28 ms·

I started taking English classes at the age of 46

124 points by homakov 4y ago

tayo42 4y ago
The comment about discovering as you write is interesting. Might have to give that a shot. I never really had a motivation to write.
Twisol 4y ago
This is one of those titles that doesn't make sense when HN drops the leading word. It should be: > Why I start taking English classes at the age of 46
- regzok 4y ago
  Wasn't even aware HN is doing that.
- biggerChris 4y ago
- b212 4y ago
  Also had no idea about the mechanism. Why?
poszlem 4y ago
As someone who moved to an English-speaking country as an adult, I noticed the temptation to reach a "local maximum" in language learning and stop making progress. This can happen when you feel like you have reached a point where you can get by with your current level of proficiency, but it can actually limit your ability to fully express yourself in the language. The only way to overcome this challenge is to make a deliberate effort to continue learning and improving. I agree with the author of the blog post and appreciate their message. One thing I also noticed is that the general tendency to be welcoming and non-offensive makes it very hard to get corrections and feedback from people you are talking to. That is very much the opposite approach than what happens in my country of birth (also a Slavic country, as the OP) where people will almost always correct you. I now realise that receiving corrections and feedback, even if it is sometimes delivered harshly, is an important part of language learning.
- mxgrn 4y ago
  Thanks for the comment. Wanted to add that, for me personally, effort _has_ to follow fun, and only then it's efficient, and, most importantly, sustainable. This post was partially inspired by an awesome book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis, btw.
- 988747 4y ago
  I am such person, stuck at "local maximum". I do still live in my country of birth, though. One of the reasons I'm stuck is I keep thinking: "Should I invest more time in learning English, or maybe it's better to start another language? (Spanish perhaps)" ROI with learning new language seems much higher than learning more English, just to avoid occasional hiccups in my conversations.
- drivers99 4y ago
  In the spirit of giving a correction, and how to get them, the title should say either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.” I was going to suggest lang-8 for written corrections but it appears they changed to HiNative.com (I’m not affiliated) which appears to be for a combination of corrections and asking language questions. I used to give language corrections on lang-8. I started to notice there are two types of corrections you can give. One type of error is a true grammar mistake, like saying “a apple.” Another is just making it sound more native. In those cases I would sometimes decide how to fix the grammar while keeping the original way of saying it, but also suggest a better way of saying it.
  - mxgrn 4y ago
    > either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.” ... And suddenly it seems so obvious! Thanks, fixed!
    - a_lieb 4y ago
      To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."
dghughes 4y ago
I've read about native English speakers who take classes to cleanse their colloquialisms from their speech. It's for conducting business with people who speak English but not natively. OP in a way is trying to do the opposite.
- mxgrn 4y ago
  Well, only in a way :) I don't think colloquialisms are necessarily what I'm after, but rather a richer, literate language.
  - jollofricepeas 4y ago
    For American “literate”language favored by artists and elites: Avid book readers of classic and Early Modern English literature have a much wider and expressive vocabulary, and are more likely to pepper their speech with socially-accepted literary references. But for richer American language: I especially love the colloquialism, grammar and accents across the American regions. They’re so vibrant, punchy and exciting. This is best experienced in person when traveling and stopping into local restaurants but can also be found in literature, music and social media as well but it requires effort to find which it what makes it fun. In my case, I ask myself a question like what does a 40 year old blue class worker from New Jersey or a 19 year old Floridian rapper sound like, then the hunt is afoot. Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing - a radiant, colorful flower in a sea of sameness.
    - js2 4y ago
      > blue class worker Blue collar, a reference to the working class wearing blue-collared shirts as opposed to the professional class wearing white-collared shirt. Blue class workers are sad students, or maybe Smurfs. :-) > Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing. On account of because of your comment, I think you'd really enjoy Ball of Fire (1941). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OwcxH46a16g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OwcxH46a16g
      - 4y ago
gfd 4y ago
>I start taking English classes at the age of 46 I think it should be "started" instead of "start". I'm also ESL and have given up on learning English properly after 30 years of trying. Nowadays I just rely on grammarly/gmail (and it does catch this particular example).
- jacooper 4y ago
  Try learning German......
- mxgrn 4y ago
  You're right, thanks! Fixed.
082349872349872 4y ago
One trick I employ for language acquisition: as a native X-speaker, I often encounter native-Y speakers making mistake Z in my mother tongue. When I remember to do so, a little googling at home often reveals that a light retro-translation of Z is indeed the proper (sometimes even a refined) construction in Y. Fortune, mxgrn!
Tempest1981 4y ago
What's a good rule for when to use "the" before a noun? I liked the movie I installed the new update I installed the new Python I installed ~the~ Python 3.11 I visited ~the~ Brazil I visited the Amazon River I visited ~the~ San Francisco Seems very inconsistent. Exclude "the" before some proper nouns.
- somrand0 4y ago
  you're omitting "the" when using capitalized nouns. except when prepending "new" in a way, I understand that the function of "the" is some kind of emphasis (or something). The answer you seek is not syntactic, but semantic. I liked the movie... But which one? I liked Movie-Title. Now there's no doubt which one was it. My point is that to say "I installed THE python 3" could be understood as a sort of emphasis... I installed THE python 3 could signal (in the appropriate context) that you did not install python 3 from the conda foundation but the one from THE PSF (this is a shoddy example, but this is a random comment on the internet) I watched Star Wars. I watched THE ('complete', or 'original', or 'new') Star Wars trilogy
  - mxgrn 4y ago
    AFAIK, you don't need "complete" or "new" here, "the Star Wars trilogy" is fine. It's "the Title/Name something".
- Twisol 4y ago
  You can sort of justify "the Amazon River" as "the Amazon river" -- i.e. the river that happens to be in the Amazon rainforest. The other two don't really act like "adjective + noun".
- nightpool 4y ago
  This article should help explain some of the theory behind "the" in more detail: https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/definite-articles/ https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/definite-articles/
- tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  See also: - He is in hospital versus - He is in the pub Does this mean any hospital vs a specific pub? No! It's just the idiom, and you have to get a feel for it. On the plus side, it's these sort of crazy nuances that help make email scams more detectable.
deleted 4y ago
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Existenceblinks 4y ago
I think learning at that age for some people is not going get anywhere (at least for me). And this is not about giving up. It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing. Learning language process is about > 50% mimicking / copying. I didn't realize until I graduated and worked with a British boss first time. I realize that 90% of schools in my country have taught english wrong all along. In school, they still teach student to mix and match a sentence on their own which is WRONG, resulting in weird non real world sentence with correct or incorrect grammar. Good speaking comes from listening to tons of real world audio / conversation / encounter any arbitrary context. This is akin to the process of training neural network. Good writing comes from reading a tons. And then we start to write and speak like those english speaker. So at this point my english skills won't going anywhere because my adult's mental model commands me to stop mimicking and copying. For example, this phrase sounds good but I hate it and I won't use it: "that being said, ..." which sounds nonsense to me as non-english speaker, I prefer "however" which sounds mediocre writing but it's a straightforward meaning. Think about it when you translate "that being said" .. it doesn't give a twist hint at all, it sounds like "something is stated" that's it. Excuse me for long whining.
- joshuaissac 4y ago
  > "that being said, ..." You can think of it as a contraction of, 'despite that having been said'.
  - willeum 4y ago
    You can also simply use "that said". I've always taken the phrase "that being said" to be a variation of the phrase "that said" that isn't as assertive of what was said, relegating it to only "having been said" rather than set in stone
- mxgrn 4y ago
  > It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing. This. In my little theory, that's exactly the watershed: will one be able to find something exciting to do. If succeeded, learning abilities and creativity follow the energy. It's akin to falling in love, really. But yeah, when you get older, you my need to try harder finding those things. I couldn't find any tricks as to how to identify such areas of interest, but I "discovered" an indirect factor that raises the chances for that: regular physical exercise, ice baths, proper nutrition, and staying calm. When I feel great, the world suddenly becomes a fun place to live.
w-m 4y ago
Thanks for teaching me the word garrulous! For years in my teens and twenties I built my English vocabulary slowly, by looking up any word I didn’t know while browsing the internet. Looking up 15 words every day adds up, even if you don’t have a system for memorizing them. But there too have I reached a plateau. I remember taking a test that tries to gauge the size of your vocabulary fairly recently (it was linked and discussed on HN IIRC), and being somewhat disappointed that I, in my mid-30s, rank like a native ~15 year old. I’d like to express myself in more sophisticated ways, like an adult would, but the look-up method is at an end there. Hardly ever do I need to look up a single word when reading tech content, which is what I consume the most. So for me it would take an effort to seek out such material, that pushes my vocab bounds. Kudos to you for getting active, it’s not that low of a hurdle to get started on! (Corrections welcome)
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  Read books. East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, for example. Or collections of Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Asimov's Foundation series (skip the last couple of books!). Or Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Or Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke. Or go through lists of famous opening lines of novels and maybe pick up a novel that you really like the beginning of ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times [...]", "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen", etc.). It doesn't matter what it is, as long as the writing is good and you like reading it. (And don't bother looking everything up. It shouldn't be necessary and it makes the reading process dull.) Another option is to watch TV. Watch something you never used to watch before, such as Grand Designs or Would I Lie To You (start with the clip "I accidentally bought a horse" on the "WILTY? Nope!" channel as it has fantastic subtitles... which you WILL need). Or maybe A Bit of Fry & Laurie, for example the sketches about language and the sketch with the pretentious tourists (it's on youtube as "A Bit of Fry and Laurie S02E04 Czech"). Or Jimmy Carr hosting I Literally Just Told You (season 1 episode 2 -- the others are not as good). Or Carr hosting The Big Fat Quiz of the Year/Decade/etc or 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown. A third option is radio/podcasts. The Unbelievable Truth (hosted by David Mitchell), for example. Or In Our Time (hosted by Melvyn Bragg) -- start with some of the older ones as Bragg is no longer as sharp or as clear in his speech as he used to be just five years ago.
argella 4y ago
Question for ESL people here. One of my direct reports is a non-native English speaker. He has a pretty thick accent and talks fast. Common feedback I get from customers we work with is that he can be hard to understand. I plan on giving him some career advice that he should work on this. Talk slower, consider working on reducing his accent. Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? My first instinct is just to say it, share comments I’m getting from our customers, etc. but I don’t want it to be hurtful. It’s really a “you could be more effective if … “ thing.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  You could say that some of the customers, who are not native speakers themself, havd trouble keeping up with his speed of speech. That would likely both be true and remove entitlement from the question.
- bojan 4y ago
  > Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? Offer him a course or private lessons paid by the company (with the company investing ideally both money and time). They are probably aware of their accent and shouldn't refuse the possibility to improve. If they do refuse, then it's a bit questionable if you want to work with a person that is not open for feedback.
- Adverblessly 4y ago
  > Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? Wouldn't that depend on what culture he is from and what that culture considers offensive? Either way, I've heard good things about "Accent makeover" classes, so if they are available to him, maybe it is worthwhile to pay for him to take such a course?
pythonguython 4y ago
I'm a native English speaker currently studying Russian in Kazakhstan, and I completely understand the frustration of lacking sophistication. It can become a negative feedback loop where lacking the ability to have fun and nuanced conversations causes me to avoid talking in the target language, which then only brings me further from reaching the language level I want. It certainly takes dedicated effort - language learning by osmosis can only take you so far as an adult. P.S. I had to look up the word "garrulous", so kudos to you for the vocab word.
anyfactor 4y ago
I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time. The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar. One of the most common mistake I make is forgetting to use sub-three letter words to my sentences like - to, is, and, or etc. Now the issue is that, this IS 80% of what English grammar stands for. My writing style is kinda keyword focused, if that makes any sense to anyone. The internet as a whole has become quite tolerant and the spaces I dwell usually don't criticize me for my bad grammar. My keyword focused statements gets my ideas across. Also I found that, if I cared too much about something I end up not expressing it. So the only things I talk about are my impromptu ideas which are jumbled and careless.
- kekkidy 4y ago
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar I remember one time when I asked a native speaker to proof-read an article I wrote. Most of my mistakes were missing "s" in the present tense, one of the first thing you learn as a beginner. > I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time. Same here. My company would pay for English lessons (3h a week with an English coach). It's quite a commitment and I'm worried that I'm way past the diminishing returns and it would take tons of effort for barely noticeable improvements. On the other hand, I'd love to get better and it'd be helpful professionally for sure.
  - deleted 4y ago
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yodsanklai 4y ago
I think English is peculiar in the sense that tons of people use it as a second language, and there are also many local variants that sound quite different. As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French. I wonder how often English native speakers here on HN feel that some comments aren't clear or odd-sounding due to approximative English. It's something I barely have experience of in my native language, as there are comparatively fewer foreigner speakers. And when reading HN comments, I'm mostly incapable of guessing the origin of the commenter (with a few exceptions).
- munificent 4y ago
  I can definitely recognize the writing styles of non-native speakers and can sometimes guess their primary language by the way they write. For example, Russian speakers tend to omit articles before nouns and speakers of romance languages often prefer Latin-derived words which also exist in English over more common Germanic words because those words transliterate easily from their language. I love it. It helps some of their culture and personality show up in their writing. It reminds me how diverse and varied the world is, and what a delight it is that we can come together on the Internet.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  For precisely the reason you stated - loads of non-native English speakers for all over the world - you just get used to it. I’m so used to “broken” English that’s it just not really a big deal. I know what they meant. Drop all the articles and don’t conjugate verbs for all care (many verbs don’t even change in most tenses anyway), it rarely makes a difference. And if I’m not sure I’ll ask. English is flexible, adaptive, and with a rich vocabulary. In my experience is pretty hard to not be understood, no matter how poor your English. Don’t know what something is called? Just put two words together, I’m sure it’ll be good enough to be understood.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Not just the non-native speakers, but also multiple strands of native speakers (and big regional differences even within native-speaking country, and significant grammar and word choice variation as well as pronunciation differences), no official "correct" version and a certain amount of cultural resentment even within Britain to RP which was intended to be an official version. And of course English is a very irregular language, with stuff like articles being irrelevant to the vast majority of sentences, and some of the complexities like conjugations conveying very little meaning (as you say, verbs often don't change during tenses; think there are more irregularities with common words than actual shades of meaning conveyed by conjugating them), and many of the common "corrections" like objections to split infinitives actually being based on misconceptions Actually, I think the prevalence of ESL speakers will eventually result in "standard" English variants on native-speaking TV losing quirks like nonstandard pluralisation and even articles, and it'll be much the better for it.
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MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I think one of the best ways to increase your overall ability to utilize a language is to read as much fiction as you can. Authors do not like to sound repetitive. As they write their novels, they will be forced to find alternate ways to say the same thing.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Also, authors write dialogue, which is speech as it would be said. This is an important distinction in languages where talking like, say, a newscaster, would sound extremely stuffy and awkward.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Agreed, and I had one language prof who said she could always tell who in her courses read for pleasure and who did not.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Online gambling promoters are the best communicators. They hustle and you feel as if you are in control and there is the investment ad with fine print after the aster saying, "You do not own..".
lambdadmitry 4y ago
Two things I observed while slowly getting better at English. First, the "sophistication" can backfire. There're a lot of comments about reading here, but there're very fine lines between - "simple English", think a stereotypical ESL speaker - "well educated" English, think a native posh college alumni - "colloquially broken" English, the way native speakers speak to their friends - "out-of-place highfalutin" English, a hallmark of someone who didn't have a chance to experience the variety of contexts growing up in an English speaking country. It's quite hard to balance those, but I guess it just comes with time and practice while being mindful of it. For me personally it worked in waves, from unnaturally-broken to too-correct to feeling comfortable enough to break the grammar in natural ways to noticing more unnaturalness to… you got the idea. Second, and I'm forever grateful to the person who first introduced me to this idea, is realising that high level language acquisition can only come with a new personality attached. It's very weird and disorienting if you're not aware of it happening, but it's a natural and necessary part of it. You need to grow a personality to feel in your second/third/etc language, to react to jokes on the spot, to make friends, to dream, to live in that language context. It often differs from one's identity/personality in the first language, and that's fine, it's just as valid. Embracing the process and the difference makes things easier. I don't think it's possible to do that through learning though.
- lambdadmitry 4y ago
  Something else that came to mind while I was reading the comments: you do want phonetics/pronunciation classes when you're C2+. Do learn IPA and learn the sounds, it's crucial not just for your accent but for understanding others. I found [1] very useful, but only combined with a great tutor. Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there. It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that. Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty. It's just as much about perception as it is about accent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair

124 points by homakov 4y ago

The comment about discovering as you write is interesting. Might have to give that a shot. I never really had a motivation to write.

Twisol 4y ago

This is one of those titles that doesn't make sense when HN drops the leading word. It should be: > Why I start taking English classes at the age of 46

regzok 4y ago
Wasn't even aware HN is doing that.
biggerChris 4y ago
b212 4y ago
Also had no idea about the mechanism. Why?

poszlem 4y ago

As someone who moved to an English-speaking country as an adult, I noticed the temptation to reach a "local maximum" in language learning and stop making progress. This can happen when you feel like you have reached a point where you can get by with your current level of proficiency, but it can actually limit your ability to fully express yourself in the language. The only way to overcome this challenge is to make a deliberate effort to continue learning and improving. I agree with the author of the blog post and appreciate their message. One thing I also noticed is that the general tendency to be welcoming and non-offensive makes it very hard to get corrections and feedback from people you are talking to. That is very much the opposite approach than what happens in my country of birth (also a Slavic country, as the OP) where people will almost always correct you. I now realise that receiving corrections and feedback, even if it is sometimes delivered harshly, is an important part of language learning.

mxgrn 4y ago
Thanks for the comment. Wanted to add that, for me personally, effort _has_ to follow fun, and only then it's efficient, and, most importantly, sustainable. This post was partially inspired by an awesome book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis, btw.
988747 4y ago
I am such person, stuck at "local maximum". I do still live in my country of birth, though. One of the reasons I'm stuck is I keep thinking: "Should I invest more time in learning English, or maybe it's better to start another language? (Spanish perhaps)" ROI with learning new language seems much higher than learning more English, just to avoid occasional hiccups in my conversations.
drivers99 4y ago
In the spirit of giving a correction, and how to get them, the title should say either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.” I was going to suggest lang-8 for written corrections but it appears they changed to HiNative.com (I’m not affiliated) which appears to be for a combination of corrections and asking language questions. I used to give language corrections on lang-8. I started to notice there are two types of corrections you can give. One type of error is a true grammar mistake, like saying “a apple.” Another is just making it sound more native. In those cases I would sometimes decide how to fix the grammar while keeping the original way of saying it, but also suggest a better way of saying it.
- mxgrn 4y ago
  > either “I started” or “I am starting” not “I start.” ... And suddenly it seems so obvious! Thanks, fixed!
  - a_lieb 4y ago
    To be fair: titles and headlines are often written in the tense you used, often to give a sense of energy and intensity. In fact, this is the most common form in news headlines, like "Smith wins 2022 election" or "new statistics show increase in employment rate."

dghughes 4y ago

I've read about native English speakers who take classes to cleanse their colloquialisms from their speech. It's for conducting business with people who speak English but not natively. OP in a way is trying to do the opposite.

mxgrn 4y ago
Well, only in a way :) I don't think colloquialisms are necessarily what I'm after, but rather a richer, literate language.
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  For American “literate”language favored by artists and elites: Avid book readers of classic and Early Modern English literature have a much wider and expressive vocabulary, and are more likely to pepper their speech with socially-accepted literary references. But for richer American language: I especially love the colloquialism, grammar and accents across the American regions. They’re so vibrant, punchy and exciting. This is best experienced in person when traveling and stopping into local restaurants but can also be found in literature, music and social media as well but it requires effort to find which it what makes it fun. In my case, I ask myself a question like what does a 40 year old blue class worker from New Jersey or a 19 year old Floridian rapper sound like, then the hunt is afoot. Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing - a radiant, colorful flower in a sea of sameness.
  - js2 4y ago
    > blue class worker Blue collar, a reference to the working class wearing blue-collared shirts as opposed to the professional class wearing white-collared shirt. Blue class workers are sad students, or maybe Smurfs. :-) > Elites find local speech ignorant but I find it mesmerizing. On account of because of your comment, I think you'd really enjoy Ball of Fire (1941). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OwcxH46a16g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OwcxH46a16g
    - 4y ago

gfd 4y ago

>I start taking English classes at the age of 46 I think it should be "started" instead of "start". I'm also ESL and have given up on learning English properly after 30 years of trying. Nowadays I just rely on grammarly/gmail (and it does catch this particular example).

jacooper 4y ago
Try learning German......
mxgrn 4y ago
You're right, thanks! Fixed.

082349872349872 4y ago

One trick I employ for language acquisition: as a native X-speaker, I often encounter native-Y speakers making mistake Z in my mother tongue. When I remember to do so, a little googling at home often reveals that a light retro-translation of Z is indeed the proper (sometimes even a refined) construction in Y. Fortune, mxgrn!

Tempest1981 4y ago

What's a good rule for when to use "the" before a noun? I liked the movie I installed the new update I installed the new Python I installed ~the~ Python 3.11 I visited ~the~ Brazil I visited the Amazon River I visited ~the~ San Francisco Seems very inconsistent. Exclude "the" before some proper nouns.

somrand0 4y ago
you're omitting "the" when using capitalized nouns. except when prepending "new" in a way, I understand that the function of "the" is some kind of emphasis (or something). The answer you seek is not syntactic, but semantic. I liked the movie... But which one? I liked Movie-Title. Now there's no doubt which one was it. My point is that to say "I installed THE python 3" could be understood as a sort of emphasis... I installed THE python 3 could signal (in the appropriate context) that you did not install python 3 from the conda foundation but the one from THE PSF (this is a shoddy example, but this is a random comment on the internet) I watched Star Wars. I watched THE ('complete', or 'original', or 'new') Star Wars trilogy
- mxgrn 4y ago
  AFAIK, you don't need "complete" or "new" here, "the Star Wars trilogy" is fine. It's "the Title/Name something".
Twisol 4y ago
You can sort of justify "the Amazon River" as "the Amazon river" -- i.e. the river that happens to be in the Amazon rainforest. The other two don't really act like "adjective + noun".
nightpool 4y ago
This article should help explain some of the theory behind "the" in more detail: https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/definite-articles/ https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/definite-articles/
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
See also: - He is in hospital versus - He is in the pub Does this mean any hospital vs a specific pub? No! It's just the idiom, and you have to get a feel for it. On the plus side, it's these sort of crazy nuances that help make email scams more detectable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Existenceblinks 4y ago

I think learning at that age for some people is not going get anywhere (at least for me). And this is not about giving up. It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing. Learning language process is about > 50% mimicking / copying. I didn't realize until I graduated and worked with a British boss first time. I realize that 90% of schools in my country have taught english wrong all along. In school, they still teach student to mix and match a sentence on their own which is WRONG, resulting in weird non real world sentence with correct or incorrect grammar. Good speaking comes from listening to tons of real world audio / conversation / encounter any arbitrary context. This is akin to the process of training neural network. Good writing comes from reading a tons. And then we start to write and speak like those english speaker. So at this point my english skills won't going anywhere because my adult's mental model commands me to stop mimicking and copying. For example, this phrase sounds good but I hate it and I won't use it: "that being said, ..." which sounds nonsense to me as non-english speaker, I prefer "however" which sounds mediocre writing but it's a straightforward meaning. Think about it when you translate "that being said" .. it doesn't give a twist hint at all, it sounds like "something is stated" that's it. Excuse me for long whining.

joshuaissac 4y ago
> "that being said, ..." You can think of it as a contraction of, 'despite that having been said'.
- willeum 4y ago
  You can also simply use "that said". I've always taken the phrase "that being said" to be a variation of the phrase "that said" that isn't as assertive of what was said, relegating it to only "having been said" rather than set in stone
mxgrn 4y ago
> It's about being adult is about not giving a shit to a lot of thing. This. In my little theory, that's exactly the watershed: will one be able to find something exciting to do. If succeeded, learning abilities and creativity follow the energy. It's akin to falling in love, really. But yeah, when you get older, you my need to try harder finding those things. I couldn't find any tricks as to how to identify such areas of interest, but I "discovered" an indirect factor that raises the chances for that: regular physical exercise, ice baths, proper nutrition, and staying calm. When I feel great, the world suddenly becomes a fun place to live.

w-m 4y ago

Thanks for teaching me the word garrulous! For years in my teens and twenties I built my English vocabulary slowly, by looking up any word I didn’t know while browsing the internet. Looking up 15 words every day adds up, even if you don’t have a system for memorizing them. But there too have I reached a plateau. I remember taking a test that tries to gauge the size of your vocabulary fairly recently (it was linked and discussed on HN IIRC), and being somewhat disappointed that I, in my mid-30s, rank like a native ~15 year old. I’d like to express myself in more sophisticated ways, like an adult would, but the look-up method is at an end there. Hardly ever do I need to look up a single word when reading tech content, which is what I consume the most. So for me it would take an effort to seek out such material, that pushes my vocab bounds. Kudos to you for getting active, it’s not that low of a hurdle to get started on! (Corrections welcome)

peterfirefly 4y ago
Read books. East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, for example. Or collections of Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Asimov's Foundation series (skip the last couple of books!). Or Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Or Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke. Or go through lists of famous opening lines of novels and maybe pick up a novel that you really like the beginning of ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times [...]", "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen", etc.). It doesn't matter what it is, as long as the writing is good and you like reading it. (And don't bother looking everything up. It shouldn't be necessary and it makes the reading process dull.) Another option is to watch TV. Watch something you never used to watch before, such as Grand Designs or Would I Lie To You (start with the clip "I accidentally bought a horse" on the "WILTY? Nope!" channel as it has fantastic subtitles... which you WILL need). Or maybe A Bit of Fry & Laurie, for example the sketches about language and the sketch with the pretentious tourists (it's on youtube as "A Bit of Fry and Laurie S02E04 Czech"). Or Jimmy Carr hosting I Literally Just Told You (season 1 episode 2 -- the others are not as good). Or Carr hosting The Big Fat Quiz of the Year/Decade/etc or 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown. A third option is radio/podcasts. The Unbelievable Truth (hosted by David Mitchell), for example. Or In Our Time (hosted by Melvyn Bragg) -- start with some of the older ones as Bragg is no longer as sharp or as clear in his speech as he used to be just five years ago.

argella 4y ago

Question for ESL people here. One of my direct reports is a non-native English speaker. He has a pretty thick accent and talks fast. Common feedback I get from customers we work with is that he can be hard to understand. I plan on giving him some career advice that he should work on this. Talk slower, consider working on reducing his accent. Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? My first instinct is just to say it, share comments I’m getting from our customers, etc. but I don’t want it to be hurtful. It’s really a “you could be more effective if … “ thing.

thriftwy 4y ago
You could say that some of the customers, who are not native speakers themself, havd trouble keeping up with his speed of speech. That would likely both be true and remove entitlement from the question.
bojan 4y ago
> Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? Offer him a course or private lessons paid by the company (with the company investing ideally both money and time). They are probably aware of their accent and shouldn't refuse the possibility to improve. If they do refuse, then it's a bit questionable if you want to work with a person that is not open for feedback.
Adverblessly 4y ago
> Any suggestions on how to do this in a way that is sensitive / not-offensive? Wouldn't that depend on what culture he is from and what that culture considers offensive? Either way, I've heard good things about "Accent makeover" classes, so if they are available to him, maybe it is worthwhile to pay for him to take such a course?

pythonguython 4y ago

I'm a native English speaker currently studying Russian in Kazakhstan, and I completely understand the frustration of lacking sophistication. It can become a negative feedback loop where lacking the ability to have fun and nuanced conversations causes me to avoid talking in the target language, which then only brings me further from reaching the language level I want. It certainly takes dedicated effort - language learning by osmosis can only take you so far as an adult. P.S. I had to look up the word "garrulous", so kudos to you for the vocab word.

anyfactor 4y ago

I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time. The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar. One of the most common mistake I make is forgetting to use sub-three letter words to my sentences like - to, is, and, or etc. Now the issue is that, this IS 80% of what English grammar stands for. My writing style is kinda keyword focused, if that makes any sense to anyone. The internet as a whole has become quite tolerant and the spaces I dwell usually don't criticize me for my bad grammar. My keyword focused statements gets my ideas across. Also I found that, if I cared too much about something I end up not expressing it. So the only things I talk about are my impromptu ideas which are jumbled and careless.

kekkidy 4y ago
yodsanklai 4y ago
> The issue is that my mistake stems from my carelessness, not from my knowledge of English grammar I remember one time when I asked a native speaker to proof-read an article I wrote. Most of my mistakes were missing "s" in the present tense, one of the first thing you learn as a beginner. > I sometimes think about sitting down and properly learning English. But for some reason, I think that would be a waste of time. Same here. My company would pay for English lessons (3h a week with an English coach). It's quite a commitment and I'm worried that I'm way past the diminishing returns and it would take tons of effort for barely noticeable improvements. On the other hand, I'd love to get better and it'd be helpful professionally for sure.
- deleted 4y ago
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yodsanklai 4y ago

I think English is peculiar in the sense that tons of people use it as a second language, and there are also many local variants that sound quite different. As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French. I wonder how often English native speakers here on HN feel that some comments aren't clear or odd-sounding due to approximative English. It's something I barely have experience of in my native language, as there are comparatively fewer foreigner speakers. And when reading HN comments, I'm mostly incapable of guessing the origin of the commenter (with a few exceptions).

munificent 4y ago
I can definitely recognize the writing styles of non-native speakers and can sometimes guess their primary language by the way they write. For example, Russian speakers tend to omit articles before nouns and speakers of romance languages often prefer Latin-derived words which also exist in English over more common Germanic words because those words transliterate easily from their language. I love it. It helps some of their culture and personality show up in their writing. It reminds me how diverse and varied the world is, and what a delight it is that we can come together on the Internet.
nkrisc 4y ago
For precisely the reason you stated - loads of non-native English speakers for all over the world - you just get used to it. I’m so used to “broken” English that’s it just not really a big deal. I know what they meant. Drop all the articles and don’t conjugate verbs for all care (many verbs don’t even change in most tenses anyway), it rarely makes a difference. And if I’m not sure I’ll ask. English is flexible, adaptive, and with a rich vocabulary. In my experience is pretty hard to not be understood, no matter how poor your English. Don’t know what something is called? Just put two words together, I’m sure it’ll be good enough to be understood.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Not just the non-native speakers, but also multiple strands of native speakers (and big regional differences even within native-speaking country, and significant grammar and word choice variation as well as pronunciation differences), no official "correct" version and a certain amount of cultural resentment even within Britain to RP which was intended to be an official version. And of course English is a very irregular language, with stuff like articles being irrelevant to the vast majority of sentences, and some of the complexities like conjugations conveying very little meaning (as you say, verbs often don't change during tenses; think there are more irregularities with common words than actual shades of meaning conveyed by conjugating them), and many of the common "corrections" like objections to split infinitives actually being based on misconceptions Actually, I think the prevalence of ESL speakers will eventually result in "standard" English variants on native-speaking TV losing quirks like nonstandard pluralisation and even articles, and it'll be much the better for it.

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MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I think one of the best ways to increase your overall ability to utilize a language is to read as much fiction as you can. Authors do not like to sound repetitive. As they write their novels, they will be forced to find alternate ways to say the same thing.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Also, authors write dialogue, which is speech as it would be said. This is an important distinction in languages where talking like, say, a newscaster, would sound extremely stuffy and awkward.
082349872349872 4y ago
Agreed, and I had one language prof who said she could always tell who in her courses read for pleasure and who did not.
abudabi123 4y ago
Online gambling promoters are the best communicators. They hustle and you feel as if you are in control and there is the investment ad with fine print after the aster saying, "You do not own..".

lambdadmitry 4y ago

Two things I observed while slowly getting better at English. First, the "sophistication" can backfire. There're a lot of comments about reading here, but there're very fine lines between - "simple English", think a stereotypical ESL speaker - "well educated" English, think a native posh college alumni - "colloquially broken" English, the way native speakers speak to their friends - "out-of-place highfalutin" English, a hallmark of someone who didn't have a chance to experience the variety of contexts growing up in an English speaking country. It's quite hard to balance those, but I guess it just comes with time and practice while being mindful of it. For me personally it worked in waves, from unnaturally-broken to too-correct to feeling comfortable enough to break the grammar in natural ways to noticing more unnaturalness to… you got the idea. Second, and I'm forever grateful to the person who first introduced me to this idea, is realising that high level language acquisition can only come with a new personality attached. It's very weird and disorienting if you're not aware of it happening, but it's a natural and necessary part of it. You need to grow a personality to feel in your second/third/etc language, to react to jokes on the spot, to make friends, to dream, to live in that language context. It often differs from one's identity/personality in the first language, and that's fine, it's just as valid. Embracing the process and the difference makes things easier. I don't think it's possible to do that through learning though.

lambdadmitry 4y ago
Something else that came to mind while I was reading the comments: you do want phonetics/pronunciation classes when you're C2+. Do learn IPA and learn the sounds, it's crucial not just for your accent but for understanding others. I found [1] very useful, but only combined with a great tutor. Something I didn't appreciate enough is that we don't actually hear sounds when we hear people speaking. We hear phonemes, which are clusters of physical sounds that make semantic difference in the language. The clusters themselves aren't fixed either, they are very loose and mostly defined through what they are not — i.e., the difference that we perceive in "lip" and "leap" is not absolute, the actual sounds might easily overlap between speakers, but we adjust to the particular accent/speaker using the fact that they probably still have two separate phonemes there. It works very well until one starts to learn a second language that might have not just different "clusters", but a different number of them. My first language is Russian, and in Russian there are just fewer semantically meaningful vowels; I honestly thought that the word "milk", молоко, has three roughly equivalent sounds, whereas in English that'd probably be heard as two or three distinct vowels ([məɫɐˈko]). Similarly, Russian "soft" sounds like м in мята are widely heard as having "j" in them, "m-ya-ta", while native speakers just don't hear that. Phonetics training helps to start actually hearing all those sounds, to adjust our inbuilt clustering and start perceiving things that natives do. You suddenly start understanding native accents much better, and gain a new appreciation for the language and its beauty. It's just as much about perception as it is about accent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair