4 ms·

> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every singl

by ajuc 5y ago

> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words. It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning English. Usually I would understand from the context what the idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means. For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs". I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up every definition as many levels down as needed before going to the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her because my stack would overflow. I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for now". In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the first meaning as gospel.

spoonjim 5y ago
Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.
- ajuc 5y ago
  Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem. That's what I meant by guessing from context.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    It sounds like this idiom has been comically overextended for effect, though. Sometimes this is funny, sometimes it's aggravating. In this case, funny and extremely apt.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  The latter is easy to figure out That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-8604030680-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-860403...
  - jfengel 5y ago
    True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice extension of the same concept: not only do they think that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are actually angry that they didn't get more. (Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression, precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Haha of course.
_kst_ 5y ago
> For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs". Nearly monolingual English speaker here. I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're etymologically unrelated.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 5y ago
  Also native English speaker. One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the words for “Orange”. The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption from the Gaulish “Arausio” meaning cheek or temple. The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don’t know where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the fruit has the name “an orange” as a corruption of “a norange” (except the language this happened in varies from English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask, so might have been “une norenge” but all the stories agree the “n” shifted), that from the Arabic nāranj, and that is apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word. Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the fruit is “Sinaasappel” - Chinese Apple. And of course, “Mandarin” is the English words for both a type of orange and a branch of the Chinese language.
  - d13 5y ago
    Interesting… in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-skinned oranges “Nar Oranges” and apparently the first plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China. In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called nartjies.
  - samatman 5y ago
simias 5y ago
I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples. Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror" to "excellent" in the English vernacular). So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.
- myrion 5y ago
  This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry and the Discworld: Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
  - scubbo 5y ago
    GNU Terry Pratchett.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. This is the kind of thinking that led to a friend of mine and his entire family, touring Germany, saying the word for "apple juice" whenever they meant to say "thank you". I'm not even kidding. Comic example in film: in the Oliver Reed film Hannibal Brooks, a misunderstanding leads one of the major characters to believe that elephant translates into english as "we're-here". There are several misunderstandings in translation between Australian Aboriginal languages and English.

by ajuc 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago

Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.

ajuc 5y ago
Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem. That's what I meant by guessing from context.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  It sounds like this idiom has been comically overextended for effect, though. Sometimes this is funny, sometimes it's aggravating. In this case, funny and extremely apt.
JohnBooty 5y ago
The latter is easy to figure out That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-8604030680-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-860403...
- jfengel 5y ago
  True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice extension of the same concept: not only do they think that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are actually angry that they didn't get more. (Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression, precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Haha of course.

_kst_ 5y ago

> For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs". Nearly monolingual English speaker here. I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're etymologically unrelated.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 5y ago
Also native English speaker. One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the words for “Orange”. The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption from the Gaulish “Arausio” meaning cheek or temple. The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don’t know where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the fruit has the name “an orange” as a corruption of “a norange” (except the language this happened in varies from English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask, so might have been “une norenge” but all the stories agree the “n” shifted), that from the Arabic nāranj, and that is apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word. Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the fruit is “Sinaasappel” - Chinese Apple. And of course, “Mandarin” is the English words for both a type of orange and a branch of the Chinese language.
- d13 5y ago
  Interesting… in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-skinned oranges “Nar Oranges” and apparently the first plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China. In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called nartjies.
- samatman 5y ago

simias 5y ago

I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples. Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror" to "excellent" in the English vernacular). So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.

myrion 5y ago
This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry and the Discworld: Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
- scubbo 5y ago
  GNU Terry Pratchett.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. This is the kind of thinking that led to a friend of mine and his entire family, touring Germany, saying the word for "apple juice" whenever they meant to say "thank you". I'm not even kidding. Comic example in film: in the Oliver Reed film Hannibal Brooks, a misunderstanding leads one of the major characters to believe that elephant translates into english as "we're-here". There are several misunderstandings in translation between Australian Aboriginal languages and English.