a while earlier there (to the extent that it
really happened) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-
Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-
Saxon_settlement_of_Britain) . But this just highlights that it's probably
impossible to reasonably declare languages non-native on this kind of basis.

~~~
ciupicri
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language)

> Irish (Gaeilge), also referred to as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic
> language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and
> historically spoken by the Irish people. [...]

> Irish was the predominant language of the Irish people for most of their
> recorded history, and they brought it with them to other regions, notably
> Scotland and the Isle of Man, where through earlier branching from Middle
> Irish it gave rise to Scottish Gaelic and Manx respectively.

~~~
leoc
I did most of my primary and secondary education in the Republic of Ireland,
and finished with a secondary leaving qualification in Irish Gaelic language
and literature (as well as modern Irish and European history). My final grade
in Irish was fairly respectable too, and I even had half-decent conversational
Irish by then.

