Hacker News Reader

Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow non-native who accepted not to strive for full assimilation, my suggestion is to do the same. You can refine your writing by reading a lot. Books like “The elements of style” and “On writing well” can help with grasping those structural elements you might be struggling to identify. Apart from that, our brain has been shaped by our native language, and we can’t really delete that. Which is great news! It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

One tool I use is Grammarly. I think it’s mostly crap, but if used properly it helps you identify the more blatant mistakes. Oh, and by the way, if you need a non-native speaker ego booster, try and read native speakers’ first drafts of anything.

View on HN

I wanted to write a message to a Swedish relative to say "Happy Birthday" but the literal translation felt wrong.

I asked my wife how to say "Happy Birthday" and she said "What you've got there is the right translation but that's not what people say".

I think that's one of the hardest things about learning another language is to not directly map words but understand what would be said in a certain context.

There is no English word for Hygge or Fika because the concept simply does not exist. You can find a nearest match but it lacks the meaning.

This is only a problem when translating words or short phrases which is usually one of the first things that language learners try to do.

When you know the original intent behind a sentence (for example if you are its author), you can usually convey its meaning it in any of the languages you know well.

As your wife said, there is a way to express a friendly sentiment to somebody on their anniversary and let them know that you remember them. It's just not literally using the words "Happy Birthday".

You know what I struggle with? Writing professional letters (or email) in my native language. I went to university and worked in the industry in the UK and so I only ever had to write in a professional style in English. I was trying to ask for some information from an online shop in Greek the other day (I'm Greek) and I found I had no idea how to start and end the email and how exactly to phrase the question I wanted to ask without sounding like I was talking to my bestie.

Kind of the reverse situation than what you're describing, because I haven't learned to say those things in my native language, but for me it goes to show we learn lots of pre-baked turns of phrase that we adjust appropriately to the context when we need them.

That's interesting because you're right, in English there are different voices depending on the context and who you're talking to. Is it a professional context or casual or if you're supposed to be doing something important or tactful.

In some countries, this is extended to even using different languages depending on the context, especially more in the Eastern countries.

That's a good point of turning your native language into an asset. The goal of communication is to be well-understood. That's so easy to forget that and strive for something more. Good writing also keeps the readers engaged, maybe entertained, but is there much more to that?

> It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

Yeah, that happens all the time. It always strikes me as unfair when someone comes out with an ostensibly perfect sentence and the result is "well, you didn't make any mistakes; all the words mean what you want them to mean and all the grammar is used correctly. But the sentence is still wrong; that's just not how we say that."

I’m a native English speaker and you all write well enough in English that I didn’t notice that you are not native speakers from your writing. I went back and looked more carefully and noticed a few little mistakes, but nothing I wouldn’t write off as the result of someone writing quickly.

It's useful to learn how they say it, though. Not because we should pretend to be native speakers when we aren't, but because language is more efficient if you know the expected way to use it.

The correct but awkward sentences from non-natives (I also use them, being a non-native English speaker) will more easily get lost in situations with background noise, several people talking, people not paying a lot of attention, etc. because not saying things they way people expect and are used to implies extra effort to understand.

True, but OP was asking for an AI tool to help in this. I think the language bias on such a tool would be enormous, and it would contribute to flatten a piece of writing. Being effective by saying things the right way, or picking the right words to express a specific context, is definitely important. My point was this: once you get to a good-enough point, what you're looking for is an editor (of sorts, not necessarily a professional one). Someone that could recognize how your idiomatic choice of words serves the piece right, or makes it harder to understand. What really helped me was asking native friends to read my posts or my articles, and tell me what they were getting from them. After a while, through this process, you'll get better yourself at recognizing these patterns. Before that, I worked hard on understanding the specific pitfalls of writing in English as a native Italian. One clear example: attributive nouns.

>> One clear example: attributive nouns.

Specific examples, please? I'm curious :)

In a case where a noun is a modifier of the following word, Italians tend to prefer specificity , therefore falling for the “noun + of…” construct. A chicken soup bowl is easy to understand, but for an Italian that’s a “piatto di brodo di pollo”, so an Italian native would tend to feel like “a bowl of chicken soup” is the better choice. In this case there’s no real mistake (and for “bowl of” you might argue there’s almost no meaning difference) but most of the time you end up with convoluted sentences, especially if a genitive is lurking around —- “Andy’s chicken soup bowl” vs “the bowl of chicken soup of Andy”. Understandable, more familiar to an Italian speaker, yet kind of wrong.

Thanks for the example!

Wouldn't "piatto di brodo di pollo" translate to "a bowl of soup of chicken", as a more unnatural English sentence?

Greek is similar in that respect and I catch myself sometimes lapsing into such more micro-managed speaking, and I also noticed it in other Greeks (perhaps a few Italians also).

Just for reference, the default English constructions would be "bowl of chicken soup" and "Andy's bowl of chicken soup".

"Bowl of soup of chicken" is right out, but "chicken soup bowl" isn't much better. It's so anomalous that I might interpret it as meaning "a bowl for chicken soup" as opposed to "a bowl with chicken soup in it right now".

And English, in its predatory way, will adopt those 'different' words and constructions as its own in due time :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com