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Hmm, ... English is not my native language, but I don't think I have problems applying the work the. So I find that hard to imagine. However, my native languag

by ma2rten 15y ago

Hmm, ... English is not my native language, but I don't think I have problems applying the work the. So I find that hard to imagine. However, my native languages are Dutch and German, which are probably the closest two languages to English in terms grammar. So, that could be a possible explanation. I read that children learn to pronounce the th sound quite late. And this is generally a give-away for of non-native speakers. Could it be that you are confusing this with that ?

rmc 15y ago
children learn to pronounce the th sound quite late. And this is generally a give-away for of non-native speakers The working class accent for where I'm from (Dublin, Ireland), prounounces "th" as "d", so "the" can be said "de". A german friend advised his mother (who's is an english teacher (in germany)) to teach her students this, since it's easier for germans to pronounce!
kiiski 15y ago
Many of the people I studied with had problems with "the" (I still use it wrong sometimes), so it probably depends on your native language (mine is Finnish).
Jun8 15y ago
You're right, the "th* sound is the bane of non-native speakers (maybe an analogy would be the "ch" sound in German). However, I was referring to the actual usage of the definite article, not its spelling. I think the problems here are of two different kinds: Those who come from languages where there is no definite article (e.g. Chinese, Turkish) struggle to understand the correct usage. This is one of the most common glitches I hear from my Mandarin speaking colleagues (in addition to omitting plural forms). Not all IE languages have articles, i.e. Hindi, Russian, Latin. Simplifying thing, one may say that English is a curious mixture (or bastard :-) of French and Anglo-Saxon, both of which has articles. It shed a lot of its grammatical rules over the centuries (e.g. noun declension, verb endings) but still carry vestiges, like the appendix, which is what confuses other IE speakers. These errors, tend to be the opposite of the Mandarin case, i.e. the over-regularization of the usage. My wife, who is near-native in French, does this frequently in her English usage. This brings to mind a slightly different topic: The prediction of gender for (genderless) words adopted from English, i.e. if you are German and see the word iPad for the first time, which gender do you use? This study (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.851&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132...) tackled this problem for Scandinavian languages and found that it is quite difficult, they get ~70 accuracy.

by ma2rten 15y ago

rmc 15y ago

children learn to pronounce the th sound quite late. And this is generally a give-away for of non-native speakers The working class accent for where I'm from (Dublin, Ireland), prounounces "th" as "d", so "the" can be said "de". A german friend advised his mother (who's is an english teacher (in germany)) to teach her students this, since it's easier for germans to pronounce!

kiiski 15y ago

Many of the people I studied with had problems with "the" (I still use it wrong sometimes), so it probably depends on your native language (mine is Finnish).

Jun8 15y ago

You're right, the "th* sound is the bane of non-native speakers (maybe an analogy would be the "ch" sound in German). However, I was referring to the actual usage of the definite article, not its spelling. I think the problems here are of two different kinds: Those who come from languages where there is no definite article (e.g. Chinese, Turkish) struggle to understand the correct usage. This is one of the most common glitches I hear from my Mandarin speaking colleagues (in addition to omitting plural forms). Not all IE languages have articles, i.e. Hindi, Russian, Latin. Simplifying thing, one may say that English is a curious mixture (or bastard :-) of French and Anglo-Saxon, both of which has articles. It shed a lot of its grammatical rules over the centuries (e.g. noun declension, verb endings) but still carry vestiges, like the appendix, which is what confuses other IE speakers. These errors, tend to be the opposite of the Mandarin case, i.e. the over-regularization of the usage. My wife, who is near-native in French, does this frequently in her English usage. This brings to mind a slightly different topic: The prediction of gender for (genderless) words adopted from English, i.e. if you are German and see the word iPad for the first time, which gender do you use? This study (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.851&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132...) tackled this problem for Scandinavian languages and found that it is quite difficult, they get ~70 accuracy.