6 ms·

I agree with the premise of the article. I started going to International school (all classes in English) at age 9. Got two University degrees in England. Have

I agree with the premise of the article. I started going to International school (all classes in English) at age 9. Got two University degrees in England. Have several academic papers published. There are still moments where I'm made aware that I'm not a native English speaker - for example I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist. However I'd disagree that the article's premise is unique to English. I've been learning Japanese for the past few years, and while it's definitely more difficult to learn than English for someone who's coming from another European language, I think the long tail of being native-like is equally infinite. It's just based on different things. Examples would be は vs が (this is a beginner-level topic as well, but comes back in a different way much later), sentence-level pitch accent, the fact that writing in formal language is basically the world's most elaborate game of madlibs, etc.

presentation 6y ago
Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.
- andi999 6y ago
  Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago
    It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
    - andi999 6y ago
      Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
      - mkl 6y ago
        Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
        bckr 6y ago
        This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
- cehrlich 6y ago
  Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood. However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist. As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that. [1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X
  - tasogare 6y ago
    Japanese is hard for different reasons but some of them are self-inflicted. Bothering with pitch accent is one: no second of effort towards it will be ever relevant in comparison to learning new vocabulary or collocation. An other big issue is indeed in manuals, which teach sentences construction with the English logic instead of the Japanese one (eg starting with 私は学生です already poses 3-4 pedagogical problems). I’m working on a conversation guide (in French for now) to avoid those issue but that’s a lot of work...
    - presentation 6y ago
      Disagree re pitch accent being unimportant - it depends what your goals are and what your experience level is. If you’re competent enough with grammar but screw accent up constantly Japanese people get tired of listening to you, when you nail it people are more at ease talking to you in my experience. Like someone messing up stress in English all the time. If your goal is to get over that then it’s absolutely worth studying, and arguably it’s worth studying early before you pick up bad habits in the first place. As the parent mentioned, it’s all dependent on your goals.
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  >Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  > There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.
kh1 6y ago
As a Japanese, I agree with you. When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them. So I end up saying "that's just how we say/use it". And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.
- robotmay 6y ago
  I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    Learning kanji is a skill. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Also what's a few thousand kanji if you also have to learn 10s of thousands of vocabulary.
  - kh1 6y ago
    I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Japanese). On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. So you shouldn't feel bad about it, taking small steps serve you well in the long term.
    - matt-attack 6y ago
      How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??
em-bee 6y ago
i have a similar experience. i became mostly fluent after a year of living in the US during high school. (and then living in the US again and other english speaking countries for a few years) i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder. learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  I would describe your statement of german to be accurate in terms of how I've been learning it. I'd classify myself as a soft A1 but i have a decent vocabulary built up and can generally understand what a sentence is saying even if I don't know all the words. The foundation of the language is vital to learning it and as a native English stuck in SVO, the german sentence structure gets weird fast. But then it just clicked. Like oh I know where to put that now! The hard part i have is knowing which specific word to use because in context the meaning of it could change based off of how a native would use it. Honestly, the conjugations don't scare me so much as they used to. I'm not good at all with like accusative, genitive, etc but I don't think twice when altering verbs.
amelius 6y ago
> I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist. This is how language develops, so I wouldn't feel bad about it.
yigitcakar 6y ago
I agree with both of your premises. I started going to International school when I was 10 and got all my education in English. I got two college and one masters degrees. I am fairly confident in my ability to use English yet my wife is American and every day she finds something to correct in my English. My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well. Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.

presentation 6y ago

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.

andi999 6y ago
Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
  - andi999 6y ago
    Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
    - mkl 6y ago
      Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
        bckr 6y ago
        This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
cehrlich 6y ago
Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood. However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist. As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that. [1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X
- tasogare 6y ago
  Japanese is hard for different reasons but some of them are self-inflicted. Bothering with pitch accent is one: no second of effort towards it will be ever relevant in comparison to learning new vocabulary or collocation. An other big issue is indeed in manuals, which teach sentences construction with the English logic instead of the Japanese one (eg starting with 私は学生です already poses 3-4 pedagogical problems). I’m working on a conversation guide (in French for now) to avoid those issue but that’s a lot of work...
  - presentation 6y ago
    Disagree re pitch accent being unimportant - it depends what your goals are and what your experience level is. If you’re competent enough with grammar but screw accent up constantly Japanese people get tired of listening to you, when you nail it people are more at ease talking to you in my experience. Like someone messing up stress in English all the time. If your goal is to get over that then it’s absolutely worth studying, and arguably it’s worth studying early before you pick up bad habits in the first place. As the parent mentioned, it’s all dependent on your goals.
EE84M3i 6y ago
>Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.
jhanschoo 6y ago
> There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.

kh1 6y ago

As a Japanese, I agree with you. When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them. So I end up saying "that's just how we say/use it". And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.

robotmay 6y ago
I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  Learning kanji is a skill. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Also what's a few thousand kanji if you also have to learn 10s of thousands of vocabulary.
- kh1 6y ago
  I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Japanese). On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. So you shouldn't feel bad about it, taking small steps serve you well in the long term.
  - matt-attack 6y ago
    How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??

em-bee 6y ago

i have a similar experience. i became mostly fluent after a year of living in the US during high school. (and then living in the US again and other english speaking countries for a few years) i always explained to people that complained about learning german being hard, that i felt that german is hard at the beginning, but once you are over the hurdle, it gets a lot easier, whereas english is easy at the beginning, and it keeps getting harder. learning german is like climbing up a steep road followed by a shallow incline, whereas learning english is a not so steep road that just keeps going up and up and up.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I would describe your statement of german to be accurate in terms of how I've been learning it. I'd classify myself as a soft A1 but i have a decent vocabulary built up and can generally understand what a sentence is saying even if I don't know all the words. The foundation of the language is vital to learning it and as a native English stuck in SVO, the german sentence structure gets weird fast. But then it just clicked. Like oh I know where to put that now! The hard part i have is knowing which specific word to use because in context the meaning of it could change based off of how a native would use it. Honestly, the conjugations don't scare me so much as they used to. I'm not good at all with like accusative, genitive, etc but I don't think twice when altering verbs.

amelius 6y ago

> I sometimes translate German figures of speech into English, where they don't exist. This is how language develops, so I wouldn't feel bad about it.

yigitcakar 6y ago

I agree with both of your premises. I started going to International school when I was 10 and got all my education in English. I got two college and one masters degrees. I am fairly confident in my ability to use English yet my wife is American and every day she finds something to correct in my English. My wife have been learning Turkish using Duolingo and a Turkish learning platform for the past couple months, and she can hold her end up in basic conversation. We have many expat friends who have been learning Turkish for a year or so and they can communicate pretty well. Turkish syntax is wildly different than English syntax, and pronunciations are throat based rather than tongue based. There are lots of synonyms and parallel meanings in everyday use. Moreover there are not many resources to learn Turkish from. Yet, people start speaking broken Turkish enough to communicate complex ideas within a year.