As someone who moved to an English-speaking country as an adult, I noticed the temptation to reach a "local maximum" in language learning and stop making progress. This can happen when you feel like you have reached a point where you can get by with your current level of proficiency, but it can actually limit your ability to fully express yourself in the language. The only way to overcome this challenge is to make a deliberate effort to continue learning and improving. I agree with the author of the blog post and appreciate their message.
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.
In the UK there is indeed a reluctance to correct people's English as you say, but if you live somewhere like London you are surrounded by non-native speakers so apart from other considerations it would also be exhausting to correct everyone's errors. We must also be mindful of the reality that English is the global language, and as such it is arguably not the place for someone who speaks a particular dialect to be overly prescriptive. The situation in a Slavic county is likely to be different - a non-native speaker is I suspect far more of a novelty, and the reasonable assumption for native interlocutors is that the non-native is actively eager to improve their proficiency rather than merely trying to get by in the language, so feedback is welcome.
In the spirit of giving a correction, and how to get them, the title should say either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.” I was going to suggest lang-8 for written corrections but it appears they changed to HiNative.com (I’m not affiliated) which appears to be for a combination of corrections and asking language questions.
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.
To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."
That's definitely true, but just for the third person.
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.
“A apple,” a grammatical mistake yes, but always makes me smile because it reminds me of the Honeymooners episode where Ralph Kramden gets stage freight presenting he “handy housewife helper” ending his latest get rich scheme.
Another thing that stood out: “the primary school” instead of just “primary school”. It implies there was only one primary school where you lived, which I’m guessing is not what you meant.
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'd like to offer a counterpoint: quite likely you'll reach a ceiling unless you move as a kid or, better yet, as a toddler or baby! I spent ten years in the US, and was very lucky to have a wonderful native uncle who cared a lot and, sometimes tenderly and other times quite bluntly, corrected me constantly, but naturally this became less frequent.
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!
The effects of just absorbing what's around you diminishes at the C2 level. From my experience a huge effort must be made to improve beyond that, e.g. pronunciation won't improve without focused effort - you need a tutor or youtube videos on the topic.
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.
Consider reaching a point where you only improve half of what you improved the day before, say first p for some increment p in English proficiency (hence p/2 the next day, p/4 the next…). By definition, you’ll keep improving for the rest of your life, but will never improve 2p counting from that fateful day, à la Zeno. That’s an example, not a model, which I don’t have.
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.
> the general tendency to be welcoming and non-offensive makes it very hard to get corrections and feedback from people you are talking to
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.
Thanks for the comment. Wanted to add that, for me personally, effort _has_ to follow fun, and only then it's efficient, and, most importantly, sustainable. This post was partially inspired by an awesome book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis, btw.
I don't correct people on the street but I do correct and advise without being asked for people I work with that I know are not native speakers. I have the sense that they appreciate it
I am such person, stuck at "local maximum". I do still live in my country of birth, though. One of the reasons I'm stuck is I keep thinking: "Should I invest more time in learning English, or maybe it's better to start another language? (Spanish perhaps)" ROI with learning new language seems much higher than learning more English, just to avoid occasional hiccups in my conversations.
As some one who has moved countries and the main language isn't Indo-European in nature as well non alphabetical I'll share a bit. I have studied said language over 10 years and have been speaking it daily for at least 10 years. I have a few mistakes that I make but no one ever corrects them. I asked friends and family here why they never did. The response, because you sound cute making those mistakes. I was taken back and since then I always ask a coworker or loved one to check any documents I write that need to be official because those cute mistakes don't help.
I think English is peculiar in the sense that tons of people use it as a second language, and there are also many local variants that sound quite different. As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French.
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 can definitely recognize the writing styles of non-native speakers and can sometimes guess their primary language by the way they write. For example, Russian speakers tend to omit articles before nouns and speakers of romance languages often prefer Latin-derived words which also exist in English over more common Germanic words because those words transliterate easily from their language.
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.
For precisely the reason you stated - loads of non-native English speakers for all over the world - you just get used to it. I’m so used to “broken” English that’s it just not really a big deal. I know what they meant. Drop all the articles and don’t conjugate verbs for all care (many verbs don’t even change in most tenses anyway), it rarely makes a difference. And if I’m not sure I’ll ask.
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.
Not just the non-native speakers, but also multiple strands of native speakers (and big regional differences even within native-speaking country, and significant grammar and word choice variation as well as pronunciation differences), no official "correct" version and a certain amount of cultural resentment even within Britain to RP which was intended to be an official version.
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.
> As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French
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!
Oh I notice oddities all the time. Unusual word orders, preposition use, that sort of thing. As an example “I barely have experience of” is perfectly clear but not idiomatic, enough to tag you as likely non-native (compare to “I’ve barely experienced”). The thing about most native English speakers is that we don’t care; we’re just happy everyone else is speaking English. If the cost of every person in the world being able to communicate with me is hearing some very-slightly-off phrasing, that is a great bargain.
(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.)
yeah, like others have said, it's very easy to see a lot of non-native english comments all across the internet, tv, real world, in pretty much every space. It's something that it's fairly easy to ignore - people are usually able to get their point across, especially because native speakers have a whole lot of experience with interacting with non-native speakers, especially those from major language families, so can usually recognise patterns in broken grammar.
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.
the dialects in australia, NZ, england, US, Canada have a handful of unique idiomatic grammatical structures. never mind the varieties in the british colonies in asia and africa where the native/imported community outnumber british descendants - and im not referring to the colloquial dialects or creoles but the formal english varieties within each country. when you are correcting someone's english, are you correcting a grammatical mistake or a grammatical variety that you're not familiar with? it's fraught with danger.
I've read about native English speakers who take classes to cleanse their colloquialisms from their speech. It's for conducting business with people who speak English but not natively. OP in a way is trying to do the opposite.
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".
Ooo, that is a particularly great example - I wouldn't have thought of that (no pun intended), and I pride myself on being able to scale my use of English to the skill-level of the person I am speaking to.
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!
Sometimes people just hear what they want to hear. I’ve definitely been in situations where my advice was carefully caveated with a precursor “If I were in your situation, I would do X” and the person has just heard “I would do X”.
I would never understand it as "but you said you would do it", I would say "would" is safe to use with non-natives. But it may depend on the native language of the other person. There are some really weird languages out there!
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.
As a German I feel this is just common sense polite speech.
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 get the same feeling of momentary compulsion to exactly answer a greeting when confronted with two very common greetings in Thai: "Have you eaten rice yet?" and "Where are you going?"
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.)
I (a native english speaker) frequently ask this question at the start of conversations. and I am actually seeking information- it is not an empty ritual.
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.
Not exactly. "Wie geht's"? is more informal and it is perfectly acceptable to say something like "ja muss" or "geht so". There is no forced positivity. You can imply that you are feeling bad or just normal without it being a big deal.
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.
As a native speaker of English, when someone asks me that I do try to express how I am, but I know my response is being interpreted relative to a baseline of how people answer this question. If I'm having a rough day I will answer differently from how I would on a good day. But while doing this I'm balancing all sorts of other considerations: how much time I can spend away from other topics, whether I want a closer or more formal relationship with the other person, what they want, etc. I modulate my response relative to the communicative baseline, so my interlocutor, if they're fluent, can infer that I'm doing well or poorly, I'm in haste or willing to take some time, that I put great stock in the my relationship to them or little.
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.
Interesting point, never thought of that. As an ESL speaker, somewhat advanced and with an experience of living in the US for a while, I have learned many colloquialisms that I recently had to become more aware of when dealing with someone speaking the language at a much more basic level. So this concept actually applies to people like me, too, and maybe even more so, since we're less likely to be able to instinctively evaluate how common or rare a colloquialism can be to a another foreign ear.
I too try my best to learn and use colloquialisms. Excessively formal language is very academic, something you learn in a school rather than by actually communicating with other humans. Inability to understand and communicate using informal language and slang marks us as foreigners. Even subtle differences in word choice can sound weird to native speakers.
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...
> 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.
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.
On anonymous and pseudonymous communities, people tend to assume everyone's american for various reasons. This is also true here on HN.
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.
> 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...
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?
Yeah, sort of. The game is Tibia, it has an item called copper shield. When I was a kid, all my friends and I used to write and pronounce it as cooper shield. I internalized that mistake to the point I actually thought the item was called cooper shield despite knowing what copper is.
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.
For American “literate”language favored by artists and elites:
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.
It's possible that blue class workers got those blues real bad. I asked their women for comment, but they said they woke up this mornin', upped, and left 'em. The only ones I could catch up with were very old ones from the Missisippi Delta region, who admitted to feeling like a broke down engine...
Thanks for teaching me the word garrulous! For years in my teens and twenties I built my English vocabulary slowly, by looking up any word I didn’t know while browsing the internet. Looking up 15 words every day adds up, even if you don’t have a system for memorizing them. But there too have I reached a plateau.
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!
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.
Thanks for these suggestions! I'm already a fan of Fry and Laurie, of David Mitchell, and have read the Night Watch. (And some Asimov, but in my native tongue.) So it's highly likely I'd enjoy the rest of these things.
Asimov is a very mediocre writer, stylistically speaking. People read Asimov for the ideas, not for his prose, so I wouldn't recommend him in the context in which we're speaking.
I think learning at that age for some people is not going get anywhere (at least for me). And this is not about giving up. It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing.
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.
> It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing.
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 am older than TFA's author, and still practice language acquisition.
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...
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
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.
> Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive?
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.
> Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive?
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?
Two things I observed while slowly getting better at English.
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.
Something else that came to mind while I was reading the comments: you do want phonetics/pronunciation classes when you're C2+. Do learn IPA and learn the sounds, it's crucial not just for your accent but for understanding others. I found [1] very useful, but only combined with a great tutor.
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.
What's a good rule for when to use "the" before a noun?
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
Seems very inconsistent. Exclude "the" before some proper nouns.
The use of "the" is a gray area which is largely a matter of style and regionalism. Nevertheless, let me try to explain.
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.
You appear to be focused on proper nouns. There's a very simple rule for them: some of them are arthrous, and the rest aren't. This question makes as much sense as asking for a rule governing when a noun should begin with B: box, book, and boat do, but knife, mail, and ghost don't. How do you tell?
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 Francisco
you're omitting "the" when using capitalized nouns. except when prepending "new"
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
You can sort of justify "the Amazon River" as "the Amazon river" -- i.e. the river that happens to be in the Amazon rainforest. The other two don't really act like "adjective + noun".
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.
It can be either "in hospital" or "in the hospital"; this tends to be a regional difference. UK English prefers without "the", while US English is likely to include it.
"in pub", on the other hand, would never be right.
You're probably right, but I wasn't sure if there might be some regional variation even within the US.
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...)
Yeah both of those responses would be correct and how I would answer as a native speaker. Though depending on the context I would likely say "at school" vs "in school" as my default response.
US native English speaker, so this may depend somewhat on what variety of English is being used.
These are craftier meanings, at least in US English.
"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.
I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time.
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.
> The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar
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).
I'm a native English speaker currently studying Russian in Kazakhstan, and I completely understand the frustration of lacking sophistication. It can become a negative feedback loop where lacking the ability to have fun and nuanced conversations causes me to avoid talking in the target language, which then only brings me further from reaching the language level I want. It certainly takes dedicated effort - language learning by osmosis can only take you so far as an adult. P.S. I had to look up the word "garrulous", so kudos to you for the vocab word.
One trick I employ for language acquisition: as a native X-speaker, I often encounter native-Y speakers making mistake Z in my mother tongue. When I remember to do so, a little googling at home often reveals that a light retro-translation of Z is indeed the proper (sometimes even a refined) construction in Y.
I think one of the best ways to increase your overall ability to utilize a language is to read as much fiction as you can. Authors do not like to sound repetitive. As they write their novels, they will be forced to find alternate ways to say the same thing.
Online gambling promoters are the best communicators. They hustle and you feel as if you are in control and there is the investment ad with fine print after the aster saying, "You do not own..".
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.