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After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incred

After talking to people from a lot of other countries (inc. europeans who use English as their "lingua franca"), the main benefit of English is that it's incredibly fault tolerant. It's difficult to learn well enough to sound like a native speaker, but even if you are very far from it, you're still understandable. Think about these phrases: * I go store now * I hungry * I wash car later * I cook food grill tomorrow if no rain These all immediately sound like a "foreigner" speaking, yet are completely understandable. Many other languages, relying on conjugations and implicit subjects & objects are way more inaccessible to new learners!

axaxs 6y ago
This is a really good point. It reminds me of exactly how my daughter spoke English as she was learning. It always amazed me how she put words together to make a sentence that was at face value wrong, but intent was understood. I think my two favorites were 'i scary' and 'that makes me funny'(after laughing, I guess context matters too)
kaba0 6y ago
They would be equally understandable in any language given a one-by-one translation of each word, since the same information is conveyed either way. I think humans are the fault tolerant in language understanding, not a language. (Or in a different meaning of fault tolerance, like used in information theory, I would even wager that a more regular language will have more of it, because of some “parity checks”. For example, a disappearing subject will still make a sentence understandable because a suffix makes if contextually guessable, eg a gender)
nullsense 6y ago
Not much different than any other language... You can still get get quite a bit wrong and still be understood no matter what you're speaking. You dont even need to conjugate verbs necessarily.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Reminds me of my dad, when he taught Norwegian to Vietnamese immigrants. First time and he was checking attendance. He called out a name, looked up and saw 20 hands in the air. He was very surprised because due to the way it was written it should have been only one...
dehrmann 6y ago
I'd say English listeners are incredibly fault-tolerant because of how diverse English speakers are. Languages with fewer, more localized speakers are less tolerant of poor pronunciation because there's less variety in what they hear.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- smcl 6y ago
  This x 100! My pronunciation in Czech is now pretty bang on, but when I started I didn't elongate "long" vowels enough - by that I mean a vowel like "á" should be pronounced about 50% longer than "a". My great example is when I was trying to tell my friend something about a pub called "u čápa". She told me she didn't know it, which was surprising as it was well known within my friend group. I explained its location and she said "ahhhhh, you mean u čápa!". I couldn't believe it - the difference between "I know this" and "What are you talking about, I have no clue what that could possibly be" was like 50 milliseconds more "a". But it makes sense - if you've only ever heard correct Czech your likely won't know dodgy Czech. Most native-English speakers have plenty of exposure to various levels of English-language ability, either directly via speaking to a tourist or indirectly through various other media (radio, TV, film, podcast, music).
ggambetta 6y ago
Or even phrases that later entered mainstream English - "long time no see", "no can do", etc.
Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
OTOH in Mandarin, the correct way to say things is actually more or less like that :) Most of the time tenses are inferred from context, copula (the verb "to be" in "I am hungry" or "there is no rain") is omitted, and there are some prepositions but very often you don't need them (for example, you would indeed say "I go store"). A pity that it has a super complex pronunciation, tonal system and writing system to go with the extremely straightforward grammar.
- 5C07BF3E 6y ago
  > I go store Grammar is simpler, but the need for tonal agreement makes the vocabulary more complex. You can't just go to a "store". You would go to a food-store or a one-thing-store, or a store-store.
ivan1783 6y ago
English is no more or less fault tolerant than any other language. You can make the exact same sentences in Russian, German, French (I speak those so I can draw parallels) and they make the same amount of sense and sound the same (incorrect) - but you get the meaning. People here saying that native speakers of other languages are not fault tolerant but that just isn't true. There are exceptions, sure but for the most part people speak with me in German/French just fine even with the mistakes I make (Russian/English being my mother languages).

axaxs 6y ago

This is a really good point. It reminds me of exactly how my daughter spoke English as she was learning. It always amazed me how she put words together to make a sentence that was at face value wrong, but intent was understood. I think my two favorites were 'i scary' and 'that makes me funny'(after laughing, I guess context matters too)

kaba0 6y ago

They would be equally understandable in any language given a one-by-one translation of each word, since the same information is conveyed either way. I think humans are the fault tolerant in language understanding, not a language. (Or in a different meaning of fault tolerance, like used in information theory, I would even wager that a more regular language will have more of it, because of some “parity checks”. For example, a disappearing subject will still make a sentence understandable because a suffix makes if contextually guessable, eg a gender)

nullsense 6y ago

Not much different than any other language... You can still get get quite a bit wrong and still be understood no matter what you're speaking. You dont even need to conjugate verbs necessarily.

magicalhippo 6y ago
Reminds me of my dad, when he taught Norwegian to Vietnamese immigrants. First time and he was checking attendance. He called out a name, looked up and saw 20 hands in the air. He was very surprised because due to the way it was written it should have been only one...

dehrmann 6y ago

I'd say English listeners are incredibly fault-tolerant because of how diverse English speakers are. Languages with fewer, more localized speakers are less tolerant of poor pronunciation because there's less variety in what they hear.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smcl 6y ago
This x 100! My pronunciation in Czech is now pretty bang on, but when I started I didn't elongate "long" vowels enough - by that I mean a vowel like "á" should be pronounced about 50% longer than "a". My great example is when I was trying to tell my friend something about a pub called "u čápa". She told me she didn't know it, which was surprising as it was well known within my friend group. I explained its location and she said "ahhhhh, you mean u čápa!". I couldn't believe it - the difference between "I know this" and "What are you talking about, I have no clue what that could possibly be" was like 50 milliseconds more "a". But it makes sense - if you've only ever heard correct Czech your likely won't know dodgy Czech. Most native-English speakers have plenty of exposure to various levels of English-language ability, either directly via speaking to a tourist or indirectly through various other media (radio, TV, film, podcast, music).

ggambetta 6y ago

Or even phrases that later entered mainstream English - "long time no see", "no can do", etc.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago

OTOH in Mandarin, the correct way to say things is actually more or less like that :) Most of the time tenses are inferred from context, copula (the verb "to be" in "I am hungry" or "there is no rain") is omitted, and there are some prepositions but very often you don't need them (for example, you would indeed say "I go store"). A pity that it has a super complex pronunciation, tonal system and writing system to go with the extremely straightforward grammar.

5C07BF3E 6y ago
> I go store Grammar is simpler, but the need for tonal agreement makes the vocabulary more complex. You can't just go to a "store". You would go to a food-store or a one-thing-store, or a store-store.

ivan1783 6y ago

English is no more or less fault tolerant than any other language. You can make the exact same sentences in Russian, German, French (I speak those so I can draw parallels) and they make the same amount of sense and sound the same (incorrect) - but you get the meaning. People here saying that native speakers of other languages are not fault tolerant but that just isn't true. There are exceptions, sure but for the most part people speak with me in German/French just fine even with the mistakes I make (Russian/English being my mother languages).