English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) | Hacker News Reader

English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

antirez.com

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In continental Europe I have often been in a room with people from 10 different countries say Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Poland, India, China, Korea, England. Everyone could understand each other's broken English with the exception that half of the people couldn't understand English guy. What always puzzle me is the fact that the English doesn't consider that the room language isn't their mother tongue and they should also try to speak this universal dialect that everyone understands.

I think there is a very real, uncanny valley effect (at least partially emotionally/identity grounded) with languages where it takes more experience and effort with recognizing a language (or dialect/accent) as a distinct environment requiring a code switch the more closely it resembles one you are very comfortable in, especially your native language, and especially if something about it specifically has become emotionally attached for you with your native language being spoken badly or by people of disfavored background.

It may depend on personality. When I lived in Malaysia my English rapidly took on an accent and developed an unusual grammar, friends commented on it. I found it embarrassing but I couldn't easily stop myself doing it. OTOH, my friend has a long time Asian girlfriend, and speaks 100% native English regardless of whether she understands it or not. He is the type to correct your pronunciation.

I think there is a difference between gradually adapting in immersion (which I think most people will do unless they actively work to avoid it, the way a number of celebrities where an accent/dialect foreign to their new home is part of their brand will literally employ a language coach to maintain it) and identifying a need to learn distinct rules and code switch to them in a particular occasional environment.

When I had a girlfriend who didn't speak English as a first language, she asked me not to simplify my English so she could improve her understanding. She'd get annoyed if she felt I was "dumbing down" to make things easier for her.

I think that was a good ask. I automatically adapted my vocabulary to match my wife's as English isn't her native language (I tend to do that subconsciously in general irrespective of language or who I am speaking to). Over the years, we (again subconsciously) developed more constructs using this limited vocabulary mixed with words/phrases from her native language - so now we almost have our own dialect. However, since then her interactions with other highly proficient English speakers has increased and now she feels that my adjustments were actually a hindrance towards her English proficiency. I try to counter that by saying that this fluency of communication, as impure as it might be, has contributed to our relationship but I know that she has a valid point.

During the almost eight years I lived in Brussels, Belgium, I was employed for a year as a consultant by Snow BV (a Dutch consulting company), and for six months I was working on-site at Eindhoven for ASML.

They told me it was actually an advantage that I didn’t speak Dutch, because this would encourage all of them to speak English around me. A few weeks later I was asked by the same manager to stop attending the standup meetings, because it was too hard for too many people to speak English instead of Dutch.

That’s only one of my Snow and ASML stories.

I married a foreigner and for a few years when she was learning my native tongue, my own vocabulary and ease of expressing my self deteriorated noticeably. Even when speaking to others. This was quite a few years ago. I'm back on track but it was a frustrating experience.

Similarly I find myself speaking better English when "guided" by an American or English person. It's weird... If someone else speaks broken English, I will too.

'...they should also try to speak this universal dialect that everyone understands.'

My take on this is to speak regular English with a slight foreign accent, which sounds ridiculous, but it actually does seem to be effective.

Incidentally, I am from the North of England but have lived in the South for the past ten years and people sometimes struggle to understand what I am saying. Repeating myself has become the norm.

I once met someone from the North of England. I went to a college in the US as an exchange student, the first international student I met was this girl from a northern town in England. We started chatting, but I couldn’t understand a thing. I felt terrible! I didn’t understand a thing of English! How I was supposed to take college classes in English if I couldn’t understand a simple conversation!

Then other students came from other countries and then I figured I just didn’t understand that particular accent.

She pronounced where as “wa” or something like that I was really confused.

'She pronounced where as “wa” or something like that...'

Indeed, Northern English is just regular English with random vowels and syllables missed out.

> My take on this is to speak regular English with a slight foreign accent

It does sound ridiculous, but I do exactly this when speaking to groups of foreign colleagues. I'll slow down a bit, change my consonants and vowels ever so slightly, and use slightly "incorrect" or simplified grammar. And I think it's helped me. At least, it hasn't hindered me.

People who have never learned a second language often have mind blindless of how difficult it is. Speaking slower, not using advanced idioms, avoiding ambiguous expressions like "I'm good" could make a world of difference but I rarely see people do it.

I've learnt several international languages, and what you describe is very hard for me. I'm guessing there is an built in arrogance in my mind that "everyone should understand me", I do make an effort. One thing that makes it harder is the taboo of seeming studpid, and hurting my feelings. So while I do want to agree that I am better at communicating it is not a given, the give and take of communicating is not only about languages and I've met some excellent one-language communicators.

Arrogance sucks, just trying to be humble is not enough for me to shake it.

Something I find useful is to explicitly separate thoughts into small sentences.

"Bonjour. Parlez-vous anglais?"

"Yes, a little bit."

"Hello. I need a passport photo. The photo is for a USA passport. The USA passport photo is a different size from the European size. The size for the USA passport photo is 2 inches by 2 inches."

I live in a Francophone region and speak like this to the locals all the time. Taking short pauses between sentences also helps.

This is a good example. I never saw it written about so directly: Short, simple sentences, with small pauses between. It is a very good idea. When I get stuck speaking with non-natives in my own language or another, I repeat the sentence but use synonyms where possible. That also helps sometimes.

Depending upon the local culture, it may be acceptable to "gently" mix languages. Example: Maybe you can say part of what you need in French, and part in English. When I say something in English, then try to repeat another language (or vice versa), the non-native listener is much more likely to understand me.

It’s probably not obvious to the English guy that what is being spoken is not UK (or US) English, but is instead a "Global English" that is (mostly) a subset of the language they already speak.

It’s very easy for a native English speaker to unknowingly step outside the boundary of what constitutes “Global English” and use constructs & vocabulary that are not taught to Global English speakers.

In the UK in the 80s and 90s it was unfashionable to teach formal English grammar in schools. A whole generation grew up without knowing their gerund from their past participle. (Even as I write this, I know that if put on the spot to explain those words, I’d need to check on Wikipedia). As a native (post-?)modern British English speaker I have observed that “Global English” is a truer version of the language I speak. It intimidates me a bit.

I had to look up gerund, which very much proves you correct.

Isn't that rather normal that foreigners have to learn grammar more explicitly? Outside of teachers and people who studied Polish, nobody remembers what "przysłówek" is.

Good question - I'd assumed that most countries' educational systems teach the formal grammar of their native language(s)?

The challenge is that the formal understanding of a language constantly evolves and there isn’t always even a consensus in the field itself, so perhaps UK school system has/had a point here.

Unless I’m going into linguistics or some adjacent field, doubtful I’ll need it—and if I do, I might be better off learning it later when I can appreciate the nuance (rather than as a small child, liable to treat as ground truth the whatever formal model that happened to be popular at the time) and from a linguist (rather than elementary school teacher).

The same could be said about most of what is taught in secondary education. At least an understanding of principles of grammar would help when learning foreign languages. It is also a transferable skill; a number of parallels to coding for example.

I disagree that it’d help much, maybe even the opposite. Knowing how to use the language effectively is different from knowing [some mainstream theory of] how it works and various taxonomies of its parts.

Similar deal with music: you don’t need to know theory or notation to play well, and knowing theory doesn’t really mean you can play.

Some say, similar deal with math: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

IMO the existing ways education works in most countries is a can of worms in general.

At least in Poland they do at the elementary school level - but, at the high school, Polish lessons focus 95% on the literature.

Is this not understanding things like gerunds why we now have things like "ad spend", when "ad spending" is the pre-existing way of nounifying the verb?

I don't think it's the constructs & vocabulary which causes the most problems.

It's mostly the dialect (pronunciation), fast speaking and unclearly articulated or swallowed sounds.

(nothing specific about English here, most of us speak like that in our native languages)

> It's mostly the dialect (pronunciation), fast speaking and unclearly articulated or swallowed sounds.

I agree. I was once in a car with a Brit and Canadian and had a lot of trouble to understand them as a non-native English speaker. They could understand each other perfectly well. So, it must be not the specifics of the British or Canadian accent, but more about the fast speaking like you say.

For fast speaking some Northern Ireland Accents can get hard to understand even for native speakers.

Try Glaswegian. I'm from the south of England and on occasion hitch-hiked in Scotland. Got a lift from Aberdeen where they speak perfectly understandable English to Glasgow with a Glaswegian building contractor. I don't think I understood more than half of what he said along the way.

> Try Glaswegian.

I'll put the Western Pennsylvania/Appalachia accent up against Glaswegian.

The Pittsburgh Penguins faced with Pittsburgh-ese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07W9kCK6Q4

These are comedians making fun of the accent, but they don't do it justice. The accent itself can be near unintelligible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrJnIxrtB4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_u122kFO2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJfNI9DppP4

We once had an employee from Westinghouse from the Netherlands over at our house for Thanksgiving. The poor man could understand everybody in the family except for my grandfather. He finally asked us what he was doing wrong. We all laughed and simply pointed out that the problem was my grandfather's accent, not his English and that a significant portion of America wouldn't be able to understand my grandfather, either.

True, dialects differ. My father was a cockney in London and my mother was Irish, we lived in Wales during WW2 and my father was a Major on the Burma Road - came back with a love for curry that the cook soon adopted. We often had Canadian and Australian officers stay with us. The net result is I am fluent in all British dialects, and adapted to the Canadian dialect in school - kids who spoke funny soon learned Canadian-speak. Once, on the phone, my mother asked me a question, and back I went to Oxford English to answer that question - when I returned to my call, the called asked me who was that? I had switched back to UK-speak and back to Canadian-speak instantly. I also learned Yiddish - my father was a stained glass artist, and while he was in Burma the home office asked him if we could accommodate a family from Poland who had given my father as a reference. It was Mr Berger, my father's art glass supplier in Poland who had escaped via Spain as a DP family. Father and mother, 2 children and their grandmother - we had the space and my father agreed by telegram. My mother and me at 4 were immersed in a Yiddish family. It was great, I soaked up the language like a sponge. In 1946 my father returned and the Bergers went to live in a house they rented. In 1948, we came to Canada. Many of the storekeepers in Toronto were amazed at my Yiddish fluency, as we often shopped in Yiddish store - no supermarkets then, we shopped 2-3 times/week. Butchers, fishmongers, bakers, grocers, greengrocers all a melange of differences - I still long for these aspects as I wander Costco these days.

I've heard one Australian speak only the initial consonant of every syllable.

> (nothing specific about English here, most of us speak like that in our native languages)

I think it actually is something specific about English. English is stress-timed, which means that sounds are given variable amounts of time, and what gets a regular timing and rythm is stress phrases. Many other languages are syllable timed, which means that the syllables each get roughly the same amount of time. This is probably what creates the impression of the english mumbling, speaking fast, or "eating" sounds.

Edit: agree on the rest, it's probably not the vocabulary or the grammar

I don't have any linguistic insight, I can only speak comparatively regarding my experience with learning German where it's essentially the same story - strong dialects, mumbling and eating sounds make it very difficult (perhaps even more difficult than in English) to understand what the native person is saying.

Admittedly, English and German are linguistically similar, so the same effect might be present here as well.

I once had a native German speaker tell me they had trouble understanding me because I was speaking a 'dialect of English'.

It would be very useful to know how English is taught as a foreign language. I assume there are certain methods of constructing phrases that are more natural for certain languages.

Whatever language is spoken, it’s always a dialect of some parent language. Even preferential versions of the language, like “the Kings English”, a.k.a., Received Pronunciation, is still just another dialect that happens to be preferred.

You could just as easily have asked him what dialect of German that he spoke.

This happens in languages that do have an official version, too — like French. There’s an official dialect that is defined by L’Academie Française, and there’s everything else. But they’re all still dialects.

As an English guy who travels I find myself modifying the complexity of my language depending on the audience. "Where station?" if the locals aren't very up on English and so on. It's quite easy to gauge it a bit wrong though. I also sometimes find myself modifying the accent a bit to more like US/Australian style which is often better understood than my natural accent (UK home counties).

This phenomena also scales not only up to a room full of internationals but also down to within countries. For example, if you're American and have a stronger accent you'll typically use a more universal one at work, even if everyone you work with is from the same geographic area as you. That's my experience as a Southerner.

As an American living abroad, I learned this fast when I started working in a multi-lingual environment. If I just spit out words naturally, people don't understand me. It's frustrating at first but if you want to be understood, then well, you should just speak more simply. I've found that the habit of speaking in a simple manner has helped a lot even when speaking with other English natives.

I'm a US native and have worked many years overseas. When I'm back in the US, people tell me that my speech has the distinctive character of someone who is accustomed to speaking with non-native speakers. I think the main differences are more careful enunciation and more carefully structured utterances.

My mother also notices the same about me when speaking on the telephone. If I have been code switching for a day with co-workers, she will mention that my accent sounds different today!

The English don’t notice their English accent.

England is a country of a new accent every 40 miles or so. We understand each other nonetheless; we’re habituated to it from birth. We rarely realise others don’t experience the same.

> England is a country of a new accent every 40 miles or so

If not less. There's been a fairly large of degree of flattening over recent years, but my grandparents could quite often differentiate between the accents of people who grew up barely more than a couple of miles apart.

One thing that seems to trip up even some native speakers is that the T-V distinction[1] still exists in the Yorkshire dialect in some contexts. I seem to recall a band getting some criticism for lyric that went "I tell thee", which a few people saying it sound sounded phoney or nothing like what a young person would say, and that it was only used to make the rhyme work. It sounded perfectly natural to my Yorkshire ear - it would just a normal dialect use of "thee".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction

I wonder if "thee" comes from "thou". Definitely distinctly Yorkshire. I wouldn't use it as I think people would accuse me of taking on a false Yorkshire accent.

I lived in England when I was little. My parents were doing their PhDs. I suppose their English must have been good, but every time someone came over to do some job (say a plumber), my brother and I would have to translate.

Nowadays, a few decades later, I find it easier to fall into my English accent instead of trying to pronounce everything clearly. My wife says it sounds chopped up.

I have a fairly generic, south east English accent, much like you'd hear on Radio 4, and weirdly the country where I have the most trouble with people not understanding what I'm saying is the United States.

"Two nations separated by a common language"

                          Winston Churchill

That might not be just the accent. I noticed that British English seems to use synonyms for a lot of nouns. Sometimes this just sounds quaint (rubbish -> trash), sometimes it takes me a moment (car park -> parking lot), but sometimes the word is simply not used that way in American English (bin -> [rubbish] bin -> trash can; pavement -> sidewalk [but "pavement" in American is the road surface, so it's a valid word, just means the opposite in British]).

Imagine coming at it from the other side and seeing "biscuits and gravy" on a menu.

There’s a whole line of books about the same words that take on different meanings in American versus British English.

Like pants. In the US, pants are something you wear on the outside over your underwear. In the UK, pants are what you wear under your trousers.

But the hysterical thing to me, is that the act of “pantsing someone” means exactly the same thing in both languages, despite the different meanings of the word themselves. Either you are pulling down someone’s pants to expose their underwear, or you are pulling down someone’s trousers to expose their pants.

The French would call these words “faux amis”, or “false friends”. You think you know what you mean when you say the word legume, but you don’t understand that they have a different definition of that word.

In the UK, you do NOT want to be caught selling or giving away Fanny Packs. The word Fanny in the UK is a reference to female genitalia, and not your butt. In the UK, if you want to sell or give away these things, you do so with “Bum Bags”. But the word “bum” in the US has a rather different connotation.

Oh, so many hilarious things can be found in this line of books.

Right, I speak a sort of broken English to Asian speakers. Just dumb it down a bit. I always smile when a friend visits and tries to speak to non-native speakers the same way he talks to me and I see they can't understand him as he's rambling away. I'll then adjust based on how the conversation flows.

> In continental Europe I have often been in a room with people from 10 different countries say Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Poland, India, China, Korea, England. Everyone could understand each other's broken English with the exception that half of the people couldn't understand English guy.

The problem is that most people are not exposed to real-life English. It's either quite artificial language during classes or well spoken lines in movies. Words are spoken slower and clearer. Native speakers speak fast, use linking, colloquial language, multitude of idioms, phrasal verbs, and tons of stuff never ever touched during classes.

Also, the economics of making a movie mean that the dialogue must be written for an audience with a very low average level of comprehension. I am not a language snob but sometimes it is so poor or obviously dumbed down that it spoils the realism of the film.

> real-life English

I get what you mean, but want to point out that this Global English which allows the folks to communicate is real-life English as it gets. It's just not Her Majesty's or Mr. President's.

I would equate it more to a Pidgin English, or a lowest common denominator dialect that throws out 80% or more of the parent language.

Yes, I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years. I heard plenty of Belgians who spoke English better than many native US speakers, but I also heard plenty of people speaking what I would consider a very broken English, more like what is being discussed here.

"The problem is that most people are not exposed to real-life English. It's either quite artificial language during classes or well spoken lines in movies."

This is true of most languages. My favourite example in Mandarin Chinese that appears very often in TV shows and films, "what are you looking at?" 看什么看？

On the surface, this should be pronounced as "kan shenme kan", Chinese people like to add particles to things, in this case it gains a "-na", and the whole thing when said quickly actually reduces to something approximating "ka'me ka-a". When you've heard it a few times, you just recognise it, but unless you have a native to explain it (or good subtitles), it's impossible to guess.

I should add that this example is particular to the North, especially Beijing, but other areas have similar but different effects.

It is called Globish. It is not only about pronunciation but also grammar etc. Like word information. In Globish you have information as well as informations.

Don’t forget “do you have a Software?” Instead of “software program” or just plain “program”.

Or do you “do the Necessary”?

Sometimes accents can make it harder.

In my first job in China, I was working on a project with Chinese colleagues and an Indian software company.

They teams had difficulty understanding one other. During conference calls, I often had to relay messages. Everyone could understand my English, and I could understand theirs, but the Chinese folks couldn't understand the Indians' accents, and vice versa.

Ha, my British wife had the same issue on exchange to Sweden. A bunch of non-British people were speaking to each other and only after a while did she realize it was in her own language.

What's weird about English is the hugely wide range of "native" English dialects. My late father asked me where my in-laws were from. Then he asked me whether I was sure, because he'd heard they speak English in Scotland.

The plus side is that everyone accepts that everyone else speaks good enough English to carry a conversation. In a lot of other places, once you miss a vowel they will switch to... English.

The reason for that is obvious to me: these people from Germany, Russia and China speak dumbed-down simplified version of English. Do you really want the English guy to forget 2/3 of his native language just to please others?

What I see more often is Russians and Chinese don't even try and stuck with their broken English after decades of living in USA or UK.

> Do you really want the English guy to forget 2/3 of his native language just to please others?

Communication is about exchanging information. If you're this English guy and you're blabbing something and no one understands you, would you be fine with being not understood (i.e. your information being lost)? If so, why even open your mouth?

GP's scenario is about people in Continental Europe. If the English knowledge is weak, an English person speaking in idioms (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awUqKKEKQh4 ) would confuse them quite easily.

I prefer to not work with people that I can't communicate with.

From your 2 responses, you seem like a difficult fellow to work with.

I wish the people who do have to work with you as little hardship as they need to suffer...

As a foreigner you have lived a significant amount of time in England, people with little mastery of the language can be very annoying. It is frustrating to exchange with people who don’t understand slowed down conversational English. Also global english is a myth. In my experience people somewhat understand other speakers of their native language who mispronounce following similar patterns and can somewhat mimic the mistakes of other foreigners while inferring an often incorrect meaning from the context.

From a linguistic podcast I learned that people don't notice how mangled their pronunciation is, in their native language. With phonemic languages, most people think ‘duh, I speak like it's written’ while swallowing half the vowels and slurring all consonants together.

I'm the English guy that about 1 in 50 of those people will walk up to afterwards. "Excuse me, but where are you from in England? I find your accent very easy to understand." (I'm told this around once per business trip.)

It's mostly my accent (or lack of accent, if you wish to think of it that way), but I'm also used to speaking to non-natives, so avoiding idioms and slang.

In the last 2 years, I've sometimes told other natives in Zoom calls to slow down, speak more clearly etc — if I have trouble understanding, non-natives probably have more trouble, but can be more reluctant to admit it.

The problem is: native speakers have a very warped idea about what's "difficult" about their own language.

Ask English speakers about what's difficult about it, and half of the time they start talking about spelling, because that's what they feel difficult. Nobody says "When I see 'place' or 'book' how do I know if it's a noun or a verb?" because that's just blindingly obvious to a native speaker.

>My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language.

I definitely agree on this one. At a previous stage of my life I'd read a lot of text in English and never spoke a word of it. I sorta had this self-emergent mostly subconscious way to map English words to sounds in a way that preserved the spelling information without being too dissimilar from the real pronunciation.

Of course the whole system proved to be quite problematic when I eventually had to start speaking in English on a daily basis.

I just started to watch all movies in English whenever I can, this helped me a tremendous amount.

But occasionally, it happens that I still get it wrong. For example, just a few weeks back, I've heard 'Arkansas' pronounced in the News - totally different than I would have pronounced it. I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread: https://youglish.com/ is absolutely brilliant to figure out how something is pronounced, saved me quite a few times already of mispronouncing things.

Wow, that website is super useful, didn't know, thanks.

Place names are notorious for this in English. Family names too, sometimes.

Honestly though, mispronouncing words is a rite of passage for ordinary native English speakers too, especially ones who acquired a large chunk of their vocabulary from reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOd3lwluQIw

England is well known for this. I live close-by to a town called Gotham.

It is pronounced goat-em.

Other nearby places include:

Loughborough, pronounced luff-bruh

Leicester, pronounced less-ter

Derby, pronounced Dar-bee

Yeah, you might have a hard time understanding how many times I’ve heard my own last name pronounced incorrectly by people who are clearly Native American English speakers. And from a name that goes back to at least the 1600s in the “Domesday Book” from England.

It wasn’t until Beyoncé became a thing that some people started getting it right. And even then, I’ve still had to prompt them — “you know, like Beyoncé?”

Another example: If you know how to pronounce "in" and "famous", you still don't know how to pronounce "infamous".

I'm a native English speaker, but not from the USA, and I'd heard Arkansas spoken out loud and written down separately for over a decade before I understood they were the same place. And my first thought when I realised this - even as a native English speaker - was incredulity at how mind-bogglingly stupid that was.

You know, before I took 30 seconds to come up with a handful of other inconsistent pronunciations and begrudgingly concede that it wasn't any weirder than a lot of other inconsistencies I'd already absorbed without really realising it.

Yep. I follow the advice in the article:

> NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound.

Because on probably a monthly basis my partner will make fun of me for pronouncing something wrong. The phrase is "I learned it from reading" --but it's not a good enough excuse anymore in our wide web'd world.

Oh, and I've spoken American English since birth, and have been variously told my language and communication skills are very strong.

> I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

The reason why they're pronounced differently is that they have different language origins. Arkansas is from the plural form of the French name of a Native American tribe, so you don't pronounce the '-s' while Kansas comes from the English spelling of a similar(?) tribe, where the '-s' is pronounced. English is notorious for just borrowing words from other languages wholesale but it seems to work most of the time.

I learnt it from the news during the Clinton years. Took quite a while to make the connection. You can add on Tucson to that list as well.

Tucson was originally a Spanish town, and its name in Spanish (Tucsón) is pronounced probably more similar to how you expect. Not sure why the “c” became silent in English.

> But occasionally, it happens that I still get it wrong. For example, just a few weeks back, I've heard 'Arkansas' pronounced in the News - totally different than I would have pronounced it. I know how to pronounce 'Kansas', and I was always under the impression that 'Arkansas' is the same with an 'Ar-' prefixed, which is apparently not the case.

This example also happened to me (native British English speaker), mistakes will be made if you don't hear how a word is pronounced.

I can relate to this experience. I have since worked on my pronunciation extensively, trying to expose myself to spoken English as much as possible (which nowadays with Netflix & sons is so much easier than 20 years ago). But since I learned to read English at such a young age, I can never "undo" the way I internally pronounce/read the words - I have just learned a second "overlay language" that maps my internal sound of all the words to their 'correct' pronunciations (those that are recognizable by someone who speaks English natively.)

The funny thing is, in my current work project there is a colleague who can clearly read & write English without any effort, but his pronunciation is "zero effort given". The other day, I chuckled on the way he pronounced the word "queue", which is exactly how I pronounce it myself "in my head" before I map it to the 'correct' English pronunciation. I think everybody understood what he meant, but his total disregard for the 'correct' English pronunciation rules is admirable.

After years of speaking English, I try to do what your friend does. I'll never learn how to speak "cucumber" properly.

Just a note on the difference between written and spoken words in languages in general, I'm Danish, and we have this a lot, words that are pronounced totally different from the letters that comprise them, and only general rules, with plenty of exceptions on how they sound in different contexts, even the same word will be pronounced different depending on contexts, and also words that mean different things, are spelled diffrently and yet sound the same when spoken (so you need to know the context + know that there are these different, same-sounding words).

When I was a child, I was convinced that all these traps had been designed to keep outsiders out, and to allow people to show their level of education. I always thought these traps were there to make it clear who were higher class, when I started learning English I became convinced this was the case.

Now I'm older and realized that it's probably just because languages are not designed, and some evolve worse than others.

Pronunciations and meanings shift all the time in English. Sometimes, words even flip meanings - like "fine" can mean anything but fine. Depends on the context!

Japanese has a similarly maddening expression for non-native speakers: "Kekko desu." (けっこです。) For example, if you have coffee and someone asks you if you want milk and sugar... to decline, you might reply "kekko desu" -- which means "it's fine as it is." It's tough to understand when to use it correctly! Still now, after more than 10 years of learning Japanese, I have memorised a few key situations when it is correct/safe to use the expression.

I adjust my use of English to the person or group I am talking to. This is sometimes derided as "coded speech", but I think it is just common courtesy.

But sometimes the word choices of ESL speakers just sound better than proper English, and I tend to pick that up, too. For example, I still find myself saying now and then:

"I'm going to make some shoppings."

"It's time for go."

I think it's more historical than anything. If someone has a better explanation I would like to hear it though. For example, words that comes from French have the letter "i" pronounced the french way, other pronounced like a "y"

And the local variations. In NZ the bulk of "e"s in words like pen, ten, etc. are often pronounced as "i"s, like in pin or tin. Took me a while to get used to it.

Some of them, but I don't think this is a rule. I would say more so for uncommon words that are recognizably French, and less so in US English. Historical accident is definitely the main cause.

Compare dauphin, cinema, dime.

> I was convinced that all these traps had been designed to keep outsiders out, and to allow people to show their level of education

While this is not the original reason, this is one of the reasons not to change things. For example, ‘distinguishing educated and ignorant people’ had been named a reason to keep Ѣ in the Russian alphabet (it was eventually removed after the revolution).

French does this too, and thanks to the official guardian and creator of the language known as L’Academie Française, they don’t have that excuse.

But don’t get me started on Welsh.

English language dominance is usually downplayed, and accepted as "normal" - because of convenience and also, because frankly, what would be the alternative?

But because of convenience and lack of alternatives, we tend to forget that English dominance is not without deep political, psychological and economic consequences for all the others. Those things are usually downplayed, and it's problematic.

First of all, learning English is a cost, and not an insignificant one. Research has also shown that mastery of English follows class cleavages in many contexts.

Another example is gatekeeping in publications: in academia, sometimes I see some political visions or takes are de facto marginalized or ignored because they don't quite fit the politics in the "Anglosphere", and the "Anglosphere" or Anglo trained people de facto control the publishing market. The Anglosphere is not the west, but quite a weird subset of the west.

Also many quirks of the Anglo political debate or categories to analyze the world tend to get global - but they are ill fit in other contexts. I think about the whole idea of the "5 races", with so many weird categories such as "Asian" or, worse "Latino".

There have been plenty of alternatives since there are multiple cultures able to speak and the need to talk with each other.

English just happens to be the last variation of that, and not even all around the world, as there are places where other languages are more welcomed for cross culture communication and you will hardly find a soul able to talk your majesty's English.

>what would be the alternative?

Mandarin seems the most likely candidate. There might come a day when most Indo-European languages merge into a variant of English while Mandarin, being from a different language family, becomes the only other major human language, with both borrowing from each other to some degree but not merging. Given the large number of languages that exist now and their degree of connection to the cultures that spawned them, in some ways it's difficult to believe that most could fall to the side but the trend of English as a second language almost everywhere is pretty strong. At some point people might simply stop bothering to learn their culture's formerly primary language.

More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail.

That was the retcon.

The real reason that they spoke a pretend version of Mandarin was so that they could say things that would otherwise get stopped by the censors. They used it as their cursing language, among other things.

> More or less what happens in Firefly, though it's not explored in detail.

Though the process is hinted to be very much top-down political, in that the Union of Allied Planets flag is a very obvious direct blending of the USA and PRC flags.

Oh no. As a non-native English speaker I'd rather forget and learn English all over again than touch Mandarin. My life is too short for that.

> what would be the alternative?

I'm pretty sure that before English become what it is nowadays - a tool that helps bridging the communication, it was French that people were using and way earlier, it was Latin. Russian language was the one used in USSR on a daily basis (even taught in schools as mandatory subject of Warsaw Pact countries back then) and still is being recognized in post-soviet countries as a language that you can communicate in. It's still being used in international organizations.

The dominance of the particular language or languages doesn't come out of nowhere - it is indeed tied to geopolitical actions of the countries and their people.

Before English became more common, yes — French was the main “Lingua Franca” in the western world.

There have been attempts to create an alternative language that would not heavily favor or disfavor any speakers of any natural human language, but they haven’t gotten a lot of traction. Look up “Esperanto”.

Prior to French, I think it probably was Latin. But that’s still the western world.

But in the Eastern world? I don’t know what the primary language was before Mandarin, which itself was created only relatively recently because the ruling party didn’t like people using Cantonese and they wanted one unified language that they could force on everyone in the country.

Exactly my experience as well. In my home country I was an extrovert. In native English speaking country I turned to an introvert.

Best approach I've seen is to speak regardless of making mistakes. What wears out the listeners is not that much the mistakes (they usually can understand what you mean by the context) but altering your tempo or having it too slow to errr and emmmm. As long as you keep it steady and to a decent pace you should be ok.

In russia I was introvert but my english teacher's love of english turned to english lover and more of an extrovert. Way that insinuation works in English is brilliant and how I liked to compress what I am saying, russian is very intricate but verbose language, I found home in English though being down to the center bi-cultural, bi-lingual. Generally I feel english is so super efficient and dramatic language but russian is a feeling language kind of more precise but also heavy.

My mind being slow I prefer English and it makes me more extraverted, russian being good with close friends but clumsy with external world. 2c.

It's not just the mistakes, when I speak with my non-standard accent or slightly incorrect phonetics the listener needs to work harder to process information, even if unconciously, and this on it's own already is detrimental or activates some bias.

I've been mostly the same in my efforts to learn Mandarin. Not only am I much more introverted speaking Chinese, but I'm also easily frustrated trying to get my point across. The Chinese they teach you in school is the extremely standardized version of the language (maybe similar to the concept of 'global English'?) which maps very poorly to what you hear anywhere that isn't CCTV news programs.

The biggest challenge, though, has been native Chinese speakers just shaking their heads when you speak to them and pretending not to understand. It's clear no effort is being made. I've seen fellow Americans do this too, and it's extremely frustrating having been on the other side of that situation. Thankfully I sometimes get a morale boost from restaurant/shop workers who complement me, even though it's clear I'm speaking at a kindergarten level.

For the last 8 years or so I've been communicating primarily using global English. I moved overseas a few times, my partner comes from another country, and besides talking to my family I rarely use my native language. My inner voice mostly switched to English, too.

There's one negative side effect I've noticed - I feel less smart than before. I'm not sure if it's a real thing or not, but I feel I can't fully express myself in English. I consider myself quite a fluent speaker, but my vocabulary is still quite limited compared to my native language. It's enough for 99% of the conversation I have, but whenever I say or think something, I have this feeling that I lack words to precisely express what I want.

> There's one negative side effect I've noticed - I feel less smart than before. I'm not sure if it's a real thing or not, but I feel I can't fully express myself in English. I consider myself quite a fluent speaker, but my vocabulary is still quite limited compared to my native language. It's enough for 99% of the conversation I have, but whenever I say or think something, I have this feeling that I lack words to precisely express what I want.

I've got the very same problem. The frustration at the lack of precision of my communication is what kills me.

I suspect it's perception only and caused by the fact that my native language has more expressive grammar that allows entire "She would have gone" sentence be expressed as a single word - a conjugated verb - and include 100% of the information of the one in English.

Just so you know, it's not just you. I switched to using English since ~6 years, and almost never use my native language (Swiss French) anymore outside of exchanges with old friends and family. I feel that my clarity of thoughts took quite a hit. And thinking in my native language now requires a lot of effort as I got used to construct my thoughts in English.

On top of this I currently live in Germany, when I speak with my life partner (native German speaker) it is mostly in English, with some German words, and a few random French words and idioms I have no idea how to translate, so we have a tendency to reuse the same limited vocabulary just because it is easier to communicate.

I know what you mean. It appears that conscious thought is intertwined with language and greatly affected by it. I'm not quite sure how or why, I think some concepts and patterns of thought (maybe memories?) are linked with something language-specific, perhaps the words themselves. But at any rate it negatively affects my ability to think the same way, with the same clarity and speed as before. I've recently been trying to use my native language more to revert my inner monologue back to my native tongue. It does hurt my eloquence in English but I don't care.

>I feel less smart than before

This definitely resonates with me when I use english.

My spoken English is limited by the fact that I have perfectly laid out sentence in mind, which sometimes is just missing the key word. I try to remember which one for a few seconds, then I default to something that is not quite right, or just describe the word I was trying to use. This ends up sounding very stupid, as it would be very okay if I just did not use the word in the first place.

It's directly mirroring the way I use written English, where if you miss a word you can just go back a few seconds later and fill in the blanks. Still, I try to write more fluently and not obsess over small details - I think it's way worse for me when I spend long minutes or hours trying to craft perfect sentences, when "slightly worse would do trick".

Tangentially, I try to not give fuck about pronounciation. I'll never learn how to say "cucumber" naturally.

Your expression "slightly worse would do trick" is very similar to the engineering expression: Do not let perfect be the enemy of good!

Are you living in an English speaking country and using English all the time?

What you are describing sounds like how I felt for my first three months in England. I stopped feeling this way when I started thinking entirely in English and actually became fluent. It was quite nice because it also marked the end of my daily headaches in the evening. I had no idea about how physically painful immersion would be before moving there.

No, but I work using English and speak regularly in that language, including native speakers, for at least 30 minutes every working day. Usually longer.

Maybe I would need way more for short term.

Yes, I only significantly improved after being put in a context where I could only talk in English and didn’t use another language for months. Unless you are very talented at learning languages, full immersion is more or less required if you want to become fluent.

Tangential: Me looking up "cucumber" on youglish.com led me to this very powerful TED talk on online abuse of women. Thought I would share

https://youtu.be/GSf6nij-SdA

Nothing hurts the HNer more than feeling less smart.

My two biggest disappointments about English:

- I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic language. I can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano (unless of course we get Mandarin instead).

- I started reading a lot of English because found tons and tons of material on the English web. And then on closer look this English web turned out to be utterly dominated by the US. Want housekeeping advice? Well we have these funny cardboard houses, just drill a lot of holes and then replace entire walls because it's cheap. Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths. Now when people on HN complain that other people assume everything is in California by default, I laugh heartily, tingling all over with schadenfreude.

In Russia people call Moscow “default city” because if people are talking on the internet about something that is related to a location they usually mean Moscow. Also people from Moscow in conversations also always assume that everyone lives in Moscow.

IIRC that originated on the largest Russian car-related internet bulletin board. They had a rule about posting classifieds that said "if you're selling your car, you're selling in Moscow by default, if you are not, explicitly state your locality at the very beginning and at the very end of your ad or don't complain about people from Moscow calling you".

What is the name of that board?

Same in Poland. Warsaw is the default city.

This is like how on certain internet forums, people talk about American conditions as if everybody is in America. Start a conversation about labor conditions and people throw around W-2 as if it's some standard thing. Or someone will give you a summary of your rights as if you are in America ("at-will states").

I remember in the early days of the internet, when you came across a postcode field, it had to be a US postcode. 90210 was the only one I knew at the time, so that got put in a lot.

Actually chuckled out loud at "stone-weights and horse-lengths" :D

> can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano

In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin.

If people from, say, Germany, France, Italy, China, Egypt, India, Brazil, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina get together in a room, the odds are English would be the language most of them would be familiar with, even though it's not any of their native language.

Over here in India people in different states natively speak totally different languages, with totally different scripts and everything.

For example:

(State — Language)

Karnataka — Kannada

Kerala — Malayalam

Tamil Nadu — Tamil

Andhra Pradesh — Telugu

Uttar Pradesh — Hindi

West Bengal — Bengali

Maharashtra — Marathi

These are just a few examples. There's atleast 28 states in India and even more languages. In most of northern India I think you can get by with Hindi. However, not everyone knows Hindi.

And when people from, say, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have a conversation, then unless everyone in that group knows Hindi it'll likely be in English even though it's not the native language of anybody in that group.

> Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths.

Lmao. But these days I notice that most American youtubers (atleast the ones I'm subscribed to) would also mention the metric equivalent of whatever they're talking about. So kudos to them for being mindful of their international viewership :)

> In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin.

I hope you are right; but it's one of the observations of sociolinguistics that a more "prestigious" language eventually wins out, and until recently, prestige was synonymous with power. I hope that with the arrival of the internet we may be past that, and that English has reached sufficient critical mass to stay dominant even after the fall of the US; but if history is any guide, a new superpower may eventually replace it with its language. This happened to Greek, Latin, French and German; it could happen to English too.

I think English has embedded itself in the technology niche so deeply that it's not going away anytime soon.

Everything in tech is English based, from programming languages to kernel boot messages. Even the way we think about text doesn't let itself well to Kanji, never mind RTL languages. While GUI operating systems can handle that, your average recovery command prompt cannot.

Other languages might become dominant in new (or currently under explored) areas of science maybe in quantum computing, bioengineering and such, but computing is going to be tied to English for a long time.

Unless I am mistaken, the language of science in late 19th – early 20th century was German. And then it suddenly wasn't.

It's easy to start talking about something in a different language.

It's possible to translate most of the relevant literature into that language.

Changing the keywords in programming languages, HTTP headers, JSON field names, identifiers in library code, error messages embedded deep in boot ROMs and so on is much more difficult.

You seem to think that one needs to learn the human language to learn those keywords. That's demonstrably false, as evidenced by hordes of programmers who can barely read English sentences, much less write anything coherent. They already cargo-cult the programming language words without understanding the human language, and the actual spoken/written languages bear no influence on that. If Spanish becomes the dominant language of the web, some of them will learn to read and write Spanish while continuing to cargo-cult English programming keywords into those conversations.

If you remove American and UK influence, I expect the resulting English would rapidly mutate into its own thing, even more unlike US/UK English than the international dialect of English mentioned in OP.

Precisely what happened to Latin

I saw somebody say once that a hundred years from now, the default common language will be English as it is spoken in China.

> people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin

Several years ago I went to a resort town in Egypt, and all Egyptians working around the hotels there spoke Russian, because there were lots of Russian tourists. Later I've been told that just a few years prior to that, everyone spoke English instead. Apparently money talks in a more literal sense too.

Try taking a vacation on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. We did.

We found out too late that Ischia was the island that mostly Germans went to after WWII, so most people there spoke at least decent German on top of their native Italian, but very few knew English.

If you’re an English speaker, you want to go to the nearby island of Capri. That’s apparently where most US and UK service personnel went on vacation.

The nearby Amalfi coast was frequented more by speakers of a third language, but by the time we got to touring the Amalfi coast we were just so exhausted from all the trying to communicate on Ischia that we kind of just gave up.

English is the javascript of languages: full of warts and enforcing a status quo that sucks but everyone has to learn it because this is the world we live in.

Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots.

Romance languages would be like scripting languages (Python, Ruby, lua, etc.): once you know one the others get really easy.

Greek would be like Lisp: had a lot of influence on current languages, dwindled a bit, but is still around.

> Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular

It might be, mostly, regular. But it is hardly beautifully pure, it is almost as mongrel as any other European language.

And of course now that there are quite a few speakers it is importing words even though native Esperanto style words could easily be created.

To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)

I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters.

Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.

If you want to make an analogy to a language that uses a strange character set, I’d point you at APL.

Have a look at Interlingua too. It's essentially a modernized, simplified Latin. You can readily understand it in spoken and written forms if you're used to the major western languages (English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian), and use it fluently in a few weeks.

I wish it was the official EU working language.

continuing the analogy with other languages I've tried to learn:

German is like Rust: everything has to conjugate properly. Difficult to compile a sentence, but once compiled it has a very specific meaning.

Khmer is like Go: simplicity as a virtue. No tenses, no genders, no conjugation. Just slap the words together. But expressing complex concepts takes a lot of words.

Esperanto could be OCaml: reasonably straightened and cleaned but still on the "practical" side.

For a Haskell equivalent, I'd take Lojban.

"Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots."

You say "would be" like that's not already the case! (for both examples)

Sanskrit could also be like Haskell.

Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice.

Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English.

Let me give an example.

(Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?).

Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States.

How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"?

Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"?

But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English!

Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know.

In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame.

I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey.

If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1].

I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that:

* the declension situation of modern English is primitive

* German has 4 cases of declension

* Latin has 5 cases of declension

* Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension

* Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced

In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things.

I hope this was useful.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

"How many presidents have their been, up to and including Joe Biden"?

> - I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic language. I can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano (unless of course we get Mandarin instead).

We will get Mandarin, if anything other than English, and you will beg, on your knees, weeping, to go back to English...

> I've been told in school that English has spelling rules.

Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers (and simple rule-based algorithms) can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words with most of the errors being minor issues about vowel reduction to schwa and stress placement.

For the incredulous, here's 56 table-based search-and-replace rules that get you to about 85%: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

Various other authors have their own slight variations on this, but typically it comes to 40 - 70 algorithmically-applicable rules. I wish more students got taught some variation on spelling rules like that, because they're much closer to the real rules of English spelling. It's only slightly worse than French, who we ripped off most of the modern orthography from. (Such table-based rules for French get above 95% pretty easily.) The thing is that, in both languages, this is a decidedly one-way process. Guessing how something is spelled from the sound is hopeless.

Getting to 80% may be easy, but getting to 100% is close to an AGI problem.

Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc.

Determining which way to use is impossible without understanding the text. You can get pretty far by using some simple heuristics. For example, when the word read is preceded by "have", you almost always want to use the past tense pronunciation, but if it's preceded by "to", you want the present tense. At some point, though, you will hit the "time flies like an arrow" vs. "fruit flies like a banana" problem, and simple sentence analysis will not be enough.

Another issue with English is that it likes to mash words together, and most pronunciation rules are not ready for that. While "Black Lives Matter" might be easy to pronounce, #blacklivesmatter is not. Getting this wrong sometimes leads to hilarious results[1].

I'm blind and I use a speech synthesizer daily, so I'm familiar with most of these issues. I haven't found a single piece of software that actually solved them well. This is still much better than languages like Hebrew, though, as they require you to manually insert vowels in the appropriate places, a task modern computers are not ready for.

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/?utm_source=go...

Yes, I was thinking of speech synthesizers when I wrote my comment :) Closing the gap is devillish and requires increasingly complex grammatical analysis and more and more rules. One of the big barriers for early speech synthesizers was enough RAM/ROM to cram all the text-to-phonetic transformation rules.

I believe that modern approaches mostly use deep learning. And definitely still aren't perfect. I don't use speech synthesizers regularly personally as a tool, but synthesized speech is common enough that I do hear obvious stress errors in synthesized speech every day. Probably because English orthography is most opaque about stress, which basically doesn't exist as far as the writing system is concerned.

> synthesized speech is common enough

I'm curious: where do you encounter much synthesized speech? In my ‘fairly general’ usage (if there is such a thing), I only hear it in YouTube tutorials when the author is totally reluctant to both use their voice and do on-screen text.

Bus stop announcements on transit, those annoying interactive phone menus, people asking Siri math questions they should be able to do in their head, stuff like that.

> Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc.

lead is somehow even worse than read.

Would be 99% for Standard German with its quasi deterministic pronunciation. Going from sound to spelling isn't hopeless, either.

I caught up with my old French teacher, who also taught German in high school.

He told me there was value in doing dictations in French, but in German he just stopped because it was so simple. Kids would barely ever get anything wrong. I have to say I agree, having done a bit of both.

English has enough weird spellings that kids seem to have to practice it a lot. 85-90% isn't actually all that high, you're going to run into a weird one pretty soon if you're writing an essay.

> Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words

That sounds pretty bad actually. You're saying most _native_ speakers can't predict the pronunciation of 10-15% of common words?

I wasn't great in Spanish at school, but the teacher was mostly correct that "you write it like it sounds". Much more so than English at least.

(for context: I'm native Dutch/French, but speak mostly English, and know a bit of Spanish and Portuguese)

Right, 85% for English sounds plausible. For Spanish, I'd venture much closer to 100%. For Chinese, around two thirds of characters contain a phonetic component.

In other words, English is around half way between Spanish and Chinese :-)

Oh, and in Spanish it is bijective: if you know the pronunciation, you pretty much know the spelling also.

The counter example for Spanish is b/v which is pretty much the same sound in most dialects nowadays, and it seems increasingly common to see misspellings online, e.g. baca for cow.

I'm a native English speaker who's studying Russian (my first real attempt at another language). I didn't actually realize how terrible English spelling is until studying a language with a mostly sane writing system (Russian Cyrillic).

My biggest observation is English basics are not that difficult (grammer rules are very easy) but the English writing system needs a total reform. Especially now that it is becoming the default international language (for better or worse).

English spelling could be greatly improved by adding accent marks to indicate long vowels. This would fix some of the most ambiguous cases (words like "read" and "live" and "epitome"), and wouldn't alter the spelling for those who want to stick with ASCII.

The funny thing is, most English text today is written on operating systems controlled by just three entities: Google, Apple and Microsoft. A spelling reform would really need to convince just these companies to adopt it in their soft keyboards and spell checkers.

Standardisation is sort of happening by default. In my work I don't both correcting stuff like "color", "optimized", "software license" unless it actually matters. Sometimes this comes in from international colleagues but half the time it's that my own country-folk haven't bothered to change their spellchecker defaults.

[Ironically my own spellcheck has highlighted 'standardisation' for me... and asked do I mean 'standardization' or 'bastardization'. Good question :) ]

"How is this word pronounced?" ― "Ugh, exactly how it's written? visible confusion"

Compare e.g. to "Worcester" actually being pronounced as "Wooster". Well, why don't you just spell it like this, then? Na-a-ah, it'll be fine.

P.S. Compare "In Russian, letter a is generally pronounced as English a in father" with "In English, letter a can be pronounced as а, эй, or (very wide) э, depending on what else surrounds it: ...". That's the main problem with English spelling: the language itself has way too many vowels to comfortably use only the basic Latin alphabet. Russian actually can, but instead it has much more variety in its consonants: look what Czech and Polish, which have similar problem, have to do to cope with it!

Good points. My biggest quip with Russian is when "е" (yeh) is written when it is actually the "ё" (yo) character. My second is the "г" character being pronounced as "в" when surrounded by "о"s. And I often make mistakes on how "о" is accented. I wish they would just use "а" when о is pronounced that way. Other than that, modern Russian writing is very sane. I honestly make more mistakes in English due to it's inadequate writing system, and thats my native language. Go figure.

Gallagher tells it how it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

Spelling begins at 1:45. Starts by making fun of "Good Food" and ends with making fun of "go" and "do".

>> Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths.

And also (American) football fields, libraries of Congress and Olympic size swimming pools.

> It's a logographic language.

You're tongue-in-cheek, presumably, but others were not:

'It is because of the widespread discrepancies noted above that Kono (1969:85) places English in the category of logographic scripts along with Chinese while Zachrisson (1931:5) goes so far as to contend that "English shares with Chinese the doubtful honor of being made up chiefly of ideographs, pictures of words which must be seen and remembered." Both views are wrong, Zachrisson's ridiculously so, since even sight words like "the" and "one" that are often taught to children without regard to "phonics'' are by no stretch of the imagination pictures totally devoid of phonetic clues, as witness th in "the" and n in "one."'

This is from the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John D. Francis.

Afaik Chinese hieroglyphs also have hints for pronunciation. I seem to have read in this very thread that something around 2/3rds have them. Doesn't change the classification of the writing system, though.

I wouldn’t expect English as the dominant language of tech, business, etc to change soon after US hegemony comes to an end. There’s a lot of inertia there.

No different than the fall of Rome, sans the extra 500 - 600 years of hegemony but that's totally offset by rate and reach of communication

Can't wait for the Roman empire to fall, to have Latin replaced as a dominant cultural exchange language! In mere 1500 years or so.

I've decided English spelling is about like Chinese characters. If you see a new word you can make some guesses about how it is pronounced (many characters have pronunciation hints), but you won't really know until you hear someone pronounce it. I was told English is phonetic, and I believed it, but the fact that we had spelling tests through fifth or sixth grade suggests it is most definitely not. I'm guessing Chinese kids have about six years of learning characters before they have the standard set down. (3000 characters gets to 95% usage, in 6 years that's 20 a week for 25 weeks/year.)

Hi, I'm a real English person, from England (not from London) . I totally agree about all of this, and all of the sentiments expressed by Salvatore. We say that "English is easy to learn, but hard to master" and I often wonder how people in the world manage to learn it and speak with confidence when using it, they have my admiration and respect.

I have an opposite (but complimentary) perspective to Salvatore, since I spent a few years living in Europe as the only English person amongst my colleagues and friends.

At the start of this period, I quickly learned that no one could understand me. My pleasantries and greetings were met with confusion no matter how slowly I spoke, even to American colleagues. I realised that the English language I had learned was only applicable to the immediate area where I had grown up. This is true of most regions in the UK, you can travel 20 miles from any location on a map in Britain and find the local people speaking in different and sometimes incomprehensible dialects and accents, or using strange words to describe people (like "duckie" or "hen").

I quickly learned to modulate my accent, speak slower and more deliberately.

In later life I moved back to the area from where I grew up and, although people could easily understand me, they often asked me where I came from (since my modulated accent was unfamiliar to them).

Now I have "two modes", one is my incomprehensible native drawl, and the other is much easier to understand and clearer but requires me to concentrate much more.

The difference between these two modes (for me) is that it is much easier to be jovial and extroverted in my native drawl. Whereas I'm much more professional and uptight when using my modulated language, even in social settings.

I now grimace, and even translate, when English colleagues are speaking to non-native English speakers and make zero attempt to improve their use of the language. I wonder how they interact with people when on holiday, do they just shout louder and point at things? How embarrassing.

It probably doesn't help that there's British English right next door, and then proper American English everywhere else. IMO you should standardize Euro English. If you have your own version of the language, nobody can say you are doing it wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

I say, take full license -- analyze, catalog, and standardize however ya'll'd like to! I say keep the American spellings, though, z's are more exciting. They add pizzazz. Rather than whatever the boring Britishized equivalent to pizzazz is.

> Britishized equivalent to pizzazz is

I suspect you want "frippery". :P

In the #algorithms channel on Libera IRC (earlier on Freenode) that its operators and I have been operating since 2007, we have always had the following note in the channel's topic:

"Don't be sorry for your bad English: http://web.archive.org/web/20100325101243/http://ostatic.com..."

Well, usually, the worse offenders of the English language are the native English speakers.

They are the ones who make basic mistakes like "it's" in place of "its", "who's", etc and other similar basic mistakes.

Sure, non-native speakers sometimes make mistakes but they're usually specific ones, like picking the wrong verb or preposition, not using an idiomatic expression, etc.

Honestly (as a native speaker) I find the mistakes of native speakers like you describe much more jarring. When I read "to" instead of "too" my brain gets stuck because I "heard" the wrong length of vowel. When an ESL speaker uses an incorrect construction it's much less annoying for a reason I can't really explain - even if it's actually harder to understand. Although I'm hesitant to say it, maybe it's just because they're trying harder.

Sometimes I can even tell what their native language is based on the mistakes when I also speak that language, and it makes me chuckle (e.g. unorthodox commas by German speakers).

yeah I got that one too (non native speaker), where things that sound the same sound different in your brain, even though they don't really if you say them out loud.

A thing I've heard several Germans do (myself also not native speaker btw, not german though), is translate "biss" always as "until", never as "before" or "by". E.g. "we have to hand in the homework until Friday".

It's one of those things that once you've noticed, you keep on noticing and cannot unnotice. You automatically start thinking "wow, that's a lot of handing in! "

Funny, I would think of this as a word order error instead of a vocabulary one. As a native English speaker, I would say or write "we have until Friday to hand in the homework".

It crosses my mind that this may be regional use and not completely standard - I'm honestly not sure.

It could be either one. You could also say, "We have to hand in the homework by Friday." Depends on which meaning of 'have' you're using, with 'have to' meaning 'must' in this case, as opposed to having an amount of time.

I had a moment of confusion wondering why one would translate "biss" as "until" instead of "bite". "Bis" with one S is the word that should sometimes be translated as "until", "before" or "by". Another one is "seid" which is always translated as "since" but should sometimes be "for" (e.g. "I've worked here since four years")

Funnily enough the reverse also happens. Native Dutch speakers will use the Dutch translation of since (in the sense of "ever since") to say because (i.e. "since" in the sense of "since you didn't call, we left without you"). This is an Anglicism, because "sinds" doesn't mean that at all! Or at least, not yet :)

To be pedantic you mean "seit" (since/until), not "seid" as in "ihr seit laut" (you [plural] are loud).

To clear things up a bit, the correct spellings are:

- „ihr seid laut“: you are loud (seid is the second person plural form of to be)

- „seit drei Stunden“: for three hours (seit gives a temporal reference)

- „bis am Freitag“: by friday (in the context of homework)

- „der Biss“: the bite

There's also the use of sein (bin):

Ich bin seit fünf Jahren in Hamburg.

which in English Germans will often say: I am living since five years in Hamburg. Whereas nobody uses "am" any more in the past perfect in English, but there are some fun examples where it's survived: "Joy to the world, the Lord is come" for example.

Another thing is the use of the dative (not genitive): Der Hund von meinem Vater. If you hear someone say "The dog of my father", that's really really German and something no native would say, they're just directly translating the above dative construct into English.

Lastly there's the misuse of wie/how. Wie heißt das? In German English, "how do you call that"? But in English it's "what is that called"? Although actually this problem goes far beyond just Germans speaking English. Also: how does it look = correct, how does it look like = wrong. Slavic native speakers make this mistake as well for example, and probably many more.

My German is rusty at best, but wouldn't one say "Der Hund meines Vaters" - or something like that but with correct grammar?

That's the genitive but in every day speech typically people use the dative. The genitive case is slowly dying out.

I'm not sure which I find most jarring, but "should of" is definitely up there.

I think it's that usually ESL mistakes make sense. Generally it's going to be because they generalized a rule that doesn't apply in that particular case, or that they've used a construction from their native language that is different in English. Whereas native speakers do weird things like using "they're" for "there" as I mentioned in another comment. Obviously you can still understand how that mistake happens, but it doesn't feel logical in the same way that many ESL mistakes do.

My pet pevee is "loose" as lose.

And what about this now common usage of “they” instead of he/she? As a non-native speaker it always makes me go “who the heck are ‘they”? If it’s OK to offend the grammar to avoid offending people, why not just go all the way and also change the conjugation? “They is” sounds just as jarring but it’s not confusing and with time it will become natural.

That said, I also have trouble with plural “you” and there is no fix for that other than the hideous (and sexist) “you guys”.

English is not my first language, and even though I used not to make these kind of homophone mistakes, I started making them once I became fluent.

Tangentially but on topic, you have me questioning whether "used not to" is grammatically correct in English. I would say, "I used to not make these kinds of homophone mistakes," and the other phrasing definitely sounds wrong to me, but I'm not 100% confident it is.

I stumbled on it, but didn't bother checking :-)

It appears that "used not to" is not common. "Never used to", or "didn't use to" would have been better.

The texting culture we have today only makes matters worse. I'm seeing more people not capitalizing the first word of a sentence, ending declarations with question marks, puting a space between the sentence and the question mark, etc...

Even worse than it's/its and who's, which in my opinion can at least be understandable mistakes, are things like when someone uses "they're" in place of "there" or "their". I could understand mixing up the latter two, but it's like, what do you think the apostrophe means, exactly??

Obviously the answer is that they don't think about it at all, but it is indeed a bit jarring.

"would of" "could of" are mistakes which no non-native speaker would make.

Often it’s just a humble brag.

I can certainly relate to what the author says about the English spoken in Europe. I'm Canadian, and spent half a year in the Flemish part of Belgium a decade or so back as part of an internship program. Through the program made friends with people from all over the world, but mostly Europe. Interestingly, in that group most people found the member of the group from London easier to understand than me from the west coast of Canada, when we were both speaking 'normally'. I was pretty natural to fall into the habit of speaking what we referred to as "International English" though—basically the simplified form the author here refers to.

Still occasionally had funny exchanges though, like when my Belgian coworkers assured me that my use of the phrasing "almost exactly" couldn't possibly make sense.

I have gone the other way, I am a native british english speaker learning another language.

I had learning difficulties when I was a kid, which meant that my reading was slow (its not now) but my spelling was utterly shite(it is still)

When the first child was born, I decided that when I was bathing them I would learn a new language. I can read and write dutch slowly now, at the level of a 6-8 year old. I don't speak it very well.

however when it came time to teach my child to read, I realised just how much of a cunt english is.

* spelling: there are no rules. I just thought it was me being dense.(I before E, except after C, apart from these 1500 corner cases in the most common 10k words. )

* Pronunciation: some words are greek, others latin, french, germanish, some anglo saxon. None of them have rules.

* Syntax: its not german.

* fuck me there are loads of words

* Idioms are not universal.

On the point of introvert/extrovert, I very much agree. I am able to be who I am in English, because I know I can react, change tact and update my responses in real time to match the "social impedance". I have a very fine grained, real time control over the cheeky/formal - funny/sombre - flirty/impassive axes (and much more).

In a second language, I have to plan far more, which means I'm committed or silent.

> * Idioms are not universal.

if you think idioms are bad, try cockney rhymes (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/09/guide-to-c...)

Alas cockney is one of those things that died just after WWII.

I grew up in a rural county, which _had_ a rich tradition of both hyper local words and idioms. I used to be able to place someone in a sentence to within 5 miles of where they grew up. ( I can't do that now, I've been away too long)

How can an idiom be universal?

I teach ESL as a volunteer, and I do have deep sympathy for students--mostly native speakers of Spanish--who have to deal with irregular verbs and English pronunciation/spelling.

well that the thing, as someone who exists in an almost exclusively english speaking world, you simply don't realise that "mad as a box of frogs" doesn't translate.

I feel the authors pain of learning a foreign language. I’ve struggled with Japanese just as long as the author has with English and I am no where near being able to write a blog post like that.

I still think the author misses the target on a few points:

English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling, which I suppose is more difficult than average (being Danish myself, I don’t see it as more difficult than “normal”)

English is a first language across a huge swath of the earth. No wonder British, Indian, American and Australian English ended up so different. But due to politics and the internet, we barely recognize these as dialects.

The author says it’s easy for Italians to understand Sicilian, but I’m sure anyone who learned Italian as a second language from textbooks won’t feel the same.

If you’ve learned Japanese or Chinese from a textbook you’ll have a hard time understanding what people are talking about in Shanghai or Guangdong or Osaka or Kyushu.

Languages are difficult. Difficult to learn, difficult to measure and difficult to categorize.

The biggest myth on the internet is that English is somehow easier or more suited for as a common language. But I disagree that it is worse than others.

> The author says it’s easy for Italians to understand Sicilian, but I’m sure anyone who learned Italian as a second language from textbooks won’t feel the same.

Sicilian is not intelligible to italian speakers. The only dialect that is fully understandable is Roman vernacular.

He said that Italians understand each other when speaking Italian.

> English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling, which I suppose is more difficult than average (being Danish myself, I don’t see it as more difficult than “normal”)

But Danish is even harder. Written like Norwegian, spoken like Dutch.

> English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling

I doubt that. I understand Italian at an A2/B1 level, however if I see a sentence or a name in Italian I will pronounce it correctly in 95% of the times even if I never saw it, or heard it before. That's the power of a phonetic language which Italian is for the most part.

That’s due to a reasonable spelling. Phonetics are the sounds of a language. All spoken languages are phonetic.

> Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics

OK, I guess it's an idiom that differs between romance languages and English. In Italian and my mother tongue a phonetic language is one where one letter corresponds to one sound (or at least that's how my teachers referred to it in school). In English, the corresponding dictionary definition seems to be: a language with a "phonemic orthographic system". TIL.

Fellow Italian here. I don't know about antirez, but the key for me was moving abroad. Not even to an English speaking country, but to a place - namely, Berlin - where Global English is the lingua franca. Then, if you're lucky, you'll end up with a partner from another country, and maybe English will be the official language of your relationship. My partner is Australian, so I guess I won the language-fluency lottery, but that's another story.

As Salvatore points out in his essay, you can be exposed to Internet English as much as you want, but if you live in a country like Italy there's no way you're learning day-to-day English. First, because most probably no-one in your circle of physical friends would speak English; second, because Italian is so much better at nuances, especially when it comes to anything that has to do with food, cooking, feelings, and emotions.

If you learn something in a bad way it takes more effort that learning that straight well.

If you learn English pronunciation from Europeans you are not really learning English, you are learning Spanish, German or French pronunciation rules on English words.

Spain and all the Spanish speaking countries(Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela,Ecuador, Peru...) is such a big environment speaking just one language that they usually don't have the need to learn proper English pronunciation. You could even live in parts of the US speaking Spanish only.

Also happens with French in Africa. I have so many French friends that don't speak English well because they don't need it.

Any Spanish speaker can communicate with a Portuguese, French and specially Italian with little effort because they are so similar.

It also happens in Germany, being much smaller environment but having all those Nordic countries that speak Germanic languages they can communicate with little effort.

The exception being small countries like Netherlands or Switzerland in which work is done in English being interconnected with the global economy.

>Any Spanish speaker can communicate with a Portuguese, French and specially Italian with little effort because they are so similar.

For any native French speaker without prior exposure to it, Spanish is just as incomprehensible as Russian or Dutch.

When did 'paid' get replaced with 'payed'? I rarely saw this error before a couple of years ago and now I see it constantly. I thought it had to be some kind of generational in-joke or pop culture reference but so far I haven't been able to find any proof of that. It seems that a large segment of the population suddenly decided one day to start paying for things by handing out rope.

What are you referring to? Neither "payed" nor "paid" are in the article or this comment section.

Well, (and I just googled this), probably because payed is a real world, though it does not mean "paid". https://www.grammarly.com/blog/paid-payed/

What does "paying for things by handing out rope" mean?

In the sense of paying a price, the past tense is spelled "paid." But in the sense of paying out rope (which means to let more rope out), the past tense is spelled "payed."

I've noticed often that when I tried to speak up, people didn't cared about what I was to say. They just made fun out of me pointing errors.

Once you make a grammatical error, people feel like they're free to ignore the rest.

Those people are assholes. Not that it matters a terrible lot but where did this happen?

Thankfully it had never happened here.

In general, on other forums, on FB, etc. It doesn't happen that often. But still, it happens way often compared to what I'd have imagined.

Some years ago I've been learning Japanese for about two years. I decided it's time I try speaking with natives, so I joined a Japanese Discord server and hopped in a conversation. Ended up being laughed at, made fun of, and stopped learning Japanese ever since.

Discord grew out of gaming communities which are notorious for their extreme toxicity, what else could you expect?

I don't know. It was fairly shocking and I couldn't think clearly. I wish I didn't abandon Japanese though.

Discord has come a very very very long way since then.

Human condition, not so much.

I'm sorry this happened to you.

Unfortunately in Japanese culture it can considered acceptable (and even friendly) to laugh at people in this way. If you hang out with people who understand the pain of language learning (English learners, people with an interest in foreign culture) it's less likely to happen and you'll get empathy instead.

I hope it doesn't discourage you because learning Japanese (or any language) pays off for a lifetime. There is still time to start again.

Sucks you had that experience, but you have to consider the environment. The internet can be a toxic place, no matter the language.

Anyway, don't let some bad feedback stop you from learning -- use it as inspiration! For every asshole that mocks you, there are 10 more that are willing to help.

Hell, long time ago, when my Japanese was admittedly still pretty bad, I ran into this drunk Japanese dude in some bar with my friend. I spoke in Japanese, and he laughed in my face saying, and I quote exactly, "your Japanese is shit!" I didn't want to counter that his English was just as bad, I just moved on, and kept studying.

There are two types of people in the world: those that lift you up, and those that bring you down -- seek out the former.

The delivery of your message matters as much as the contents of it. It's unfortunate, but how you speak matters a lot. I know it's hard. It has taken me years to become comfortable speaking and joking in English. I have now started similar journey with French and Italian.

One of the most enlightening experiences I have had was living in a country where I was not a fluent speaker of the dominant language.

The struggle one experiences just to convey meaning is so intense that you have little time for other pursuits.

I greatly appreciate the effort non-native English speakers undertake in our system. It’s my job to be understanding and help them feel more comfortable doing a very difficult thing.

I can totally relate. Reading lots of english makes very little to your listening skills.

I mostly "solved" it by listening lots and lots of podcasts, but I can still remember googling the word "ossom" which a podcast host repeated every two or three sentences. I was puzzled to discover that he was actually saying "awesome", a word I definitely knew and I was familiar with.

> Reading lots of english makes very little to your listening skills.

It makes a lot. In fact, it's the most effective way to master the speaking and listening skills. There are 2 things that you need though:

1. Read out loud.

2. Use forvo/younglish/Oxford dictionary to find out how to pronounce words you haven't seen before.

I think one quote from the article shows how even though the author has a pretty good understanding of English already, he doesn't understand the depth to which your mother tongue permeates your thinking system.

"Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton. Italian is phonetically one of the simplest languages on the earth, and is full of redundancy."

Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today. The same can be said about Mandarin Chinese, and to a lesser degree French, German, etc.

This kind of undermines his central thesis, which is that English is broken because native speakers don't speak the language that's taught to foreigners. In reality, what's broken is that languages are taught an idealised version of a language that's technically correct, but don't then supplement that with actual language as it's spoken by real people.

I had this same problem with Mandarin Chinese - I'd listen to the example dialogues from the textbook and understand almost nothing. I'd then read the text in Chinese (characters not pinyin), and understand it completely. And those audio dialogues aren't even real speech. To actually get myself able to comprehend conversations, I had to start watching hours and hours of TV dramas so that my brain started to get used to the language that's actually used, not the language that's taught.

The author does kind of end on this point, the necessity of listening early, but it seems almost like an afterthought on his premise that English is somehow broken.

Oh, and an afterthought...

It's much easier to understand a dialect of your native language because you already have a very comprehensive vocabulary and understanding of typical language use in your country. It's fair easier to fill in missing words from context, because there's only so many possible words it could be, and some completely new words can be inferred from context without ambiguity. For example, "can you pass me the oojamaflip?" or slightly easier "can you pass me the whatsit". No native English speaker would even question those, even though they're very dialectal even within the UK, because it's clear it's just a stand-in word for something else. But if a foreigner heard that, they might have a chance with the second one, but the first one would leave them puzzled as to whether the oojamaflip was a specific term for something that they've not come across, or just a nonsense dialect word.

If you actually stop to analyze the phonemes in spoken English, you'll realise that it bears almost no resemblance to written English, and unfortunately most learners of English practice on the written forms and make their own models of how the language should sound from that. For instance "are we going out tonight?" is actually the phonemes "we gan aa t' nii?" (in my local area at least)

Personally, I think it's better to think of spoken and written forms of language as two entirely different things, but of course knowing one helps with proficiency in the other, as the underlying meaning, vocabulary and word order is usually the same, even if the abstract representation of it is different.

> Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today.

In the paragraph you quote, antirez was speaking about standardised Italian, not about dialects (he refers to them in the preceding paragraph).

There are still differences in standardised Italian as spoken in different geographical regions, but they're minor ones and don't really impact intelligibility - the most noticeable ones are that Southerners use the simple past whereas Northerners stick to the present perfect; some vowels are stressed differently, and Italian Switzerland has a bunch of calques from French and German. Oh, and in the North we use the definite article with women in the third person, for some reason.

On paper it doesn't look too far from the differences between American and British English, but the phonetic difference is minuscule by comparison. No Sicilian is going to have such a strong accent while speaking standard Italian that an Aostan has trouble understanding him.

Language is what it is. There's nothing more "wrong" with English than with any other language.

The alternatives are just pipe dreams for the foreseeable future: a sterile engineered language like Esperanto or some other language with with it's own set of trade-offs. Millions of people just aren't going to do the work to learn yet another language unless they have to. If anything, ubiquitous machine translation seems more likely.

However, if you MUST change the lingua franca to your native tongue, there's a simple prescription. Become a global super-power, assert dominance in all things military, political, and cultural. Make other countries your colonies and ruthlessly insinuate yourself into all aspects of their politics and culture. Keep this up for a couple hundred years, and viola, a new lingua franca.

Europe has a large population who have been taught English to a decent degree. Outside of Europe that's not always the case. I struggle to understand people who can't make an effort to speak clearly and consider following basic rules of grammar an optional extra. I was recently in a meeting where a lot of confusion was caused by the attendees' inability to pronounce words "know", "now", and "no". It took them a good 10 minutes to agree on what they meant and move on. The solution here is to accept the fact that learning any foreign language is a lifelong pursuit. I still remember the moment when I began thinking in English and from then on I became more extrovert.

My favourite feature of English grammar is the Garden path sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence#Examples

Bonus: There is the secret adjective order rule that most native english speakers have no idea about https://qz.com/773738/how-non-english-speakers-are-taught-th...

For my generation (Gen X), there was a lot of guilt felt over always using English for communicating with foreigners. It was popular in my circle to study some foreign language to show you were making an effort, but the problem was that the language you studied was rarely the language of the person you needed to talk to at the moment. Also, since people didn't really need it, they rarely practiced their 2nd language enough to get decent at it. It seems generally acknowledged now that the best way for native English speakers to show courtesy is to practice Global English.

OK, I had the same problem with phonetics.

If you're facing it as a practical problem and just want to skip to the solution, it's easy: learn English with a native speaker, if possible one to one or in a small group.

Without that option, I had to choose a hack: after knowing enough of the written language, watching movies and series with subtitles. But very important: English subtitles. Then removing the subtitles.

Lots of YouTube videos of some topic (to get famiiar with vocabulary) is an excellent complement.

Once you understand mostly everything that others are saying, speaking is much easier.

I have taught many students who came to Canada from diverse countries. Many had long standing problems with English fluency. Bear in mind, these were all grad students, so they were, by and large, very intelligent. The basic problem, as I saw it, was their domestic situation, with a wife, and occasional children and often one or more parents. This home situation meant they spoke their native language at home, often watched TV and videos from their home country - this all meant that they had only their college attendance actions as language practice - at home they got none. In contrast, the students in residence or rooming houses were isolated from their native language unless they made the effort to self immerse in English - sink or swim. In general they achieved fluency far faster than those with their native social life. There was spectrum, some in rooming houses/residences sought out their countrymen and thus hindered their achieving fluency.

So as advice, I would say immerse, read papers, date, watch TV - all in English (or French/German etc - where ever you are studying) to get your fluency up to speed ASAP.

I am a non-native English speaker. My English is far from perfect, both with regards to grammar, style and pronunciation. However, having lived outside of Italy for about 6 years now I must disagree with the premise of this blog post. I feel more fluent expressing myself in English than Italian. Especially but not limited to the discussion of technical topics. I learned many words and phrases that I have to routinely translate back to my mother tongue because ironically my vocabulary and phrasal verbs are not up-to-date with my English counterpart. My vocabulary seem to have developed primarily due to the fact I have been constantly exposed to the culture and living in an English speaking country. Aside from the understandable phonetic and pronunciation difficulties encountered by antirez, this is entirely debatable and down to personal experience. Living abroad has tremendously helped in that regard

"The Chaos", by G. Nolst Trenite, is a fantastic poem lampooning English pronunciation: http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html As a native English speaker I struggle to read it aloud in its entirety without error or pauses.

English does have a major advantage over more tonal or accented languages and that is that pronunciation and grammar are not critical to understanding people speaking it as a second language.

Correct grammar would say e.g. "Are you French?" but if someone says, "You are French?" or even "You French?" then the meaning is still there, especially if a foreign accent means somebody is not speaking their first language.

But I also agree that many native English speakers forget that just because someone speaks quite good English doesn't mean you can speak at 200wpm using idioms and advanced grammar. I think this is mostly because we have become so used to people speaking English that we forget there are degrees of ability.

I am aware of this with some people where I will speak slightly more slowly and perhaps use more simple words e.g. "get" instead of "gain" etc.

>Correct grammar would say e.g. "Are you French?" but if someone says, "You are French?" or even "You French?" then the meaning is still there, especially if a foreign accent means somebody is not speaking their first language.

That reminds me of a famous scene from La Grande Vadrouille, a renowned French comedy, where the protagonists of the film try to meet an English pilot grounded in France in hopes of exfiltrating him. But as it happens, both characters believe the other to be English : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YepP1M6eO4

Past discussions:

English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21179539 - Oct 2019 (111 comments)

English has been my pain for 15 years (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10641246 - Nov 2015 (238 comments)

English has been my pain for 15 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314628 - Sept 2013 (300 comments)

To me, this more sounds like something easy to nitpick.

> The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically.

News to me. I've never met someone from Australia/UK/NZ not being able to understand someone from the US/Canada. Personally, I've also found native english speakers FAR more accommodating of non-native speakers. Try do anything in Spain/France/Germany/China/Russia/etc without knowing the language (or only knowing it basically) & it's like you're playing Russian roulette with people being rude.

> Try do anything in Spain/France/Germany/China/Russia/etc without knowing the language (or only knowing it basically) & it's like you're playing Russian roulette with people being rude.

I've experienced this in France, but in Germany the language may as well have been English. I worked for a German software company for a bit and English was spoken by everyone in their office in Bavaria. People in the region spoke English regularly as well. In Berlin I definitely heard more English than German on the street.

Tech is always the misnomer because it's english everywhere. Honestly, I'm shocked quite regularly with how little & how badly english is spoken in Germany (outside of tech) - and how rude people can be (esp. over the phone) if you don't speak semi-fluent german.

One thing I really like about motivated non-native English speakers is that, of the ones I interact with at least, they write in clear full sentences.

I should really become more Zen, but I can literally keep track in my head of when my friends start interacting in wider circles and start saying "u" and "ngl" etc. etc. It shouldn't really bother me but it does, writing good English is no slower than mocking (I think it's implicitly saying you don't care about what you're writing) the person on the other end writing full sentences (grumble grumble, working with older programmers has spoiled me in this regard)

My biggest tip is to not watch movies and series dubbed. I know from looking at menus that English is very commonly dubbed to Italian. I'm Swedish, and don't have that luxury, which has forced me to become better at listening.

This [0] document shows how the EU Commission uses non-standard English in its documentation, with the result that sentences can make little sense to native English speakers.

[0] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...

I strongly disagree with the author about Italian words being simple to pronounce by just knowing the alphabetic pronunciation. My favorite example is to try complimenting an Italian woman by telling her she is a magnet ("calamita") for your eyes. If you pronounce it wrongly ("calamità"), you'll be telling her she is a natural disaster for you eyes.

Obligatory link to a poem that shows just how weird English is: [0].

So is my mother language Dutch by the way, young kids are constant reminders of that, they learn the language and apply its rules... and then you spend years pointing out all the exceptions... (no it's not tee-shirtden, the word comes from English so it's t-shirts, yes double ee is a long e, still in "beer" (Dutch for bear) you say the "i" sound, more like "bir" because... I don't know why, just remember it!)

[0]: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

>yes double ee is a long e, still in "beer" (Dutch for bear) you say the "i" sound, more like "bir"

That's your issue then, we in the south pronounce it properly ;)

What annoys me most about Dutch are the stupid doubling of consonants and removing of vowel rules. Why is it boom/bomen, bom/bommen? Just remove both rules and write boom/boomen, bom/bomen.

I work in the south, still I doubt whether anyone says "beer" with the same "ee" sounds as in "één" or "been", right?

"What annoys me most about Dutch are the stupid doubling of consonants and removing of vowel rules. Why is it boom/bomen, bom/bommen? Just remove both rules and write boom/boomen, bom/bomen.", Yeah, for sure, I feel like we need a reset and just remove all the stupidness for the next generation, too much time in school is wasted on this bs. Oh, while we are at it, lets teach them to say 121 as "honderd-twintig-één" (like the English) so we don't have to teach them to first pronounce the first digit, then the last, then the middle. I never thought much about how stupid this is until I got kids.

>I work in the south, still I doubt whether anyone says "beer" with the same ee sounds as in één or been. Right?

That's exactly how I pronounce it and I didn't even know there was another way to pronounce it until now. I even checked Wiktionary to see if you weren't joking. I guess you don't work over the border south?

Counting is indeed very confusing too, I had a lot of trouble with it as a kid and it took a while to get used to it. Until I learned English and other languages and started mixing things up again. But I don't think we can (or should) change that, changing spelling is at least something that's possible.

Hmm, let me pay some more attention to my colleagues next time I hear them speak haha, "beer" (and "peer") really is more like "bir" than like "bee-r" or "been" for me, very different "ee" sound.

Flemish here. The "ee" in "beer", "één" en "been" all sound exactly the same, and I've never even slightly been aware that there might be a difference.

Both Beertje Colargol (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PHLl6EXn44) and this NL Dutch Baloe de Beer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htbBpgQWvq0) use a simple long "ee", exactly like I'd expect. Unless of course the distinction you're talking about is too subtle for me to hear. Do you have some audio (or audio+video) with a different "e" sound? I'm interested to hear that difference.

Obviously there are quite some differences in pronunciation between the North and the South, but this is one I had never heard of before.

Now that I think about it, in my dialect "beer" does sound differently from "één" and "been". "been" sounds close to its Standaardnederlands pronunciation, while the "ee" in "één" en "been" becomes a diphtong (or at least I think that's the correct term; I'm not a linguist). That might to some underlying fundamental difference between those words, maybe?

I'll look up some examples, but for now, ee (as in "been") sounds like the English "a", so Dutch "been" sounds like English "bane". The ee in "beer" (and "peer") sounds more like I say "bir" (in Dutch, perhaps with a bit longer "i" sound).

So, do these 2 ee sounds sound the same to you:

https://translate.google.co.uk/?sl=nl&tl=en&text=peer&op=tra...

and

https://translate.google.co.uk/?sl=nl&tl=en&text=been&op=tra...

Not to me :) But it's difficult to articulate.

No, now that I pay close attention to it I do hear a difference. "Been" sounds like English "bane" indeed, "beer" goes a bit in the direction of English "beer". I would never have noticed on my own.

I don't think there's difference between the two in the south, but maybe there is and I just never heard it. (Of course we pronounce the "ee" differently anyway (more like the Luxemburgish pronunciation on https://nl.forvo.com/word/ee/ than the Dutch one), and our "r" is different too, hence also the transition from "ee" to "r"; maybe that changes the whole thing.)

I see now what you mean, it's less of a difference than I thought you meant. In my mind it was the "r" sound that you pronounce differently but listening to it it's actually the ee that's different.

I'm reminded of this commit to a python repo about the form of English to be used being dismissed as 'White Supremacy'

https://github.com/python/peps/commit/0c6427dcec1e98ca0bd46a...

It isn't often I find a commit in a project that is rather offensive, racist, and works against the goals of the software development community to be reasonable, approachable, and welcoming to all types of people.

The only reason to remove "The Elements of Style" by name is that it is objectively wrong, and subjectively dry as fuck. Go use AP or Chicago instead.

I think they meant (Strunk and) White Supremacy.

If you think that the words "white supremacy" in that commit message allude to Strunk and White (maybe in a tongue-in-cheek way), then how does "people of color" fit into this?

to clarify, it was a joke

Thank you. I completely missed that.

Back in school I often used my native dialect of math all the time, the professor was racist though, probably a supporter of white supremacy or something, and required the standard dialect. It warms my heart the times have changed. Now I want to see more doctors who studied anti-racist ways in medical school because that's what's important for me when someone's performing an open heart surgery.

What really helps:

1) Watch movies in English 2) Move abroad, at least for a while 3) If (2) is out of the question, find English-speaking friends and hang out with them as much as possible

Lectures in school, especially when given by non-native teachers, are inferior in terms of costs/benefits when not counterproductive.

Trying to tech my 5yo son English made me realize how broken English is. The alphabet and grammar are decent, the problem is that every other word is an exception. Also, there's no way to write my name in English even though all the syllables are present in English dialect.

I have never obsessed about speaking foreign languages perfectly. I can speak English well enough to communicate with other folks, work meetings, but I don't obsess about perfect pronunciation and pristine grammar. Makes it much less stressful that way for me.

What ever happened to Latin?

Latin was never a static language, the changes from the empire to the new latin of the church were substantial. I know too little about it, but the study of how latin affected the languages around the empire is still active today when studying old texts and trying to place them in a context. A similar effect can be seen by english culture today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latin

Printing happened. Literacy of the middle class meant Latin was less useful as a vehicular language, as it was spoken by an increasingly small share of the literate population.

I was born in the Netherlands, lived in Sweden, Finland, and now Germany. So, I always joke that I'm fluent in Dunglish, Swenglish, Finglish, and Genglish. I've also worked with plenty of native English speakers and have even been accused of having a vaguely Irish accent (due to having a few Irish friends). But usually my Dutch accent comes through quick enough that people can figure out where I'm from as soon as I open my mouth.

Learning languages is not easy and I never managed to master more than two out of the six or so I took classes in at some point (French, German, Latin, Swedish). I've also picked up a few words of Spanish by reading the relevant page in the lonely planet while traveling and by passively absorbing some words and phrases by watching e.g. Narcos on Netflix. But I'm not able to have an intelligent conversation in other languages than English and Dutch. I actually struggle to speak about work in Dutch these days because my brain is used to using English for that. My German is not that bad but I kind of sound like a moron when I mangle the grammar, use the wrong words, etc.

So, I avoid using it even though I've lived in Germany for 13 years now. This usually shocks people into some unhelpful advice "why don't you just ...". It takes non trivial amounts of time; time I simply don't have. That's why. I can order food, deal with bureaucrats (bureaucracy is optimized for idiots in most countries), etc. in German. There are enough people here reluctant or unable to speak English that this is useful. For everything else, I default to English. There's just no way my German will ever get to the same level. So, not going to bother with that. Improving my German skills would strictly be a hobby project and there's plenty of competition from more interesting projects for that time.

Picking a second language is kind of important for most people on this planet. I'd say English is probably the world's most popular second language and the most relevant one to master for doing business. In most corners of the world, speaking the magic phrase "do you speak English" will actually enable you to communicate. Even though the answer might be "no" (hey at least they understood the question), it kind of starts a process of figuring out who to use as a mediator and these tend to be people with some level of education and/or business influence. I.e. exactly those people you'd want to talk to generally.

There are a few other contenders for most popular second language: Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and maybe French on some continents. However, Mandarin only works in Asia (and migrant communities elsewhere), Spanish is limited to Spain and Southern America; and French limits you to France and their former colonies (mostly in Africa). Arabic is actually fairly widely spread thanks to migration patterns in the last few decades as well as the displacement of Christianity by Islam in a lot of former British, French, And Spanish colonies.

However, courtesy of the British, English has penetrated on all continents and is even an official language in several countries where it is definitely not the native tongue. It's kind of the modern era Latin and it has displaced that as the language of business, science, and diplomacy.

However, we are now entering an era of machine translations enabling people to communicate directly without having to master a second language. So, while still relevant, I'm guessing the world is going to be a bit bigger than the former spheres of influence of the British Empire and the cold war era US empire. I don't think a lot of people in the US or Europe will be learning Mandarin or Arabic any time soon. But I do think a lot of business will be conducted in other languages than English very soon. Automated translations will enable and facilitate this even for people who only speak 1 minor language.

Well, being no native speaker, actually my English is probably their pain.

Now, Jack, you know your speech is incomprehensible babble, so be kind and hand me the cane for a proper flogging of yours.

To much Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville and McDonald Fraser, me guesses...

The same for me ;)

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