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As a non-native speaker who started to regularly use English in my 20's, I find pronunciation is the hardest part. As mentioned in the article, "The fine distin

As a non-native speaker who started to regularly use English in my 20's, I find pronunciation is the hardest part. As mentioned in the article, "The fine distinctions of English vocalism are beyond many adult learners’ phonetic abilities, which is why some foreigners pronounce modal and model the same, or bird and bed the same, or seat and sit the same, and so on." Pronunciations in Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. are much easier to manage. Although most adult learners can never pronounce as good as native speakers, it is much closer in the latter cases. I find another "undesirable feature" mentioned in the article, "absurdly large multilayer vocabulary", is quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages belonging to the same family, like German, French, Spanish, etc. For my untrained ears, English and German are more similar to each other than Mandarin (my native tongue) and many dialects in southern China.

fennecfoxen 11y ago
> quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages It's fun like that; I've studied a trivial amount of Dutch and German and kept running into words where the root was present in English in some really weird way. For instance, one of the first signs I saw at AMS was 'uitgang' (exit) which is clearly the same root as 'gangplank' and 'gangway' and which shows up in some really old folk songs (Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, and why sae sad gang ye, O?). Or "rustig", which is just "quiet", but has a certain specific rough-hewn country-living feel to it when you use it as the English word "rustic". They also seem to use the old-fashioned form of the helper-verb "will" ("wil") to mean want/desire (as contrasted with "shall", which has been replaced in modern English, at least in America.) And, of course, the word for boy-child is "jongen" - pronounced "young'n", like you're from Appalachia or something. (Actually, I think there are a lot of things like that. Don't put down the people with the 'uneducated' accents, they have a perfectly legitimate linguistic history.)
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  "Gang" (in that sense) isn't all that weird. It's just "going" with different vowels. "Uitgang" -> "out going" -> exit.
somehnreader 11y ago
I came to England in my 20s and am now often complimented on my pronunciation: Try to over exaggerate the way natives speak your target language, almost as if you were mocking them (Do it by yourself first, not in a conversation as that might make them punch you). Watch QI and try to speak like Stephen Fry does, or if you want a US accent do the same with American shows. After a while you get the hang of it and you speak more natural. I am in no way able to trick English people into thinking that I am one of them, but other foreigners always assume I am English, to Americans I just sound British.

fennecfoxen 11y ago

> quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages It's fun like that; I've studied a trivial amount of Dutch and German and kept running into words where the root was present in English in some really weird way. For instance, one of the first signs I saw at AMS was 'uitgang' (exit) which is clearly the same root as 'gangplank' and 'gangway' and which shows up in some really old folk songs (Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, and why sae sad gang ye, O?). Or "rustig", which is just "quiet", but has a certain specific rough-hewn country-living feel to it when you use it as the English word "rustic". They also seem to use the old-fashioned form of the helper-verb "will" ("wil") to mean want/desire (as contrasted with "shall", which has been replaced in modern English, at least in America.) And, of course, the word for boy-child is "jongen" - pronounced "young'n", like you're from Appalachia or something. (Actually, I think there are a lot of things like that. Don't put down the people with the 'uneducated' accents, they have a perfectly legitimate linguistic history.)

Turing_Machine 11y ago
"Gang" (in that sense) isn't all that weird. It's just "going" with different vowels. "Uitgang" -> "out going" -> exit.

somehnreader 11y ago

I came to England in my 20s and am now often complimented on my pronunciation: Try to over exaggerate the way natives speak your target language, almost as if you were mocking them (Do it by yourself first, not in a conversation as that might make them punch you). Watch QI and try to speak like Stephen Fry does, or if you want a US accent do the same with American shows. After a while you get the hang of it and you speak more natural. I am in no way able to trick English people into thinking that I am one of them, but other foreigners always assume I am English, to Americans I just sound British.