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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

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No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation".

The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades later!

This is grammar from their native language. They dont know the English grammar, so they just assume it's the same as the one they understand. You just understand them via the context.

Older Europeans used to say 'AND NOW WE MAKE PARTY!"

But your friend was applying consistent rules of grammar from his mother tongue. Having learned some vocabulary, he would mentally form the phrases in his head, and then literally translate out the words and tenses.

Grammar was so important to him that he was adhering to the grammatical rules he knew. It would be interesting to know how he would perform with writing or typing instead of contemporaneous conversation.

"go" in particular is an irregular verb, and also one of the most versatile words in the English language. Having studied how to conjugate "go" in other languages, I do not envy anyone trying to conjugate or just use it in an English sentence!

The point was I understood him perfectly despite the execrable grammar.

That's cause you knew what he wanted to do, and there was no other possible meaning from "make some shopping."

If he just said "make shopping some" it would have been less clear.

Put volume!

— Trevor Noah, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz0WZSNcPA#t=43s>

English is a fault tolerant language that is usually comprehensible with errors. That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

> That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

I'm skeptical of that claim.

Tbh, that's how I learned English. Rudimentary grammar, knew a few words, and then just read with dictionary until I didn't need a dictionary. Also watched a lot of shows until I didn't need subtitles.

Languages are weird like that – if you use them enough, your brain just figures some things out. After all, natural languages are easy enough for toddlers to learn.

Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!

I think we have different definitions of “proficient”. :)

I recall a WW2 documentary where a veteran recounted that he approached a bunker filled with Wehrmacht soldiers. He pointed his gun, and said "raus oder ich scheissen!" The response was laughter. He repeated, and they finally came out, still laughing.

He later realized he should have said "shiessen".

P.S. He confused "shoot" with "shit".

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