Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

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Actually, you're assuming that I'm doing all these to mimic other English speakers, and you're wrong.

I'm not a late learner. I'm exposed to English when I'm ~4 yo, and started to learn it at 7. Also, I cannot learn by mimicking. I listen and read to learn, to understand how the culture is choosing words, how it works in real world. It's a kind of practice.

Because of my Job, I'm talking with Europeans a lot, and I'm considered a very clearly speaking guy. I've some accent which is carried from my mother tongue, but not from mimicking English dialects.

My English education wasn't purely language education. Whole curriculum was in English, so there was no place for mimicking. We were forced to think in English. The language is integrated into our lives for 6+ years. As a result, I can write at the speed of speech. Also while initial spellings are given as complete words, pronunciation is taught to us. So I can reasonably read or speak a work I've never seen.

When I go abroad to attend some meetings, I cannot completely switch to my mother tongue (both in spoken voice and inner voice) when I land for 30 minutes or so.

Sorry to say it, but your written English reads very stilted to me, a native (British) English speaker. Assuming your spoken English is a similar level, your European colleagues are right - it is clear in the sense that it is easy to understand what you are trying to say. But your word choice and grammar are a very long way away from a native speaker. If you do have a desire to sound more natural in the way you use English, I would suggest you actually take the advice to listen to the way native speakers use the language and try to copy what they do. At the moment you sound much more like a tourist than you think you do.

Actually my language skills, regardless of language, varies according to my mood and energy, and it's late here.

However, this is not to dismiss your comment as moot or anything, I'll keep this in mind. Thanks for the heads up.

Your English is fine and way better than my 2nd language skills. Unless you are going to become a con man or a spy, I wouldn't give it another thought.

I am a non-native speaker so I tried combing through a few of your comments to see how a native speaker might be able to pick you out as a non-native.

> listen a little more attentive

attentively

> will sharpen you in daily English

"sharpen" should be applied to the skill, not the person? ("sharpen your daily English")

> Becoming fluent becomes after becoming familiar.

"becomes after" sounds weird. Maybe "follows" or "comes".

> very clearly speaking guy

clear speaking

But I think the most glaring issue is the way you use commas (lots of unnecessary commas, comma splices, and parallel structure violations).

All of this is beyond grammar nazi-ing since some of these are just word choices that I would've made differently rather than grammatical errors. Again, I am also non-native.

Yeah well, there's a lot to nitpick here... "language skills [...] varies" - a skill varies, but skills vary. Obviously I'm making tons of mistakes too, especially in a conversation (when there's no time to think and you can't go back to correct a phrase). Besides, being technically correct - in terms of grammar, vocabulary and so on - doesn't mean it sounds natural yet.

> "sharpen" should be applied to the skill, not the person? ("sharpen your daily English")

Possibly depends on the dialect. "Sharpen your skills" is probably more common, but applying it to the person (e.g. "This will sharpen you up") sounds fine to me as a British English speaker (though if specifying a specific skill in the same sentence you probably wouldn't use that form).

> But I think the most glaring issue is the way you use commas (lots of unnecessary commas, comma splices, and parallel structure violations).

Definitely true, but that can also be a trait of some native speakers, FWIW. Some of my sentences have a ton of unneeded commas and "loose" clauses when I first write them, until I refactor them to make them more correct. It's certainly not exclusive to non-native speakers.

Thanks for your comments. I'll take note of these, and will revisit from time to time.

Most of the commas I use (before the "and" & "or"s) are Oxford Commas which dictates to use a comma before the conjunction if the sentences are separable. If the sentences are separable you don't use the comma. A more general rule is explained in [0].

My juries of my Master's and Ph.D. were very strict in this manner so I learned it the hard way. Now it's hardwired in my brain. Honestly I may be over using them, and will write more carefully.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30516/should-i-u...

> Most of the commas I use (before the "and" & "or"s) are Oxford Commas which dictates to use a comma before the conjunction if the sentences are separable

You seem to be confusing the Oxford (or serial) comma [0] used after the penultimate item of a list with the rule on comma + conjunction (or semicolon with no conjunction) separating independent clauses as opposed to a bare conjunction separating dependent clauses.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

Generally the corrections were between independent clauses, and I made some research on the matter at that time. It's possible that I just mix the name of the rules since I got them from the back of my memory.

Thanks for clarifying these up. Will keep these in mind too.

> a very long way from a native speaker

uh....this guy's English is really excellent. it may be distinguishable from a native speaker by occasional poor phrasing or misuse of words, but it's really, really good. i think your criticism is overblown.

No it isn't, and you are not doing him any favors by saying otherwise. His usage is at a level I would consider intermediate at best. FearNotDaniel's assessment is accurate.

There is no shame in not being 100% fluent. I'm multi-semi-lingual, in that I can read a newspaper, shop at a store, etc. in several languages. But I am only fluent in English. When I speak something else, my friends will frequently correct me. I appreciate it, because that is the only way to improve.

> His usage is at a level I would consider intermediate at best. ... There is no shame in not being 100% fluent.

Your notions about language proficiency are wildly out of whack. The speaker you're talking about is clearly articulating their ideas, coherently and without (one presumes) halting or grasping. That's fluency.

You don't have to agree with me, and that is OK. But my opinion is based off of experience.

You might be interested in http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale5.htm as an example of the scales used when defining levels of competency.

I'm sure you meant this reply to be constructive, but without describing the experience in question or saying which category from your link you think applies here, it doesn't convey anything.

For me, my experience is two years as an English teacher and my opinion based on that experience is that someone who can convey complex ideas clearly and without effort is fluent. If you define that to be intermediate, what's left for "fluent" to mean?

Thank you for the friendly reply. Here is the ILR page regarding spoken language, which may be more what you had in mind:

http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale2.htm

Based on the criteria given, I would estimate that his English writing ability is ~2+. Without hearing him speak, I can't properly assess. Perhaps a 3.

None of this is a criticism or a put down. Achieving this degree of competency in a second or third language takes a great deal of work over a long time, and is something to be proud of. But true fluency happens at level 4 and above.

(My father was a professional linguist and diplomat, and I spent much of my pre-adult life living in different non-English-speaking countries. I say this just so you know where I am coming from. I also want to spread awareness of what the various professional standards of fluency are.)

Thank you in kind, and I understand where you're coming from, but I still think the standard you're applying is pretty far removed from normal. Separate from any subjective rankings, the person describes having been educated solely in English for 6+ years, and from context appears to have been actively speaking it for at least 15-20 years overall. If one ranks that as intermediate, one winds up calling someone with 10 years experience a beginner, and such absurdities.

As for subjective rankings, I'm more familiar with CEFR, under which I see no obvious reason not to rank this person C1 or C2, which is what one would expect for someone with more than 800-1000 hours of study.

CEFR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

> If one ranks that as intermediate, one winds up calling someone with 10 years experience a beginner, and such absurdities.

I'm sure you are aware of people that have spent decades+ in an English-speaking environment, yet still speak in a stilted manner. Time alone isn't enough- you need active correction. A few folks are able to self-correct via listening, but almost everyone does best with regular instruction by qualified teachers.

Thank you for the CEFR link.

Part of the problem with English in particular (I am sure you are aware of this, I am just stating it for other readers) is that the number of ESL speakers exceeds the native population. This rather unusual case means that many learners are receiving instruction from English speakers who themselves are not fluent, compounding the error. From a strictly academic standpoint, it is fascinating tracing the growth of all the different flavors of English (some mutually unintelligible) but it does present certain practical difficulties in communication!

> people that have spent decades+ in an English-speaking environment, yet still speak in a stilted manner

Again, the standard you're applying is unreasonable. English doesn't have any One True dialect - it's spoken natively in various ways, some of which sound stilted to you. I went to college with a guy from Malaysia whose speech you'd likely find highly stilted (or I did, anyway), yet English was his first language - the only language he used with his parents, the only language he ever used in school, etc. That is what it is - a person can be fluent or native and still sound stilted to you. You may well sound stilted to them!

This is why the rankings you linked don't use such language - they talk about whether someone can use complex grammatical structures clearly and without effort, and so forth, and when judging someone's fluency that's the sort of standard to apply. Saying they sound stilted just says that their English doesn't sound the way you expect correct English to sound, which is neither here nor there.

What a ridiculous comment. Intermediate? I just don't even know what to say.

The guy's English _is_ excellent (100% intelligible and reads fine), but there can still be a long way between excellent/"functional fluency" and a native speaker. A native speaker wouldn't say "I'm exposed to English when I'm ~4 yo" (they would say "I _was_ exposed..." or "I've been exposed... since...") or capitalise "Job". Small things in the grand scheme of things, but they make it fairly obvious it's a non-native speaker.

Thanks for your comments. I generally write at the speed of thought, and don't read my comments for a second time to correct my errors.

These tense changes happen when I change the structure of the comment in my head in the real time, and don't revisit the beginning of the sentence to align things back.

When I read them for the second time after I send, I spot the errors, but don't always correct them since they are online and intended people possibly read the comment already.

Maybe I should write a little slower while commenting, and read again before sending.

> I'm exposed to English when I'm ~4 yo, and started to learn it at 7.

It's not. He didn't even use the right tense in the first clause. It should be: I've been exposed to English since I was 4 years old, and started to learn it at 7.

His English is certainly perfectly understandable, but also 'a very long way from a native speaker'.

> uh....this guy's English is really excellent.

It has very good vocabulary, but a whole lot of verb tense and subject-verb disagreement errors, and use of the wrong parts of speech in ways which are (especially combined with the excellent vocabulary) very emblematic of a non-native English speaker who either learned late or learned early but had much of their use of English with other non-native speakers.

Now, it's very good for someone with either of those backgrounds (and much better than my command of any language that isn't English), but the upthread comment that it is very far from that of a native speaker is spot on.

Let me see, if nine out of 10 people asses this poster as having non-fluent english and 1/10 seem to think he is fluent, the most resonable explanation is that there are now 2 people who are not fluent in english. Stop trying to grasp at straws, it quite clear the poster is not a native english speaker nor does he fool fluent speakers.

I never said he was a native speaker, did I?

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