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

English has been my pain for 15 years

antirez.com

433 pointsderefr300 comments

The recent frenzy of accent related Hacker News posts seems to reinforce the opinion I saw in a thread discussing the pg controversy:

"Dear Paul,

It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope.

I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha has covered rather thoroughly, your "empirical evidence" isn't some blind sample - it's a walking demonstration of confirmation bias.

The larger problem is something you've explained yourself, in your essay on "Investor Herd Dynamics". Another name for this essay might have been, "Venture Capital is a Cargo Cult". In that essay, you lay out several reasons why an investment becomes more attractive when other people are already investing in it. And here's the crux of your argument:

'But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups. Judging startups is hard even for the best investors. The mediocre ones might as well be flipping coins. So when mediocre investors see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason.'

Do I need to spell this out? Your bias is a cancer on your industry, because it becomes part of the voodoo nonsense that less astute investors use to pick their horses. Your decisions may seem rational to you — but if you talk about how you don't like to back people with strong accents, it becomes less likely that other people will back them as well. You can be better than this.

Look deeper."

This doesn't address the real problem, though, which is how exactly pg is supposed to filter out what is bias vs. what is an actual problem. It seems pretty obvious that both are true, so drawing the exact line may not be useful.

If you're starting a company, your communication skills are possibly equally as important as your technical skills -- there are simply so many difficult tasks that you will need really great communication to accomplish.

Not just convincing investors, but also your customers, possible suppliers and/or potential partners, your employees and potential hires... Communication is huge.

If your targets here are NOT English-speaking, then your communication in English is not what matters -- you had damn well better be very fluent in the languages those people speak. This also applies to a native English-speaker trying to break into foreign markets.

Unfortunately, there are all kinds of nasty psychological tricks that can harm you if you even look foreign (I'm thinking of a study where students were given one of two photos of an instructor but the same audio file, and some of the ones shown a Chinese-looking instructor had trouble with her accent, but the ones shown a blond instructor didn't.

Then if you do have a strongly non-local accent... people who grew up in fairly urban areas may have no trouble understanding you, but others may be lost with an accent that's even moderately different from their own. I remember spending a hour on the phone debugging with an IBM DB2 tech based in India, and his accent didn't seem terribly strong to me, but the (upstate-NY born & bred) woman sitting next to me was extremely quiet on the call... I found out afterwards that she'd hardly understood a word he'd said.

It's totally legit to talk about the bias (and I tend to agree pg should make some effort not to make the irrational part worse...), but it's also valid to tell founders that working on their accent can make a huge difference in their success.

Yep. As someone who has taught in the midwestern US, sophomores can deal with all sorts of accents, while freshmen have varying levels of difficulty depending on where they grew up and their local prejudices. I profited on teaching evaluations from being white & having a Midwestern accent myself; less cognitive load for certain kids.

He's operating off of hard data. And the data shows that the top 100 startups don't have thick foreign accents. He gave them the chance to prove themselves, and they demonstrated it's important not to have a thick foreign accent. Isn't that the opposite of biased? Should he ignore the data? Keep it quiet and not give founders the opportunity to improve themselves?

Do you really doubt pg's claim that an accent strong enough to impede comprehension is a barrier to creating a successful startup in Silicon Valley? The importance of this is undoubtably a piece of common sense that some need to hear, but really, it is common sense.

As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how could you not have a problem?

Really, this is not a debatable point among sensible people. The only part that is debatable is which accents are strong enough to pose a major problem.

Unfortunately most people don't seem to logically process what was said before deciding to argue. They just pattern match. If the pattern looks like something they argue with, then they argue. So people pattern match on his argument, see the word "accent", and argue on the basis of his comment being thinly veiled xenophobia. Which could not be farther from the truth!

IMHO, it's not which accents are strong enough. It's the baggage that an accent brings. Yes, people pattern match an accent but not just the words. For example, the content of what a woman with a strong French accent says will be diluted with thoughts of sexiness instead of being taken seriously (except Christine Lagarde :-)). In this sense, the validity of PG's claim is not cut and dry. There are other factors.

In environments outside of tech hubs like the Silicon Valley bubble, I would strongly agree. For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.

>For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In fairness, speaking as someone from Georgia, you run into a lot of this within the south. I've lived here my entire life, and generally speak with a fairly neutral, midwestern accent, and I'd say that it's extremely common within the roughly 35 and under demographic around here.

Not commenting on whether it's fair or not, but because there is such a stigma around southern accent = stupid, many southerners, especially younger ones, make a concerted effort not to pick up the accent. Generally, the younger and better educated a southerner is, the less likely they are to sound like a southerner. That's not because the accent makes someone stupid, but because there is an awareness that it has that perception, so people avoid it.

And, I mean, I'll still fall into it in less formal settings or when I'm cranking up the charm, but in a business environment it gets switched off.

It's not bigotry, but lack of investment in conversational English is frequently accompanied with lack of investment in vocabulary and idiomatic English expressions.

If you work at a large Silicon Valley company, there's always that one meeting where someone at the table, while obviously smart, speaks such an incomprehensible version of English, that whenever suggestions from their end are vocalized, everyone looks at one another with silent "did you get that?", nods politely and then moves on.

I don't think so. Diluting a speakers content into cultural bias implies that the content of the speech is understood to begin with. This is not the case for what I'd call a strong accent. Those strong accent are too far away from a locution I can make sense of. A strong accent makes it hard to grasp the words that are said. And if you're in a venture perspective and nobody can make sense of the words that are getting out of your mouth, I believe it's fair to say that your strong accent is a problem.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.

This, honestly.

As european (and italian), I can confirm most of what Antirez said.

Moreover, founding a startup (or running a business, or working as an account, or working as a diplomat) is undoubtly much more difficult when you have to work with people speaking a foreing language.

The truth is that not just "accents", but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour come into play when you have to decode whether the person you are speaking with is really angry, sarcastic or she is just joking.

Things get even worse when you can't see those you are speaking with.

I don't think PG claims that strong accents are a barrier to creating successful startups in Silicon Valley, they just add up yet another hurdle that founders (and employees alike) must overcome to make that startup successful.

Therefore, such hurdles, must be accounted for.

but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour

One of my favourite bits of (UK) english that I regularly find myself having to explain to people is the difference between "bollocks", meaning that something awful has occurred and "the bollocks", meaning that something is amazing.

Americans have the same thing (different root though). "Shit" vs "The Shit"

"Dear Paul,

The warm and fuzzy thought police department (WTFPD) would like to have a little chat with you. You see, we have taken down bigger game than you, and we could easily have you stuffed and mounted on our mantle.

Instead of saying what you believe to be true, the WTFPD recommends that you say what we wish were true. Here at the WTFPD, our belief is that wishing hard enough for something will make it true.

Sure, some founders might be hurt along the way while your advice is temporarily false during the small period when we are waiting for our wishes to have effect. But it is far better for a foreign founder's company to die than suffer the chance that he might be made uncomfortable by the suggestion that adapting his accent to the norms of the local market might help his startup.

You see, the worst crime in the world according to the WTFPD is making people feel uncomfortable. That's why we're warm and fuzzy ;)

Do I need to spell this out to you? Shape up Paul. Our sanctimony is powerful enough to destroy any reputation. Struggle too hard and we can make you a "racist". News reports about you will forever read "Paul Graham, the investor who stirred controversy by saying that foreign accents are bad for startups, ate breakfast today". Don't make us do it Paul.

The next time you are tempted to open your mouth to speak your mind based on your experience investing in over 500 startups, stop and consider that maybe we know better. You may have built a firm that revolutionized how investing is done, but we feel deeply. So who is really the expert here?

The world needs more sensitivity Paul, not the cancer of your nasty hatey hate speech. But we will give you a chance to redeem yourself. Beg for our forgiveness, say what you're supposed to say from now on, and join us in making the world a warmer, fuzzier place.

giggle and hugs

-The Warm and Fuzzy Thought Police Department

WFTPD

We feel that WTFPD is a better acronym. Are you trying to enforce Eurocentric norms of acronym construction on us?

What Paul needed is some one to have taken his shovel away when we was up to his neck in the brown stuff instead of digging himself in even deeper.

I admire him for sticking up for his principles[1]. You give the thought police and inch and soon they'll be back for another. There is no theoretical limit to how warm and fuzzy they can make the world.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Who is the really the "thought police" here? You're the one trying to ridicule people whose opinion you don't agree with while hiding behind some "warm and fuzzy" sarcasm.

WTFPD is about people forbidding ideas because they are offensive, rather than having an honest debate about them. I'm perfectly willing to debate any idea with an honest opponent who's not going to get offended and start calling me names like "xenophobe" and "racist".

Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

>Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?

Paul made a factual statement about the world in the spirit of helping others and his opponents responded with emotionally-charged labels[1]. This is dishonest bullying. I am responding with a label designed to attack labeling. So yes, it is hypocritical. But it does have a definite purpose in mind.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

From what I can find there's been around a thousand comments on the subject over the last week. Three comments called someone xenophobic, all of those where directed at pg. No comment called anyone else on HN a racist. So either I'm missing something or you're doing the exact same thing you accuse others of, making false accusations and overreacting.

I don't understand why people are engaging crassus instead of downvoting and flagging him into oblivion.

It's a brand new account that's posting deeply hypocritical crap, and the only "real" identity tied to it is a new and spammy twitter account.

Let's not pretend he's here for a conversation when every single available signal indicates that he's full of shit.

I love you too. Cheers.

PG said both accusations had been made in his follow up column.

Thought that would get modded down - guys if you went to any FTSE 100 DJA 30 HR director he would tell you exactly the same thing.

It is my observation that most hackers aren't fans of FTSE 100 DJA 30 HR directors, and they don't want to live in that world.

Its the real world mate - putting your head in the sand isn't going to help you.

And your handle is that of a roman politician an odd one to chose when your saying real world politics doesn't matter.

Would PG (or his predecessor silicon valley VC) have made the same comment about strong accents 30 years ago? I don’t think so. For one, the diffusion of Americanisms (idioms, accent etc.) were weaker and founders had stronger accents. It would be inconceivable to say this in public. To me this signifies, perhaps, a shift in the valley from investing in technology heavy companies toward more consumer branded companies. What I mean by this is if I look at Andy Grove and Intel (30 years ago), I don’t think his accent prevented him from being successful. However today you need someone who is more US market oriented. Maybe in 10 years Silicon Valley turns into a modern day Madison Avenue, where it is filled predominantly with marketing/adverting type people who have mastered the medium of Internet and smartphones. They spend their time trying to get people to buy ‘stuff’.

As for people who are standing behind PG’s statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can’t expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.

Raising capital for a startup in a particular geographic place and selling a product there from a multinational megacorp are very different propositions. When you have the capital to hire an entire local sales division you're in a very different world than when you are trying to raise your first capital investment. But of course you knew that.

Ok. So when Groupon and Uber are expanding abroad with investor capital, is someone checking if their accent fits with the local population? Their entire international expansion has been funded by external investors not their own capital.

I'm sure that when they are striking deals with local politicians, regulators, and partners, they are careful to do so through representatives intelligible to the local populace.

The founders of both firms speak American english well and raised bunches of money in America, so language and accents were not a concern for them with regards to fundraising. Indeed, America is the best market in the world for raising speculative venture capital, so being comfortable with American English is a useful skill to have for entrepreneurs.

I seen plenty of american founders with diction problems, lisp or some other speaking impediment.

Those are real communication problems recognized by professionals for decades if not centuries, and happens all over the world.

However accents are strictly a cultural and socioeconomical difference: someone coming from a very remote country is of course going to have a considerably different accent, and in countries like england the difference between classes has created some very different accents all over the country.

In the old days in england having a posh accent was a good way of working your way up the social ladder because being the best steam-engine engineer mattered little if you sounded like an illiterate irish. Same in the usa where even president Clinton got some bs from east coast journalists for his southern accent.

Did I say at any point that bad accents mean you are dumb and unintelligible? no, because that's not true. What it does is make you a target of xenophobia because it makes it very clear that you are "not from around here"

When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history because if your public already has a demeaning attitude towards you they are not going to care one bit about what you have to say, after all you are just one dumb foreigner! hearing you is a waste of everybody's time!

pg could have gone for speech impediments instead which are a problem no matter where or what language you speak, and of course if english is your second language those problems are just going to compound. But pg went for the accents and the accents alone, as if the number of white american dudebro founders out there saying your instead of you're all the time were perfect.

Then again maybe when they are speaking pg is actually paying attention to what they say.

> When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history

Not to worry! If you are as eloquent as the best orators in history, you'll do great in Silicon Valley!

The situation can't be flipped on it's top like that. English is the lingua franca, people can speak it everywhere. This is not a symmetric relationship where you can say that if A -> B then B -> A.

I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business speak English. If you speak French too, great! Then when you start selling your product, that product will have to be translated. But you as a business woman/man coming to Quebec and dealing with people, you'll be just fine speaking English.

Now if I go in the Bay Area and start expecting people to do business in French with me, I doubt anybody will bother listening to me.

"English is the lingua franca" is one of my favorite phrases.

It's right up there with the allegation that "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneurship".

(Of course, only the 1st phrase is true, but they're both funny.)

None of your examples are relevant. Andy Grove did not found Intel, and his accent is not incomprehensible. Likewise Tim Cook did not found Apple in China.

Grove not being the founder of Intel is a very pedantic point. He was there since day one of the company and had the biggest influence on Intel’s domination of the industry since it was startup (more than anyone else in the company’s history). Also, you need to have a distinct definition of what a strong accent is. If Grove has a clear accent not sure who we are talking about. Every time someone gives a counterexample of a founder with a strong accent, the pro-PG retort is that he actually doesn't have a strong accent (presumably because he is successful).

To be fair (and as an immigrant I was also appalled by PG's logic), he qualifies his statement by saying that he considers it a problem when the accent makes it difficult to understand the person. I think that's a reasonable bias, but a bias nonetheless.

It's a bias to not want to back a startup because you can't understand the pitch due to a language barrier? I think it's pretty reasonable to say you should be able to speak the native language of a country intelligibly in order to successfully do business in that country.

I don't have any recordings of Grove from the late 60s/early 70s, but in every recent video I've seen his accent is about as strong as Arnold Schwarzenegger's. It's noticeable, but it hardly affects your ability to understand what he's saying.

I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913).

Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents.

One of the points I was making with the My Fair Lady-themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue.

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg

That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play (Pygmalion). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures.

Of course, an uneducated native (or disadvantaged local group dialect) accent is a different thing than a non-native accent. A non-native accent is more likely to indicate someone with the education and drive to dare operating in a non-native language environment. But, it takes a bit of familiarity to internalize that understanding, and stronger accents still signal a risk of slower and more error-prone communication.

When someone honestly points out that the strongest accents have been problematic, based on significant observational experience, they haven't "slipped", they've done the listeners a favor by sharing a perceived truth. Even if for some reason their observation is in error (and here I doubt it), by sharing the lesson they're helping, not hurting, the process of describing and understanding the world.

any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement

This is a self fulfilling prophesy. Like a 'black swan'. If PG meant to criticise (or point out) that poor communication skills are unproductive, his comment would be banal. He chose this as a cute, cock-tail party line. It was just a poor decision on his part. Its not too dis-similar to another famous SV/C who admitted 'he knows no black people'. OK, great. No we have two prominent people in the Valley who use the rule of thumb: no blacks, no funny-sounding people. Quite embarrassing, really.[0,1]

__________________

[0] 'I don't know a single black entrepreneur' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS93R1YnK-U

[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm

National Origin Discrimination & Work Situations

The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent

___________________

Note that investing is not hiring; there is no employer-employee legal relationship. BUT, <Entreprenuers> need to be careful as they do in fact hire employees. So this is pretty ??? advice to entrepreneurs unless it comes pro-bono legal advice.

It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg’s family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why?

In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.

When you have observed a similar number of founding teams close up, your impressions will have similar credibility.

Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.

If you think that the UK and Ireland have been frozen in aspic since the 1920s, that suggests that you are very ignorant of the great many things that have happened in those countries, both of which would now be barely recognisable to anyone from the 20s.

If pg's ancestors emigrated from England, that is not in fact a judgement on it. The UK has exported a great many people to every corner of the globe, and received them in kind, because it is a very globally engaged collection of islands. By your twisted logic this must make it just about the worst country in the world.

Let's stop being intellectually dishonest for a second and look at what PG actually said. He said accents are an issue 1) in the context of startups when 2) it hinders communication.

He is looking at it from his point of view of what running a startup and startup culture encompasses, that is: an environment rife with competition built on extreme uncertainty that can be transcended with the appropriate communicative abilities to fool investors, founders, employees to believe in what you're doing. In that context, it would seem that having an accent that hinders others' ability to understand you is a huge disadvantage.

I do not know about the beginnings of Intel, but Apple in the startup stage had a founding team whose native tongue was English. Steve Jobs was fluent in English and could deliver these great orations about his stupidly crazy ideas to his friends and investors who also spoke English. You can't say that didn't help him. Having a thick accent that prevented him from communicating clearly would've had a multiplicative effect on the unwillingness of others to even listen to his ideas.

PG never just stopped at "people with accents can't succeed or be successful in business." And it's incredibly disingenuous of you and others to continue to label him as anti-accent when he has repeatedly stated the context and details of his position.

Ok, so let’s take this iteration of what he is supposed to be saying. “If you have an accent that is so strong that very few people understand you and nobody feels like listening to you then it is bad”. That is very anti-climactic, definitely not a surprising top red flag that he seemed to indicate. His initial position (in inc.com) about mastering the language to an extent that you are well versed in the local idioms etc. was strong. It would have indicated a shift in type of founders/companies YC would look for. It would also require immersion in American culture spanning several years, maybe decades. The version you are attributing to him is just weak.

Sorry, but even the weak interpretation of his statement actually raises more questions. For starters, how did YC end up funding them in the first place if they had such a strong accents that hinders understanding? Given YC accepts 1 in 25 (or 50) of applicants in a short time frame (going by a short video) what exactly did YC see in the founders. Or did the founders suddenly develop unacceptable accents in the three months at YC. Also, what did the YC team do when they found out about these guys’ accent problem? Did they ask them to partner with someone else? Did the founders refuse to partner etc. If so, is that an accent problem or a pig-headedness issue?

>Ok, so let’s take this iteration of what he is supposed to be saying. “If you have an accent that is so strong that very few people understand you and nobody feels like listening to you then it is bad”. That is very anti-climactic, definitely not a surprising top red flag that he seemed to indicate.

In fact, when it comes to startups, that is exactly what he is saying, and your dismissal of it by saying that it's not a surprising top red flag tells me that you are consciously trying to make this more racy than it actually is.

If you read his real initial position in the New York Times [0], you'll find: "“You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”" Again, the issue is communicating to reach an understanding. If you cannot convey thoughts, ideas, facts relevant to the core of your startup/idea, then you are at a disadvantage. Plain and simple.

I come from a community of Egyptians with incredibly thick, hard-to-understand accents, my father being one of them. I have difficulty talking about very complicated subjects with him because neither of us can clearly articulate our thoughts in the other's language, and so we never fully get a grasp on each other's opinions or the positions we hold. We both know the other isn't stupid; there's just a language barrier that's preventing effective dialogue.

Now take an investor who is deciding whether to risk his/her money on a startup. If an investor cannot come to a clear understanding of what it is you do or effectively bounce thoughts back-and-forth to assess you and your company, then they are not able to minimize their risk as much as they can, in an already incredibly risky endeavor. I'll also say again that had PG discovered that there was a correlation between risk of failure and stammering CEOs, he would've mentioned it.

Anyway, I'd like to think that instead of sparking an entire racist investing trend, that PG's advice has motivated a considerable number of foreign entrepreneurs to improve their English-speaking capabilities -- a skill that will certainly help them in every part of their lives (if they hope to plan to move to America to pursue a startup).

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...

Did you read his explanation? He basically said that accents don't hinder founders unless they are so strong that they hinder intelligibility. It's not that VCs won't back founders with accents because they have a subconscious bias towards foreigners, it's that VCs won't back founders with very strong accents because they can't understand them when they are making their pitch.

Many institutions require people to pass TOEFL exams, so really how is PG's requirement any different?

He's only saying that speaking English at a high level of fluency is a requirement for his investments in an English-speaking program that he runs. Fluency means you understand others and others understand you. How many of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have thick foreign accents?

The TOEFL doesn't have any kind of accent requirement, as would be clear by walking into any American university's science or engineering departments and speaking with the students who have top TOEFL marks. You do have to be comprehensible, but it's a fairly low bar. Nothing's held against a Russian or Chinese or German accent; in some areas they even have a little cachet (especially Russian accents in mathematics).

Alright, so maybe PG would have some problems with these students leading YC companies too. But in principle, how is it suddenly discrimination because the bar has been raised to higher than "so thick that people struggle to understand you"? This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country, especially for any kind of leadership or public-facing position.

> This is a very reasonable bar when it comes to hiring employees all across the country

It depends what country you're in.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm)

> A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation.

> The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon after refusing to speak English to Welsh-speaking colleagues.

His bosses didn't speak Welsh.

Legality and reasonableness is seldom correlated

I don't get it. He was a head chef in Wales where the national languages are English and Welsh, and he was able to speak one of those two languages fluently. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like he was also being discriminatory and out to make a political / nationalist point by refusing to communicate whatsoever in English.

If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

He spoke English to a non-Welsh speaking colleague.

The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers.

They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language.

A tribunal found that it was about his use of language.

> If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

I'd be interested to know what would have happened if it had been a language other than Welsh.

If there were a bunch of people who spoke Russian fluently, and he spoke Russian to them and English to the English speakers.

Somehow I misread that part about him speaking English out of courtesy when necessary. Thanks for clarifying.

So in multilingual jurisdictions there can be strong employment protections around speaking one's choice of national language. In this case the article says there was the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which presumably says that citizens of Wales are free to conduct all of their business in English or Welsh and shall not be discriminated against in any professional or government capacity for speaking either language as they please.

It's about workplace expectations that derive from the local culture. The hypothetical comparison that comes to mind would be if California adopted Spanish as a second language or something.

There's obviously enormous opportunity to try on a contrarian investor suit and back startups whose founders have strong foreign accents. Someone will fill that void.

  hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not
  understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find
  people that, once your understanding limits are obvious,
  will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often
  even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same
  sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

This is an important point. There are a number of things that native speakers of English can do to be more understandable to non-native speakers. Some things I've found are helpful: speaking more slowly, shifting your pronunciation (especially of vowels) to be more standard, using different words (e.g. if you're talking to a native speaker of a Romance language, prefer words with Latin roots over Germanic ones), and being careful to pronounce all consonants. Things that rarely help: speaking more loudly and repeating the same phrase multiple times.

Making these changes to your speech in real time is a difficult skill that must be cultivated and practiced. I would encourage native speakers to work at this skill, as it can make a big difference. I was once speaking to a couple of Russians and an American from the same region of the US as me. The Russians said they could understand me easily, but had difficulty understanding the other American. The difference was that I was making an effort to speak more clearly for them.

I go back and forth on this. As someone who's taught English as a second language for many years, I can't help but alter the way that I speak. It does help a lot with people whose listening skills are weak.

But I sometimes think it does a disservice to students or people that I spend a lot of time with (like my wife, who's not a native English speaker). Yes, they understand me. But am I then making it harder to understand "real" English speakers who aren't as careful with their pronunciation?

> Things that rarely help: speaking more loudly and repeating the same phrase multiple times.

The Spanish do that - and it doesn't help them much, either.

Oh, and you've forgotten the "waving your arms about" bit.

Oh, and avoid baseball idioms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_English-language_id...

This is a great post.

Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about!

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs)

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

It doesn't have to be people from different countries! People in England can have very very different accents. It can be hard to understand some of the stronger accents.

Sometimes people keep a regional difference for some words but not others. I say "bath" with a short a, but "path" with a longer a.

> My advice is that if you are learning English now, start listening as soon as possible to spoken English.

BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming. It had a variety of interesting short documentary, long news reporting, and variety of British culture shows. Now it's just rolling news. Idiots who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing ignored the real "soft power" benefits of the old World Service programmes.

> I always advice people against translation efforts in the topic of technology, since I believe that it is much better to have a common language to document and comment the source code, and actually to obtain the skills needed to understand written technical documentation in English is a simple effort for most people.

I gently disagree with this part.

For creating code I strongly agree, you're right. We do need a common language.

But if I had the money I'd set up a foundation to improve the man pages and documentation for projects, and to then translate these documents into the big languages - Portuguese, Spanish, French, some form of Chinese. Etc. I feel that this is important for poor people in developing nations.

Finally, your written English is good. I knew you're not a native speaker, but I didn't have any trouble understanding what you were saying. Many people speak only one language.

>> the cost of everything but the value of nothing

that tony benn speech is amazing :p

Oscar Wilde is the original author of that quote. It was the answer to a question posed to him ("What's a cynic?").

Thanks for the interesting links, it is interesting that there is a debate about it.

About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more.

As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough with a "card game" program that actually focuses on pronounce, I can't find any, even if I suspect that a simple script using osx "say" program should suffice.

How would the card game work? It sounds like an interesting idea.

There is a common game to learn new words of a foreign language consisting of a set of cards with the word translated in your native language in the back, and the word translated in the target language in the front. You have to pick the cards you are not very sure, and remember the translation before flipping the card. At this point you can flip the card for confirmation.

I would love to have the same, but with the ability to play the sound of the word at the same time. Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

They are called flash cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard

> Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

It does and is called Anki. You'll probably need to search a bit though to find a deck that has italian/english with english sounds:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/english

Alternatively you could take decks made for other languages and build a new deck, since they're all stored in SQLite.

Thanks! I don't need an italian -> english one, just english with sounds will be enough.

I'm using Anki to teach reading/writing English to my kids. Anki is also a great way to learn a programming language or API (see: https://sivers.org/srs).

Have you taken a look at Duolingo[1]? It doesn't 100% focus on pronunciation but it certainly does provide them for all words. The app is great.

[1] http://www.duolingo.com/

Thanks, I'll try it for sure.

Your article reads fine to me, only a couple of places that gave away that you are not a native speaker.

If you can get it you might be better watching BBC World News than just listening to World Service on the radio so that you get the visual cues as well. My second language is French and it improved a lot through watching current affairs programmes each evening.

as a fellow broken english speaker I have to note: _which_ pronounce? And does it even matter?

Should "can't" be kaːnt, kʰeɪnt or kænt ? Pederasts are pɛ.dəˌfaɪl or ˈpiː.dəˌfaɪl? Do we like to dɑːns or dæns ?

(examples taken from the last two TV shows I've seen _yesterday_)

Surely there are improvements we can all have to the way we misspeak (heck, I just learned "honorable" doesn't have a "h"!) but I have given up on getting english right until native speakers finally agree on whether it's tomaito or tomahto.

(Or, as wiktionary showss: təˈmɛɪtoː, təˈmætoː, təˈmɑːtəʊ, təˈmeɪtoʊ or təˈmeɪtə..)

/dɑːns/ and /kɑːnt/ in the UK, /dæns/ and /kænt/ in most of the US.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dance#Pronunciation

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t#Pronunciation

Which way you should pronounce them depends, I suppose, on whether you speak to more British people or Americans.

It also depends on which British people you speak to - I don't pronounce those words like that.

Translating the documentation from English is akin to providing obese people with scooters inside chain stores: instead of facing the problem head-on you're just avoiding it and learning to live with it.

> instead of facing the problem

The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

The problem is not being willing to learn an essential skill.

So a 12 year old in Brazil not only has to learn how to install an OS, and then how to install Python, and then how to program with Python, but also has to do all of that in a different language?

Pretty easy to call it an essential skill when English is your first language.

How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only Japanese documentation?

The parent comment wasn't prescriptive, it was descriptive. You can argue all you'd like that it isn't fair or optimal or good, but you're hard pressed to argue that it isn't true.

> but you're hard pressed to argue that it isn't true.

But it's only true (if it is true, and I haven't seen anything to show that it is) because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's nothing about it that needs it to be true.

"The world needs a common language; you lazy thickos need to speak English (which, coincidentally, is what I speak) otherwise you only have yourselves to blame" is the language of fascists and belongs to the era of Eugenics and other hateful wrong-headed ideologies.

Like I just said, the comment was descriptive, not prescriptive. Neither that commenter nor I are arguing that this is how it should be. We're simply observing that it's how it is, and if you want to be successful it's almost always better to base your decisions on how the world is than on how you think it should be.

As for anything to show that it is true… have you looked around you? English has very obviously become the lingua franca of commerce, science, and technology. This is not a controversial statement.

Are you saying the world doesn't need a common language? Or that there's a better choice than English?

Yes it sucks a lot for some people, and no it isn't fair, but that doesn't change it.

What would you have us do?

> Are you saying the world doesn't need a common language?

It is very easy to say that common languages are good when you already speak that common language.

Common languages are great when you've reached the point of doing the job, but they cause extra burden on large parts of the world population and are a barrier to entry for poor people.

One response is to say "Let's teach a simple international English to as many people as possible". Another response is to say "Let's create excellent quality documentation, and then translate this into the majority languages." These need not be exclusive, we can do both.

My misplaced anger you see in this thread comes from my perception of the tone of the 'learn English' side.

If I had to I would. In fact, just like the author, I was born and raised in Italy. I'm not a native English speaker but since the circumstances required it I learned the English language, simple as that. Now I get to read college textbooks in English instead of relying on the botched translations, I watch movies in their original language instead of watching the translated version and missing half the jokes.

I think we're talking at cross purposes.

I think it would be really useful for some core information[1] to be made available in best quality form, and in many different languages. This would be things like "How does science work?" and other simple introductory science texts. This would be things like man pages.

This would help people learn the basic concepts while they're also learning other languages. Having short form, excellent quality, science and math educational material available in many languages could do a lot to make the world a better place.

Having read some of your other comments I see that you're aiming the "learn English, it's really useful" to people working at a much higher level than that. I gently agree with most of that - there are many areas where learning English is very useful.

But in away this is always been with us.

Before ww2 in some technical fields you more or less had to learn German as that where a lot of the research was done - in chemistry it was effectively mandatory.

Before that a natural philosophers had to learn/know Latin.

> How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only 日本語 documentation?

Funny story: Ruby took a while to catch on outside of Japan because its docs were all in 日本語. The Pickaxe was created by basically ignoring all the docs, reading the C, and playing around in the REPL.

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...

I don't think so. I can talk with Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Russian... etc. people, without knowing all and every of their languages (or without them knowing Spanish for that matter.)

The fact that the common language is actually English is not really relevant to me. I don't care if Spanish has more native speakers, or Chinese. The value of English is as a common language.

No, not really. I have the same opinion and I'm not a native English speaker.

English has some good properties for a common language:

- It has a simple grammar

- It is spoken by the entertaining media

- It already has a head start

Now, if they could actually fix the major flaws:

- Spelling is absurd. It's not just bad, it is absurd.

- For foreigners, the UK accents are terrible. It took me a couple of days in London before I could understand people; and I came from a base of being perfectly fluent

Come to think of it. Scratch that fixing the UK accent part. It's a cool accent, double-oh seven style.

For the love of god, fix the spelling:

-----

"Eye Rhymes, by Helen Bowyer"

Bear and dear // Share, I fear // The pointless deceptivness // Of there and here.

Some and home // Tomb and comb, // Sin against the tongue // Like from and whom.

Howl and bowl // Foul and soul, // Mislead the ear // Like doll and toll. //

Give and dive // Live and thrive, // Bewilder the moppet // Of six or five.

Love and hove // Dove and strove // Sound no more alike // Than glove and cove.

Pew and sew // Do and go // Fail expectation // Like now and slow.

Laid and said // Must be read // As if they rhymed // With neighed and Ned.

------

As I said before, English spelling's bonkers.

bend, send, spend, friend.

Rough - 'ruff'

Cough - 'coff'

Bough - 'bow'

Though - 'tho'

Through - 'throo'

hiccough - 'hiccup'

Bought - 'bawt'

I'm still waiting for HN member ghotifish to show up, as his name is pronounced fish fish:

gh as in cough

o as in women

ti as in nation

Thankfully you're not actually allowed to pick pronunciation arbitrarily in new words. Especially if they violate common or semi-common patterns.

the internet is full of every one censorship,from government,politics and economic sanction. when do you think will the internet world be totally free for everyone?

What are you talking about?

i meant some site are banned or there are blocked and hence affect internet freedom.

An even better one (linked because it's too long to paste here):

http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

Likewise, five different words all pronounced the same: or, oar, ore, awe, aww.

Where do you live that or and awe sound the same? I get or, oar and ore, but awe (such as awe shucks, or awesome) and aww sound nothing like or in the midwest.

Certainly in the UK, 'or' and 'awe' or very similar. But I'm pretty sure the same is true across the states. The 'awe' in 'awe, shucks' is not even really a word, just a sympathetic utterance in the same sort of class as 'um' and 'aaah', so I don't think it has an official spelling, just a phonetic approximation. It is certainly distinct from the word 'awe' that's the root of 'awesome'.

Edit: I meant to point out that I have never seen 'awe, shucks' written before, always 'ah' or 'aww', but I can see how it might be written that way based on a Midwestern accent.

What part of the UK? They are wildly different in Scotland, Northern England, Northern Ireland, in fact probably anywhere except for the south of England, and even there it doubtless varies.

Really? Can you have a stab at describing the difference? Because I've spend the vast majority of my life between Edinburgh, Nottingham and Leeds and I can't bring it to mind. I can see a slight differentiation in places with more solid 'r's (Scotland and the borders for instance), but any wild variation escapes me...

That's the difference though isn't it? Come to glasgow and hear the intensely rhotic pronunciation of "or" and compare to "awe" which has no R at all. The two words sound very different.

"burger" in much of the UK is completely rhotic, with both R's intensely rolled, while in other parts it is more like buhguh. Really sounds quite distinct to my ears.

US pronunciation is generally rhotic, ie. they will pronounce the r's distinctly in those words. Most of the UK (the southwest being the largest exception) is non-rhotic, as are Australia and New Zealand, and in those accents those words generally would be indistinguishable.

Can you please shed more light on BBC World Service? Why the past tense? What radio would you suggest now as a general English background noise to occasionally learn vocabulary from?

Honestly I'd have to improve my spoken English a lot. It's not even comparable to my written skills. It feels like I have to learn the language all over again with my ears.

The BBC World Service used to have a wide variety of programming.

They'd include some of the programmes broadcast on BBC Radio Four, including panel games such as "Just a minute". They'd include some of the science and medical documentary that Radio 4 would broadcast. They'd also have their own programming - some soap operas, some news, some great documentaries.

All of this meant that English was being used in a variety of ways. There was informal, conversational English. There was English humour and word play. And there was more formal English.

But now the World Service has lost most of that. It is just a rolling news service now. There are some arts and science programmes, but those aren't great. The variety of spoken English is much reduced, and the variety of programming is much less. And everything is repeated every few hours, with some tweaks for different time zones.

Speaking English must be very hard!

Oddly enough, the English-language service of Deutsche Welle provides much of what BBC World Service used to provide, and in a fairly standardized "mid-Atlantic" accent.

(There was a time, as well, when the CBC and Radio Canada International used/enforced a standard pronunciation across the board. There was something quaint about it for every regional Canadian English dialect -- and our dialects, apart from Newfanese and the Nova Scotia Lunenburg dialect, tend to be pretty subtle -- but everyone could understand it. With the trend toward a vox populi approach, a rural Saskatchewan listener may find the various immigrant Englishes of major population centres like Toronto baffling at first. It's nice that communities can hear themselves on the radio -- it makes them feel more like first class citizens -- but it can impede communication between groups, and that friction can foster the very problems that the policies are trying to correct.)

While it might not be on the World Service, I'd like to point out that a wide range of content is internationally available in the form of podcasts, this is the Radio 4 link - http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4 but do browse around. There's really an incredible amount of content on there (and there is a ton more across the pond at NPR).

I have to agree about the World Service. It made me so very cross when I heard they were cutting the funding! Having listened to the Africa Daily for a few months, I was convinced that it was the only robust news source for so many people. (robust = willing to interview relevant politicians with real, tough questions.)

I may be wrong, but it is still an enormous asset, worth saving and/or reviving one day.

Ideally you would probably want to cross reference it with something like Al Jazeera to get a non-western point of view, too.

> BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming.

BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The result is such that, in 2013, I struggle to find any broadcast at all that might sound like old-fashioned RP. There is now no real alternative for learning RP: either you attend Oxbridge and/or belong to certain circles, or you'll be stuck with a local accent forever.

Paradoxically, trying to make RP disappear, they made it even more exclusive and desirable.

NB: RP is fancy british english

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

Nah... RP is the accent all us inverse snobs snigger at. In all seriousness, there are more "neutral" and aurally-pleasing English accents than old-fashioned RP.

It's interesting to see the effects of varied accents in modern British television programming on largely self-taught English speakers in relatively isolated communities though: Burmese Cockney has to be my favourite.

Burmese Cockney eh? This I hafta listen to at least once in my lifetime.

RP isn't especially common at Oxbridge.

"Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress)

Fucking hell, you're a prize twat. Besides, the shift from RP to regional accents in the media started during the 60's, not the 90's, it isn't some Blairite conspiracy. My mum used to winge about it because her dad sent her to RP to get rid of her welsh accent just at the point where having a regional accent was starting to be a benefit.

Thank you for the kind words, as a foreigner I try hard to fit in! :)

I've been around here since 2001 and from what I've read, the blairites were the ones responsible for big changes at the BBC in particular. The topic had been raised and policies had been half-heartedly implemented before, but they were finally enshrined after Blair came to power.

Same goes for the Scottish influence in civil service and ministerial appointments, as far as I understand, although it could be argued that it's just balancing out the Tories' penchant for English-English personalities (probably because they hardly elected anyone out of Scotland since the Thatcher years).

(btw, sorry if this sounds anti-Labour; as a proto-Bennite, I probably resent the careerist attitude of most NewLabourites more than I should -- Benn fought hard to get rid of his titles, and now we're supposed to be led by Lord Prezza... -- and their horrible treatment of Gordon Brown is still too fresh).

So you are saying that there was an orchestrated move against RP to regional accents in the media in the 90's and you think it was partly to help a Scottish influence in civil service and ministerial appointments and to help John Prescott in some nefarious plan to become a lord.

Sorry for swearing at you before, but this seems unlikely.

Hyperbole doesn't really work on the internet... of course it wasn't a conspiracy to have the Queen replaced by a Scottish miner, but it's well documented that Blair and friends did bring in a new wave of civil servants and appointees from the North, and a new attitude towards regions outside the Tory enclaves of Home Counties and Midlands. Which was very welcome and very refreshing (and likely helped acceptance of people like me, sporting a clearly non-UK accent), but was certainly motivated in large part by a desire to advance the careers of regional Labourites, and produced, as collateral damage, a certain ostracism of RP, something that I personally think is detrimental to the country as a whole (or even just to the image of the country, as perceived from abroad). Even a strong "regionalist" like Tony Wilson, wandering the country in his Granada years, had a spotless accent (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCuqKzW6r7M from 1985), whereas most popular broadcasters in their 30s/40s, these days, tend to have a recognisable accent.

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers!

Over the years, I've worked with a lot of people who are not native English speakers. The one thing that trips me up is when one of them is so utterly brilliant at speaking English that I completely forget they're not a native speaker and start unconsciously throwing in some of the slang and colorful idioms my redneck father has fed me over the years. I always feel bad when I do this because it must sound like I go from perfectly understandable English to complete and utter gibberish in nothing flat! Idioms and slang are really horrible things to inflict upon non-native speakers. I can't imagine what it must be like for a non-native English speaker trying to work with Cockneys or newfies!

Mostly true, and good for me to the extent it's true (as a native English speaker), but it does depend on the field and country. A lot of robotics and EE research in Japan is published in Japanese-language journals, as one of the bigger remaining outposts of non-English technical literature. The journals are slowly moving slowly towards more English, at least to the extent of publishing English abstracts for the Japanese papers, and younger researchers will tend to publish more in English, but it's a pretty recent trend.

There is a lot of media-art / media-philosophy / electronic lit stuff published in German as well. E.g. I would love an English translation of any of Claus Pias's books, or of this generative-art book: http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/about

OT, but an English translation of that (excellent, btw) book was released last year by Princeton Architectural Press: https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781...

Cockney is relatively easy compared to some other local UK dialects/accents. My wife's family is from Stirlingshire in Scotland and they say stuff like:

'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'.

'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food'

It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

Aye, it's a sair fecht! ;-)

In those examples, it's not just the accent or the words / language used, it's local expressions, sayings and the like. A perfectly simple and easily read sentence like "I need to see a man about a dog" can be pronounced in the most fluent and understandable accent (TV English), and still non-natives wouldn't realise it means you're going to the bathroom. In fact, going to the bathroom is another expression / figure of speech. You get the idea.

Words, grammar and pronunciation are just part of the story.

It's never quite that simple: as a genuine cockney (born at Barts), I have a bastardised Northern and German accent.

Innit.

Accent and dialect are distinct. Maybe it's because I was born in Scotland, spent my teenage years in the English midlands and north, now live in London and watch TV from the states, but I've never met an English speaker whose accent I had difficulty understanding. And that includes all the heavily accented (although generally second-gen) immigrants I've met.

Dialect on the other hand means words I don't know the definition of, and sometimes there isn't enough context to intuit it.

Exactly. But it's obviously not just the accent thats at issue here. If you think about it, and try to do a good impersonation of someone talking in a different accent it has to include a bit of dialect and local grammatical idioms to make it convincing.

I assumed that the original comment about 'foreign accents' also encompassed the grammatical tics that foreign speakers often have. Someone speaking grammatically correct english in a strong accent is easily understood, but it only takes a very little grammatical mistake to change to meaning of a sentence. For example, an Italian colleague who missed out a 'to' and told me 'just a minute, I'll come over your desk' caused some admittedly slightly childish giggling in the office...

No research in other languages than English? You crazy? Most research on Chinese art, history, literature is in Chinese. Same for French. I'd agree that some topics that are more detached from a given culture, like mathematics, are mostly English zone, but this is not the biggest part.

...the lingua franca...

Here is a random irony that I like. People today use an Italian phrase describing French, and mean English by it.

Lingua franca (on the ground, as opposed to diplomatic French) wasn't exactly French, either; it was a sort of Occitan/Spanish/Italian hybrid that was something more than a mere pidgin (possible because of the common Romance roots of its speakers). The name is more of a "this isn't Italian; sounds like French to me" designation. (William Caxton remarked that London-area English was received similarly in Kent in the 15th century.)

The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words.

Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:

    on...
    ono...
    onomat...
    onomato...
    onomatopei...
    onomatopeia

Try saying it out loud this way instead:

    ...a
    ...peia
    ...topeia
    ...matopeia
    ...nomatopeia
    onomatopeia

This will almost always result in learning to pronounce the word much better. I say almost because there probably are words out there that violate this rule, but I haven't come across any of them yet. The reason this approach works is because the first syllable of almost all polysyllabic words in English is pronounced in a more drawn out fashion than the latter syllables. By learning from back to front, you force yourself to learn to draw out the first syllable and shorten up the last syllable(s).

I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

If you are a speaker of a second language, I strongly urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.

This is a fantastic idea! Do you mind if I share that with my English students?

I wouldn't take the risk .. he might sue you for copyright infringement.

Certainly. I have another excellent trick for you that I was able to use to teach my all my Chinese students back in the day how to pronounce the word "usually", which is a notoriously difficult word for Chinese speakers.

Exploiting the technique above, start with a word in the language of the audience that share phonemes with your target word. From there you essentially play something similar to Lewis Carroll's "Doublets" game from the end to the beginning. So for the word "usually" I would usually start with the city in China, "Guanzhou" and proceed as follows (excuse my poor man's phonetic spelling):

    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee

The repetition is performed until your student(s) ha(s|ve) properly pronounced the current temperoary utterance.

I think you have misspelled the word "onomatopoeia". (Which would normally be fine – it's just such an important word in your post that I thought you should know.)

To give my post some much-needed useful content, and not look as though I was simply sniping someone's spelling, I may as well share my mnemonic for spelling "onomatopoeia."

It's 12 letters, and there's a sort-of pattern in four groups of three with a rhythm. o-n-o, m-a-t, o-p-o, e-i-a. The first and third parts are like rhyming lines in a poem.

That's how I see it, anyway.

Doh! Thanks. TBH I just pick the first fun polysyllabic word that I figured foreign speakers might find difficult to pronounce. On a different day I may have chosen another word.

Finally, somebody confirms for me the way that I've always used to learn to pronounce very long words.

I'm surprised this works for pronunciation: surely it's easier to emphasize the first syllable and then add syllables with soft or altogether lost vowel sounds (-es, -ed, -able etc.) rather than starting with clearly enunciated suffixes and then progressively de-stressing and mangling them I'd be more comfortable going from com- to comf't'bl than from table to fort-abl to comf't'bl

For the exact same reason I can see how your method works well as a means of teaching spelling by forcing native speakers to voice all the vowels that native speakers replace with the -schwa sound when pronouncing the full word.

English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irregularities out so that the language can be read after learning the alphabet. I was always against this in German but then I realized most current spellings are just a snapshot in time, it all used to be spelled differently. So now I am dor either use the original form an pronounciation or go fully local. Computer is fine as it is still english but will and should eventually become Kompjuter. It looks really wrong to me but it is readable as a German word and much better to learn for children.

2 remarks: * The Turkish written language has had a similar transformation. There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy.

* Dutch is a similar 'power language' you can combine any 2 nouns in any order to create new words. For a native speaker, the meaning then is obvious.

> There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy.

Then I am 31 years old and move from Finland to London and need to spell (dictate letter by letter) my name in a bank – something I have never done in my life. I do it really slowly, and the bank clerk probably thinks I am borderline retarded, can't even spell his own name, something even kids learn to do. :-D

In Italian there are not dictation exercise beyond age of 8. ;)

Not even for punctuation and such?

Well, you have it easy. So do we, in Romania - phonetic language. You learn the alphabet in the first grade (6-7 years) and you learn how to write words during the 2nd and 3rd grade I think. But basically once you know the alphabet you can pronounce any word. Except for, you guessed it, neologisms, words imported from non-phonetical languages.

Plus we have ce/ci/ge/gi/che/chi/ghe/ghi as the only exceptions, no doubled consonnants or actually any doubled other letter for no obvious reason, no long or short sounds. If I want a long "e" (we pronounce "e" - "eh"), I write it "ee" (duh!). Idea = idee. You can hear it, you can write it. You can read it, you can say it. EZ!

What we actually learn during school is higher level grammar: syntax, semantics. I'd say that Romanian is like the Python of natural languages :)

(same for other phonetic languages)

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

Yeah, the reform of Vuk Karadžić[1] few centuries ago has made wonder for ex-Yugoslawien languages that made them truly phonetic. One simple rule: "Write as you speak, speak as you write" allowed children to be fully literate as soon as they learn the alphabet. Of course, there are edge cases where something is written differently than pronounced, but are edge cases that accounts for less than 0.001% of the words, and can safely be ignored.

If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

And 'jilet' is 'razor' in Turkish :-)

Gillette? We write žilet, because j is pronounced like y in croatian.

English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord.

If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.

Is this "losing the root" really such a big issue? The etymology is recorded for people who want to study such stuff.

Antithesis sounds close to Anti thesis in English (As opposed to American English)

There's much more stress on the first e in thesis than there is in antithesis.

In Australian English, it's "ann-tith-iss-iss" versus "ann-tee thee-sis"; I imagined British English would have been the same. Interesting to learn.

I'm British and I pronounce it "ann-tith-iss-iss"

There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform:

1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good.

2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent example of this. This is only frustrating for foreign learners learning pronounciation, but otherwise has a lot to commend it.

3. Our historical orthography creates a link with our history and our culture; I can read Shakespeare even though Elizabethan pronounciation was startlingly different to today's.

1. Every other language with such a system bases it on the "standard" pronunciation, for English this could be for example BBC English. As a result you'll sometimes have youths who will write the local dialect phonetically in IM chat, but they also know how to write (and speak) the standard way.

2. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and that that's somehow better? My instincts tell me that knowing how to pronounce a word by reading it is more advantageous than having to learn 1000's of glyph-like words, maybe someone else has more knowledge about the tradeoffs between phonetic and glyph like scripts.

3. This is a gimmic. How many times do you estimate the average English speaking person reads these texts in their life?

3. It's not a gimmick. Shakespeare is but one example of culture; he's not the start and finish of it.

To be honest, you can dramatically reform English spelling without encountering those problems very often provided your rule-of-thumb is that orthography ought to guide intelligible rather than prescribe "correct" pronunciation

That means leaving alone anomalies like thesis/antithesis (because "antithesis" pronounced phonetically is actually perfectly intelligible, even using the American antai- prefix which is jarringly different from the British anty-) but it also means tackling the sheer impossibility of telling the doctor you would like medicine for a cough (cow? coup? Seb Coe?) without resorting to acting or a pronunciation dictionary

Shakespearean spelling varied more between early editions than many relatively radical proposed orthographies do from standard English. You can guess the opening words of a 1600 edition of A Midsommer Nights[sic] Dreame : "Now faire Hippolita, our nuptiall hower draws on apase: fower happy daies..." , but ironically only from trying to read it phonetically (the 1623 version is more readable) http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MND/Q1/defaul...

American English speaker here.

1. I'd say that the non-phonetic approach allowed this to happen in the first place. In languages where the writing system was pinned to a phonetic system, there is no room for saying something incorrectly. There is room for replacing words and sounds but at least the writing reflects the spoken versions.

2. If you want to go that far, then we ought to just adopt Chinese characters which go a step further and abstract out pronunciation from meaning. That is, it is possible to understand groupings of Chinese characters without even knowing pronunciation. But this system also creates additional problems.

3. I think we have the technology to "bridge" our roots to whatever we create in the future. Today it is actually possible to make something live for eternity thanks to the internet. One good application would be English writing reform if we are to accept that it is the linqua franca.

Consider the possible benefits:

* 2nd language learners will have a much easier learning curve and thus be able to transition from their first language to English more quickly * World communication would increase--I think this has war-stopping potential (or peace creating potential) * Translations would hopefully become more accurate (less secondary translation/interpretation needed)--things written in "new" English would be more accessible to a larger audience. * Areas dominated by native English speakers would open up to a larger audience, thus creating more competition and more contributions by people of other backgrounds other than pure English.

For example, right now we are seeing dominance in technology/internet by English speakers, but why should that remain the case? As such traveling to a non-English speaking country often feels like going back 5-10 years because much of their tech experience is based on companies paying for translations or waiting for local companies to copy the technology.

I actually think we have the capability of making "new English" for both existing native speakers and new speakers. For example for native speakers, we could write an input method that automatically identifies words, spelling, or grammatical structures that have been deprecated and may not be understood by "new English" learners.

We also have the ability to write and document English to new English translations and historical references. There will certainly be some fallout but we currently don't document many language shifts that happen even among smaller populations.

I'm sure many exceptional native English writers and culturally engrained speakers will balk at such an idea. My challenge would be to have them learn Chinese or some other not so closely related foreign language to the same fluency they can speak English in order for them to understand the pain of learning a new and complex language. Of course I am not happy with the loss of culture, but I think for the advancement of the world at large, such a path is inevitable.

> My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis.

That's quite an unfortunate example: it comes straight from classic Greek (another very bitchy language when it comes to pronunciation pseudo-rules), and percolated into Latin and eventually English.

Still, I agree large chunks of current English pronunciation "rules" (rules? what rules?) just don't make any sense from a logical perspective; proof is that even born-and-bread Englishmen can often struggle with spelling well into their late 20s and beyond, regardless of education level.

My favorite (coming from Swedish, which is also a language fond of its concatenations) is finite/infinite.

Catholic -> Catholicism is my favorite.

Even as a thoroughly American monolingual English speaker, I didn't get that until high school. The stress moves from the first to the second syllable thanks to the addition of a suffix two syllables distant. God help a non-native speaker trying to understand why that happens; I'm not even sure I do.

What you're referring to is not a problem of orthography, per se. It is a quality of the English language called "Sandhi"[1], and is fundamental to how we construct grammar.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

The fact that Sandhi is often not reflected in our orthography is a mixed blessing. Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

Every language has complexity that seems totally horrible to a foreign learner. German, for example, has three genders, which are to an English speaker completely pointless and annoying. I've yet to study a language that doesn't feel like that, although Spanish is very close to actually making sense: the two genders are 90% a matter of suffix agreement, and the exceptions like "el día" are relatively few and far between.

> Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

The pronounciation of the separate words doesn't preserve their etymologies either. This is my main gripe with (spoken) English: greek and to some extent german words (and probably most other words taken from foreign languages) are completely and randomly mutilated, the result confuses everyone who knows what they mean and how they're pronounced properly.

And to keep it complicated every once in a while we make it so you need to respect the origin words. One that always makes me think twice as a native English speaker is "infrared". I always have to stop myself from saying it such that it rhymes with "compared".

Coming from almost the opposite background, I agree very strongly with the assertion that accent is almost beside the point. It's true that if your accent is too thick that will harm communication, but below a certain threshold native speakers will attune pretty quickly.

For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properly learn until I was 12). Because I was exposed to Portuguese at a young age I have excellent pronunciation and decent grammar, but I never spent enough time living there to pick up a broad vocabulary. So actually my expressiveness Portuguese is quite weak even though people's first impression might be that it is perfect until we get into a serious conversation and I struggle to come up with the right words and expressions.

I often contrast this with my mother and father who learned the language pairs as adults, but did so in a serious academic setting. I have less of an accent than both of them in their opposing language, but they both have a much stronger overall command. Sometimes I meet someone with a very thick accent that is hard to decipher at first, but they speak very quickly and with excellent grammar and vocabulary.

So it's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary. Clearly I think pg touched on the important point that entrepreneurs generally talk fast about complicated and novel ideas, so an accent is more likely to get in the way as compared to normal interactions. However it's just the tip of the iceberg, and I think the average American lives a more sheltered life in terms of the reality of having to learn another language than any other country.

That, in fact, is directly in line with pg's point.

His point was that you have to get to "good enough" and not doing so is a real problem. However he went on to make it clear that if your accent does not impede communication, then it is a non-issue.

Yeah I don't think I disagreed with pg, more that I think he's focusing on the much less important issue. I would hazard a guess that the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who have perfect English but can't be understood because of their accent is dwarfed by the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who struggle with English at a more basic level.

I see that the submitted article, and many of the interesting comments in this busy thread, relate to the issue of the bizarre spelling patterns of English. As a native speaker of General American English (the dialect of English I recommend to foreign learners of English ;) ), I have two perspectives on this.

1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...

prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.

2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html

about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.

Concentrated learning for English accents is effective. From personal experience (through acting) I can tell you that sitting down with a professional accent coach 2-3x per week can have you speaking and understanding heavy, hard accents (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZU...) quickly. A month of lessons will get you understanding, and fooling some people who don't have that accent. A few months is required to fool people who have that accent.

From this experience I learned that the process of learning a new accent is totally separate from learning a language as most people do it. You need to master IPA as well as carry a mirror to watch your own lips and have good close-up reference material. As evidenced by all the mediocre accents in movies it's not a foolproof process, but it can certainly get you much closer to your goal.

It is worth noting that the unintelligible accent issue is context dependent. A native English speaker can be the person with an unintelligible accent, and that person may need to work on their communication skills in order to have influence.

I experienced this phenomenon first hand as a native English speaker with an Australian accent. At my first hostel abroard there was a mixed group of european (non UK) people conversing in English, and I thought I'd try and join in.

me: howrya?

group: blank stares

me: how are you?

group: blank stares

me: how - are - you?

group: look of fear

me: hello?

This first experience was definitely a shock, and it took me some time to realise what it must have been like for the group.

In terms of learning to understand native speakers, travelling in their country for an extended period seems to work. My family has hosted many international guests through exchange programs, including adult guests who had never left their home country (but were taught English at school). Communication was sometimes very difficult, but universally the guests were able to pick up on the Australian accent over time. When exchanges move from blank looks to questions about particular words used, you can start having clunky conversations.

The exchange programs did give our family tips on how to converse with the guests. The only tip I can remember is to try and use different words. Often the longer and fancier word (e.g. gigantic, massive) is easier to understand for the guest than the short and simple word (e.g. big).

Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system.

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

When I took an acting class on accents, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa). It is surprisingly handy, although most Americans have no idea it exists, much less how to read it.

Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.

Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.

In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to be able to speak at least one foreign language or two, if you don't want to focus on sciences.

> Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.

In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot.

Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I used to do that, the only problem is that it is a time consuming task.

In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29

What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.

I remember seeing a new segement on BBC about socially deprived areas of Glasgow, and local youths were talking and it was subtitled.

If I remember rightly, this also happened in some regional releases of the film Trainspotting.

For the opposite problem, try reading Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn

There's a similar show in the US about people in the deep south making moonshine, and I, a US born English speaker could not understand a word they were saying, even with the subtitles I had trouble understanding what word was what.

I remember being surprised at people in Iceland using really American idioms. At one point I asked someone where he learned a particular idiom, he told me he was obsessed with the show "Friends".

I'd actually say that the English most Europeans learn is very compatible with British English, and I very, very rarely struggle to understand them. However I do quite regularly cause issues when speaking with Americans, as the difference between our dialects is quite large; the British in general have a very diverse array of accents and colloquialisms, and we tend to speak pretty quickly in comparison to the US (personal experience, YMMV). This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers. While at conferences I've found that people from Germanic countries have very little trouble understanding me (we do have a shared heritage, after all) but anyone more eastern or southern definitely have issues when I start wittering about something.

I don't hold it against someone if they can't understand me though; the British can't even understand each other, so I can imagine how difficult it can be for people from elsewhere :)

> This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers.

That definitely can be the case, also I observed intermitting slow and very fast speeds in the same sentence in order to put the emphasis in different parts of the sentence.

I suspect a lot of the problems with British English come from how many different influences we had in the origins of the language. It doesn't really make much sense because it's a weird bastardisation of Germanic, Latinate, and Celtic languages (with a few choice French words for good luck). The pacing when speaking it can be pretty wonky because the words don't really flow together like they do in other languages.

I don't really understand the whole uproar over people's grasp of English. If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them. The best I can achieve in another language is to describe how my car broke down in German.

If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them

If all the people in the world reasoned like you we would all live in a better place..

Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects.

1. Shakespearean pronunciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

2. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

3. Power of Babel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural-Language/dp/00...

4. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)

Most of English's problems come from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

It is "problem" of most natural languages - they always change. Interesting book about this: Why Do Languages Change? by Larry Trask http://amzn.com/0521546931

Over the past year I have improved my spoken English immensely, here's how:

- I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it.

- Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one hour per day. I read books, articles, even RFCs. It does wonders.

- Made a good use of the "pronounce feature" that most dictionaries have nowadays.

- Saw youtube videos on pronunciation and common mistakes.

I also wrote a lot, about 2000 words per day (I wrote a AutoHotKey script to count number of times I hit space on any given day). Perhaps 2000 words is too much, and it tends to favor verbosity over succinctness. But you will get a LOT of practice.

It also helps to read/hear good writers/speakers. I don't like movies/tv so much, as they have a low speech to time ratio.

How did you contact your tutors? I know of some startup attempts, was it something more prosaic like a classifieds ad?

I got in contact with my tutors through livelingua.com. The first tutor was excellent, the second one was reasonable. I can't say that I really recommend the site (as the quality is somewhat inconsistent), but it did work for me.

The first lesson is free, so one can always give it a try.

Thanks, I was asking on behalf of some friends that had a startup idea about a language exchange community (say, I teach you Spanish, you teach me English). But I think they abandoned it.

I don't understand why people are making such a big fuss about the PG article. He gave only one example of so many red hearing. Obviously being a foreigner with a strong accent doesn't help you when 90% of your time is spent communicating. duh.

What makes me sad is that by being honest and wanting to help founders, PG just got a new shit load of problems from people over-reacting. Do you really think he'll give great, but controversial, feedback in his next interviews/articles?

The problem of PG (and yours) it's the lack on empathy, simply as that. Like "antirez" says, English is not a hobby: English is pushed down the throat of a growing share of people around the world today. And they need English to live a normal life, not for fancy careers.

Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be worthless just because you're born in the wrong side of the world, and you sound funny.

The problem is that many English speaker have no idea how is like to learn another language, hence they lack of empathy.

First of all, I'm a foreigner, English is clearly not my native language and I have problems every day because of it. So yeah, native english speakers have it easier. But so what? Nobody said life was supposed to be easy and that everyone was created with the same skills and weaknesses. Some people are prettier, others are taller, other speak better english. Not acknowledging this is only hypocrisy. What PG said is that if you want to put the chance on your side, learning to speak a better english is a very important skill.

    Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives.

That's life. Learn it, move on. Or I can, you know, not learn it correctly, gain less money and have it even harder.

I can understand having empathy for some people where English is pushed down their throat. But, for founders applying to YC and going to the Valley? Please. Why would anyone invest any money or take seriously a CEO that doesn't take his/her work seriously. (Yes, communicating well for a CEO is very important. What about a programmer that can't code?)

Imagine a Steve Jobs explaining to the world how Apple is great with a foreign accent that nobody can't understand.

The school you went to matters. Your height matters. Your appearance matters. Your family matters. Where you live matters. The amount of money you have matters. It always been and will always be. Faster you understand it and start putting the chances on your side, the better you will be.

And how to show a totally lack of empathy and missing the point

'If you want a friend - get a dog'. Likewise, if you want empathy, watch Oprah.

I believe there needs to be room for honest realistic views to be voiced - even if you don't like the reality they describe.

PG did not say that janitors need to polish their accent - he's talking about startup founders. These are the guys that want to strike it rich, let's be real. If you want to "make it" in this part of the world, deal with the fact that command of English is expected from company founders here.

And yes - it's not my native language either.

The author mentions that he spent a lot of time using English without ever listening to it. A big problem is the way English( or languages) are taught or learnt that causes these problems.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.

The main issue with the the usual approach of language learning is the focus on grammar, like if doing useless grammar exercises would improve your grasp of grammar and sentence construction rules. It doesn't help much actually.

I've learned more grammar watching tv series than actually studying grammar for years in school, and my pronunciation improved too. Now many things just come naturally.

And i can understand the issues he's having with pronunciation, without a constant reference to how something should be pronounced you tend to ignore the correct pronunciation of words you don't know (but you can deduce the meaning while reading) an build up a collection of words with completely broken pronunciation that you will end up using in actual conversation. With hideous results...

I agree regarding the grammar. After living in England for a couple of years, mainly surrounded by native English speakers, things just either sound 'right' or 'broken'.

Although opportunity of living here is somewhat luxurious for many. So I would say that listening to as much native English as possible is really good for grammar :)

Exactly, you can get that right/broken gut feeling just being immersed in that language for thousand of hours.

Regarding real immersion (both listening and speaking) maybe personal tutors via skype or language learning communities could be a cheap alternative, i've never really tried this approach (lazyness) but i've thought for years it could have been worth the price.

I agree with your post. TV shows and movies helped a lot, and many wrong things just sound wrong. Pure grammar exercises can only teach so much.

However a solid understanding of grammar helps. For example in your post you wrote "like if doing". Correct would be "as if doing" since "as if" is a conjunction and "like" is a preposition. It was probably just a typo, and you would have caught it during a proof-read since it sounds "wrong" but actual grammar knowledge will confirm any suspicions.

Antirez is spot on describing the problems of English as a foreign language in Europe (although I don't think it has much to do with PG's remarks and I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it).

My favourite example is the pronunciation of the math symbol Pi in a European meeting in which everyone and their dog would be tempted to say something like "pih" except a native speaker. Or try asking for the nearest Ikea.

To be fair (ish) Ikea is a Swedish brand, so the pronunciation was always likely to be a bit odd.

Pi is pronounced the way it is because a bunch of people in the C16th decided to reconstruct classical Greek pronunciation & teach that to students in England. Mix with the great vowel shift (some of which was later reversed for Greek letters in the C19th, but in different ways in the US and the UK) and you end up with the odd mix of pronunciations we have today, with UK and US English disagreeing. At least according to this stackexchange post anyway: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/why-are-gre...

> Antirez is spot on describing the problems of English as a foreign language in Europe

Only in those european countries that dub foreign language movies. In the countries where they subtitle them instead, the exposure to spoken English comes much sooner without the need for formal lessons.

I have a French colleague with the strangest attitude to his strong accent when speaking English. His accent is strong enough that it makes understanding him a bit tricky sometimes, and when I mentioned it, he said that this accent was part of his identity and he wouldn't be trying to improve it. He was weirdly taken aback when I said something in a 'good' French accent.

This attitude was really surprising to me.

For me, when speaking your non-native language, the aim should be to sound like a native (or with the accent of some subset of the native-speaking population).

I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

I really don't want to support stereotypes, but my girlfriend works on the bus station and in her experience of more than 2 years the french are the toughest customers to deal with. They refuse to learn even a handful of basic english expressions. She also tries german or spanish, although she is not exactly fluent in either. So most of the time, they speak french to her and she responds in croatian, waiting for them to give up.

I see your point, but nowadays English is not merely yet another foreign language, in a way it belongs to people of all over the world by right of their contribution to universal English-speaking culture (think Vladimir Nabokov or Linus Torvalds). Today Runglish (flavour of English spoken by those whose mother tongue is Russian) is nothing but derogatory term, but some day, when most of Russians will know English well enough, we are going to start to skip articles out of pure pride.

> I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

I hope you understand that hiding own accent is not the easiest thing and requires some effort even after lots of training. Our vocal apparatus is adapted to our mother tongue, so even if we are capable of speaking all English phonemes, not all of them are "natural" for us.

Yes, but the anecdote I wrote about was a situation where someone was deliberately not making any effort to improve their accent. It wasn't about trying but failing.

Spoken English has been the major barrier for me. All these articles from this and last week resonate with me, but this one hits the nail on so many heads.

It's especially discouraging when so many job ads require hyper-ultra-mega-puts-Bill-Clinton-to-shame communication skills for software development positions. I understand the value of communication, but I've successfully done remote gigs for companies where we don't even talk to each other. Just hand me the spec and I'll build it. If I have any doubts I'll write you an email, with the added benefit of having everything in writing and being able to re-read it later.

Not just Italian, same applies to Mandarin too.

Mandarin speakers from different regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, different parts of China, Malaysia, Singapore) speak in different accents but we usually don't have problem understanding each other (yeah, sometimes we make fun of the different accents).

It's awkward to compare Italian and Mandarin to the state of English in the world. English is a language that was "exported" to America by the British Empire. It was also "exported" to Australia and many other former colonies. It's no surprise, really, that these people have difficulties understanding each other. While China and Italy inhabitants share common borders, native English speakers share only the relationship to their former colonizer.

There are other languages that suffer from the same problem. Brazilian Portuguese differs greatly from Portugal's, which is also different from East Timor's. I don't know much about Spanish and French but I assume the situation is analogous.

It's important to note that such differences between colonies and their colonizers were once a strong argument towards independence.

I was born in America, raised learning English, and to this day, my written skills are nowhere near perfect. Nor are my verbal skills. I am constantly writing and rewriting sentences because the intangibles of communications, such as tone, style, prose, format, are extremely important and often overlooked. Not to mention, my grammar after 29 years is still far from perfect.

I've attempted and now partially understand, read, write, and speak Spanish, Swedish, German. Having experienced all of the intricacies of other languages, I don't envy those who are far behind me trying to make it in an English.

That being said, what's the lesson learned, or probably more apt - what's the solution? This is why firms like YC exist, is to provide support to founders that lack all of the acumen (and trust me, there's a lot) that is required for 21st century business leaders. There's often a meta discussion here on HN about the "technical co-founder vs business co-founder". This is one area where having a business co-founder with great communication skills is a great reason to partner up with that person. Unfortunately those who do lack communication skills often find it difficult to understand those who do have good communication skills.

I wish I could help somehow...

I don't think a "business" co-founder is any more likely to have good communication skills than a "technical" co-founder.

Your English has improved tremendously since I've known you.

You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)

Thanks Ludo, I hope this time I'll be able to fix my English before the next project ;-)

A bit ironically, I do have a hard time figuring out how to pronounce "redis"!

> Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

I'm a native English speaker and I don't understand why people do this. If you are trying to have a conversation with someone, surely you want to do what is necessary for everyone to be understood as well as possible. It is only a little effort for you to slow down and simplify your speech, but it is impossible for the other person to learn better English on the spot. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and some US/UK people still wouldn't adapt their accent, even though the locals were humouring them by speaking English to them in the first place.

Perhaps it is easier for me to empathise given I have a (now very mild) Yorkshire accent, which was consistently mocked when I moved to London, and is reasonably slow paced anyway.

We all need to practice tolerance and grace. Identifying that there are non-native speakers means we all share a bit of the burden. Antirez mentions slowing down, this is one easy way to make conversations better understood. Also, we should avoid idioms or turns of phrase. These are quite difficult even for some native speakers. Finally, we need to make a genuine effort to make ourselves understood. This is the sign of effective communication.

I think the whole "accent" controversy misses the mark. Having grown up with an immigrant parent, I know how frequently he was mocked for his accent. Of course, I could always understand and act as the mediator. This has served me well in the rest of my life. If only we all had the same benefit.

I think any geek interested in improving their English should check out my website: http://www.antimoon.com especially the "How to learn English" section, which is a guide based on my own experiences and some language acquisition theory. http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm

I've been writing about effective language learning techniques since 2000, with an emphasis on pronunciation (which is an oft-neglected topic in English classrooms). The site is written in simple English, so if you're a native speaker of English, don't be put off by the spartan writing style.

English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

How do you cope with the pronunciation though? It is my 5th year living in Germany, and as an italian I find the pronunciation much more straightforward in German than in English.

English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example:

  I redacted a  text, removing the froufrou.
  Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru.

French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.

English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).

I know, I receive Webster's Word of the Day and most of them are Latin words: really easy for anyone who speaks a Romance language. The last five were: incipient; indissoluble, indoctrinate, infantilize, inscrutable. So maybe Webster should have two mailing lists. One for anglo-saxons and one for speakers of Romance languages.

Funny, I was just googling for that :). The best I could find: http://www.quora.com/English-language/Is-there-a-thesaurus-t...

Ed Rondthaler on English spelling (video) http://vimeo.com/17561068

"If you don't know English, get a teacher and learn it, if you don't do that you won't succeed."

This is one of the first things one professor said to us at his first lecture when I went to faculty.

Broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 4, and quite pertinent: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs

Technical comment, ignoring the Paul Graham drama (which seems like a non-controversy to me):

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.

A need that I can see is for a class (or at least a few videos) for native English speakers to effectively communicate with non-native speakers, and a way to practice.

The crux of the issue is that by repeating themselves a little louder and at the same speed, a native speaker is treating the (non-native) listener as a linguistic equal. If my brother doesn't understand what I said, it is almost certainly due to the volume of my speech relative to our listening environment, not my content. To assume otherwise would insult his intelligence. If I'm speaking to a non-native speaker, my natural instinct is to extend the same courtesy. It isn't laziness or a lack of empathy. (You could argue it was lazy to speak that way in the first place, but to rephrase it after the fact would be condescending)

I used to work for a company based in Tokyo and, through practice and frustration, learned how to modulate my idiom-laden, Missouri-accented, high-speed, low-volume drawl into something at least partially intelligible to my Japanese colleagues. It required a lot of effort and still sounds strange out of context. If I spoke to my father the same way, he'd laugh at me.

As an American, I think it would be really helpful if part of our education included speaking (and listening to) English as it is spoken by non-natives. We should have to practice listening to and understanding various common accents (South Asian, Chinese, Nigerian, etc), practice making ourselves understood, and learn how to graciously ask for (or give) re-phrasing or clarification.

Offer three days ago for people to improve their accent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304783

(I'm not affiliated.)

I don't know about US English but I know how to speak "TV English" perfectly however when I came to the UK I had a hard time adjusting to the different accents around London for a couple of months.

Scottish, Irish or just about every accent out there sound like weird sounds the first time you hear them and you actually have to focus hard to figure out what the fk that person just said.

Written English may be the same everywhere but spoken English varies greatly from region to region.

This sentence is so true "My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language."

When I'm in doubt about pronunciation, " $ echo complicatedword | festival --tts ". Not the best solution in the world but it helps a lot.

Heh, I grew up speaking English and still had that problem just because my reading vocabulary surpassed the vocabulary in usage in the country where I was.

I'm 23 and a native Australian English speaker and I still run into this problem for the same reason.

I have the same problem. I've learnt English from programming manuals and old CRPG games pronouncing words in my mind like it was Polish (it has regular phonetics too). It's very hard to undo the damage now.

I watch a lot of English movies without subtitles, so I can understand (at least American English), but I'm afraid of speaking, and I have troubles with pronouncing even basic words.

This, pretty much. "Cancel" is always going to stay [kuh-ntseh-l], "OK" [oh-k] and "Delete" [deh-leh-t].

My mother tongue is russian.

At childhood I was astonished by spelling scene in translated american film:

  - Как пишется "кот" # How to spell cat?
  - К О Т # C A T

It's quite a dumb question on russian. There is no difference between spelling and pronunciation. Yet repeating word character by character shown as a mark of intelligence.

Later on I've learned english by reading. Direct mapping to known phonemes gives very rough accent. To change it one has to be aware: things are not as they seem. Reading hidden language helps a lot:

  $ curl http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html | htmlfmt | espeak --ipa -q
  dˈiəɹəst kɹˈiːtʃəɹ ɪn kɹiːˈeɪʃən
  stˈʌdɪ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ pɹənˌʌnsɪˈeɪʃən
  aɪ wɪl tˈiːtʃ juː ɪn maɪ vˈɜːs
  sˈaʊndz lˈaɪk kˈɔːps
  kˈɔː
  hˈɔːs
  and wˈɜːs
  aɪ wɪl kˈiːp juː
  sˈuːzɪ
  bˈɪzɪ
  mˌeɪk jɔː hˈɛd wɪð hˈiːt ɡɹˈəʊ dˈɪzɪ
  tˈiəɹ ɪn ˈaɪ
  jɔː dɹˈɛs wɪl tˈeə
  sˌəʊ ʃˌal ˈaɪ
  ˈəʊ hˈiə maɪ pɹˈeə

Привед, а как пишется "код"?

(Spoiler: "код" (code) is pronounced the same as "кот" (cat) but spelled differently.)

Another opinion here. I've had to learn Russian and the pronunciation was presented easy only at the beginning. Russian has:

- Diacritics that do not usually appear in the broad case writing. One example that I happen to remember now is «ё», which most of the time is written only as a plain «е» (but is still pronounced differently).

- Broad range of similar pronounced letters, like the group «и, й, ь, ъ» (Ukrainian also adds «і» and «ї» to those), which becomes very complicated and even ambiguous when someone has to write on dictation. I still didn't get it to distinguish «ь» from «ъ» case other than just learning parrot-fashion how the words are written.

- Unregulated accents. There is no universal rule for which vowel receives the accent in a given word. You have to just remember the words. Learning to read the alphabet is not enough.

- Different pronunciation for the same letter. One example is «о» which is pronounced sometimes like "o̞" and other times like "ɐ", but there are lots of other cases. So try «Как пишется...» providing only phonetic transcription to a learning-Russian person and see what comes out.

Accents is not big problem in Russian - even with wrong accent other people will understand you in most cases, but it will sound a bit odd. In some cases in different regions (or even social groups) accent for same word will be different (and a few native speakers know which variant is officially proper).

Regarding the problems to pronounce words easily: These two poems resonate strongly with me and seem to be related to what the author describes:

1: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/08/30/ough/

2: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/19/o-u-g-h/

Yes, english between non-english speakers works quite well. Listening to UK english (especially accents. The TV series Misfits was funny not only because of the weird story..) is hard, following people from the US is easier but still full of traps.

I'm confident that I have a huge number of 'english' words in my vocabulary that I never pronounced right (only read them, trying to pronounce them by guessing. See the poems..) in my whole life.

Why would anyone even think about learning 'British' English instead of 'US' English? We Brits do talk a tad funny at times.

Indeed, the OP mentions that US English is somewhat easier to follow and that's what we should be listening to, the Brits are just a distraction.

The key is that I think it's important to know the language in which most publication is done. Which for IT issues is currently US English. So more ABC and less BBC is my advice.

This book by John Honey from 1997 is an interesting read on the subject but it's a long time since I read it so might be a little dated now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Power-Professor-John-Honey/...

I think this is especially true for native speakers of languages derived from latin. Why ? Because in classical latin to pronounce a word you just pronounce every letter in the standard way. So you tend to associate the written word strongly with the way it is spoken. However in the real world languages are spoken first, and the way words are written only follows later (or does not always, which can cause a whole lot of problems, like in French).

Now I don't know about Italian, but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.

Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)

This phonetic simplicity is there in (modern forms of)Indic languages. You can look at, say, a Hindi word you've never seen before and pronounce it if you know how to pronounce the individual letters/joint letters.

> Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)

100%

> but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.

That's true but French is kind on an exception among latin languages, it is a phonetically complex language compared to Italian or Spanish.

Yeah. Spanish does have regional phonetic differences, but they don't tend to be hard to understand. Vocabulary is much more likely to cause misunderstanding.

To be honest, as a native French speaker I find it sometimes very hard to understand the French spoken by people from African countries. The same is true for deep countryside French accents, who tend to pronunciation words with different phonemes. (Such as trilled R's)

So what can we do?

As a native English speaker, I freely admit that our spelling is horrible and our grammar has some sharp edges. Furthermore I freely admit that it's unfair that the burden of making communication work lies so heavily on others and so lightly on people like me.

I could try to learn Italian, but even if a third of English-speakers did, it wouldn't really change Antirez's situation, much less that of his Chinese analogues.

I could try to write more phonetically, but at a cost of ease-of-reading for existing English speakers. And an uncoordinated effort would only produce chaos. Perhaps PG would care to serve as a schelling point?

I could try to learn to understand thick accents better. I don't know where to start. Likewise I could try to learn to read foreign-grammared English better. I actually think I'm pretty good at that.

Simply try to avoid this: "Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light."

Its worth noting though that the grammar is a piece of piss. It works well as an international language because its easy to learn yet hard to master.

(for the record, I'm trying to learn Icelandic and that language has crazy rules)

If anything we just need to be cautious of judging people who don't have native-level English.

Not quite the main point of the article, but this stuck with me: "I don't know most of the words needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example"

I grew up in the Soviet Union; I learned the names of trees, and birds from my grandma, and the names of tools in a shop from my dad. We emigrated to New York; It's been 20 years; I am fluent, I speak with a slight accent, but no one ever claims they can't understand me; yet, only now, barely, have I started to learn things like names of birds, trees and tools. I, of course, don't mean the basic ones like "owl" or "pigeon", or "wrench" and "screwdriver", but things that are slightly more obscure like "bluejay" or "vicegrip" eluded me for a long time.

"Introvert or extrovert": this is a huge deal when learning and living among foreign speakers. I went through this when I moved to Turkey and I called it an "Identity Crisis", the way other people perceive you is totally different than what you are used to.

Interesting point between English and Italian - when I was diagnosed with dyslexia the specialist at great ormand street commented that if was an Italian I would have had much less trouble with writing and grammar as Italian is a very regular language compered to English

PG has been off his game in this discussion. It is important to be fluent both in understanding and in communicating, both in English and in techspeak. I threw together http://www.strategicmessaging.com/fluency/2013/08/30/ to spell that out, and it's the first time ever I've just banged out a post that much improved on what Paul Graham wrote.

antirez adds to the discussion further, by pointing out that there are various different kinds of language fluency. Excellent observations.

>So starting from 1998 I slowly learned to fluently read English without making more efforts compared to reading something written in Italian. I even learned to write at the same speed I wrote stuff in Italian, even if I hit a local minima in this regard, as you can see reading this post: basically I learned to write very fast a broken subset of English, that is usually enough to express my thoughts in the field of programming, but it is not good enough to write about general topics. I don't know most of the words needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example, or the grammar constructs needed to formulate complex sentences, hypothetical structures, and so forth.

Well, have you tried to properly study English, as in, with a teacher and a course book? From your description I understand that you merely tried to casually pick up English.

If so, it's not particularly fair to assess the difficulty of English compared to your own language (that, besides, being your native language, you were taught it's grammar and syntax for years on end at school).

I've studied English for several years and have no trouble speaking or reading it -- despite not having had many opportunities to speak it with native english speakers until much later in my life. Reading a lot of books/magazines/etc helps a lot. Reading for like 1-2 hours per day.

I found out I could pick a specialized subject I was interested in, like, say, electronic music production, and just by reading the magazines (Future Music, Electronic Musician, Keyboard etc) for a couple of years I could go from a total newbie to understanding all the specialized vocabulary used (from simple stuff, like "knob", "fader" and "slider" to "dither", "LFO", "frequency cutoff" etc).

Watching movies and tv series without subtitles also helps tremendously. In Italy this is even worse, because they don't just add subtitles, they usually dub the whole thing with Italian actors (ugh).

(OTOH, ho studiato Italiano per tre anni, in un gruppo picolo, e questo e tutto che lo ricordo, ho dimenticato quasi tutti gli parole e la majorita de la "syntax" e gli tempi -- damn, that got bad quickly)

So, for most people the most efficient learning aid is to spend a few years abroad. A teacher helps, but you need to talk with and listen to lots and lots of different people. There is no way you'll become fluent in a foreign language without spending time there, talking with people for multiple hours a day. Get a job abroad, and you'll get better quickly.

> Watching movies and tv series without subtitles also helps tremendously. In Italy this is even worse, because they don't just add subtitles, they usually dub the whole thing with Italian actors

Except that if you hear a word in italian you can look it up easily because it's written the way it's spoken. On the other hand, I still have a very hard time looking up a word I head in English.

Hi coldtea, I tried to study English more formally, to start at high school, but the level of English teaching is not great in Italian schools most of the times. I tried it again from time to time, but now the barrier is the free time. With a busy work and a family it really is not an option for me to spend another one/two hours to watch films and/or study English... probably a simpler approach could be to travel more, and instead of refusing all the invitations I get for confs, to attend more events where there are many English speakers. Your italian is still understandable :-)

I'm more intrigued about his statement "in 10 years I'll likely no longer write code professionally".

I wonder if it's a personal choice, or if he thinks that there is age limit for the profession.

It could mean a number of things.

* He expects eventually to burn out, a risk for any programmer.

* He expects to write a best-seller and retire young.

* He expects to eventually no longer be able to keep up with changes in the software business.

* All of the above. :)

I hope antirez never stops coding to move into management. I first came to know him during the Engine Yard Hamming Distance contest (2009). I've read and followed his work ever since.

I'm a native English speaker, but I sometimes have a problem with pronouncing words that I've read but either not heard spoken, or heard but didn't realize it was the same word. I'll make up a pronunciation in my head and then use that in conversation and confuse whoever I'm talking to.

My wife catches me saying a new one every month or two, and she thinks its hilarious (but she also helps me pronounce it correctly, so I can't complain too much.)

Last time I expressed my thoughts[1] here about the same thing I was brutally word-raped by the angriest people on earth, now everyone is saying what I was saying all along and it's all well and good.

You need to know English: put in the effort, watch a shitload of movies and read even more books. That's it, you can't just ignore it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371

> You need to know English

No, you really don't. You only need to know English if you're selling to English speaking people. You'll probably need to learn English for a number of professions. But apart from that you can live and work perfectly well without using English at all.

English isn't the main language on the Internet any more, it is just one of them. The fact that you happen to think that English is the major language used on the Internet is possibly just a vicious self-reinforcing cognitive bias.

It's not about the language of the internet, it's about the language in which the most influential books and papers are written. If you can't read ACM papers or IEEE specifications you're at a disadvantage whether or not you're selling to English speakers. If I were to build a car and the best resources were written in Japanese I'd be at a disadvantage even if I was working for, say, a Swedish outfit.

Since most researchers relocate in the states and subsequently publish their findings in English there's no doubt that the best sources of knowledge are written in English.

You should have tried expressing your thoughts while being Paul Graham.

Yeah, maybe :P

You belittled those who don't speak English as lazy schmucks. This is an offensive, narrow minded viewpoint. Not surprisingly, others reacted strongly.

Willingness to learn a new skill is a requisite for any kind of skilled work. If that skill is a new language or a way to master your craft doesn't matter, what matters is that there's no excuse for avoiding work needed for you to make the best out of your time.

You are assuming everyone has the same goals, context, and motivations for doing things as you do. The answer for how best to live one's life is still very much an open problem.

Edit: Even more so, ignoring the problematic assumptions laid out above, others have stated elegantly that if efficiency, etc was your true goal, then we should focus on learning the most effective and efficient language, not simply the most widely used (currently English)

Does anyone know of software that does speech to IPA (or any phonetic representation)?

If such a thing exist then it should be possible to write a program which compares the users pronunciation to the official one and gives tips and exercises on getting closer to the proper way of speaking. I can see some difficulties with differences depending on the speakers native language and the target language.

What do you think?

I'm good reading and listening English but when it comes to talk with somebody it feels like I forget it all I have to think twice before talking and I my pronunciation sucks I've been practicing that .. if there are good sources for improving this please share it , I'm currently using livemocha but I already lost interest on it, I also recommend listening to podcasts.

> My long term hope is that soon or later different accents could converge into a standard easy-to-understand one that the English speaking population could use as a lingua franca.

I'm puzzled by this comment. The generic midwest accent that most people on television use would seem like a good, obvious candidate. Even newscasters in Europe seem to target this when using English.

I read a lot of technical docs in English, and watch a lot of movies without subtitles to force my brain to catch the words, it worked pretty well so far.

I'm starting to read non-tech literature, is another league but I like it, is cool reading a book in its original language. (Robinson Crusoe right now..)

Another hopefully interesting discussion on another HN thread here (Accents, English, Arrogance, Success): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316826

(disclaimer: I am the author of the original article)

That's the reason they've invented Lojban, a logical language, which is way easier to learn than those natural languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

I wonder if using a screen reader for the blind, with the language set to English, would help non-native speakers learn pronunciation. For example, use VoiceOver on OS X (enabled by pressing Command+F5) to read blogs, HN, etc.

In Belgium you often need 3 languages to operate (depending on the company location, and how big the company is): Dutch, English and French...

Paul Graham talks about the "founders", not of the whole "IT workers" community.

English is the QWERTY of languages.

Could be worse. Like say German. der/die/das would cause many suicides.

besides, I feel that I'm wasting too much time. I know that is important, but still, it is just a tool. Not even a challenging one. It's just a boring tool to learn.

English would appear to be the Javascript of spoken languages.

Listen to audio books. Problem solved.

While pg's comment may have seemed insensitive to some, it has helped bring to light some of the anxieties that foreign-born founders may themselves have (for instance, about the way the local culture they're founding a company in will perceive them due to their accent, not forgetting their ability to communicate anyway).

Posts like this one are a sign that cultural phenomena such as this will be more visible, and won't just disappear into the detritus of forgotten blogs. Do some foreign-born founders struggle with their accents? Yes. Is a strong accent a barrier to communication? Quite likely, yes. Is it worth it for a founder to do what it takes to communicate her message exactly, and nothing else? Absolutely.

Shouldn't the goal be to either: 1) become excellent communicators, or to 2) find excellent communicators, and get them on "our" team?

Now we can focus on, with our characteristic laser-like ability, and talk about why accents may hold somebody back, as a community, and how we can help people succeed anyway.

Some ideas: - Schools to help founders communicate better? - An additional service within accelerator programs to help founders with strong accents become effective anyway? (Maybe YC could just take this and run with it)

Solve that problem and move on to the next one. Isn't that The Rule?

Let me take the opportunity to focus on what, imho, started this whole controversy. While I consider pg's position to be valid, he should probably have explained it better, through his usual channel of the essay form, before talking about it in the media, where his words were much more likely to be taken out of context. He didn't, they were, and we're left picking up the media-transformed pieces of what would have been an otherwise instructive take on what might hold some foreign-born startup founders back. pg seems to have forgotten why he writes essays (explore ideas as fully as possible, while leaving room for improvement), and now he has to pay for that mistake with a (possibly -- I have no way of knowing if he'd prepared an article about this) quickly written piece of damage control, published in the middle of a frenzy of accusations and hurt feelings. The "Founders' Accents" essay is weaker than it would have been if he'd written it before he did the inc.com interview, as the interviewer would have had a more self-contained source to reference, counter-arguments and all.[0]

I must conclude, therefore, that his comment may have done more harm, in the short-term, than good. It remains to be seen whether we can turn this around for the good of all.

We should remember, though, that we're in this together, and pg is not the only one who has a responsibility to make sure the people that matter don't miss out on opportunities because of something that can be fixed. Which is not to say that its trivial. Fifteen years is a long time.

[0] For one, I don't think the discussion surrounding it would have devolved into accusations of racism, though that probably says more about my view of people than about pg's detractors in this case.

English is to spoken languages what Javascript is to coding.

Some simplifications were made by Noah Webster.

Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions". This meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language. Slowly, edition by edition, Webster changed the spelling of words, making them "Americanized". He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, and he dropped one of the Ls in traveler. At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung"—an innovation that never caught on.

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

Webster's choice of modifications has always puzzled me: he picked on perfectly harmless words like "defence" (but not it's cognate "fence") and that you'd struggle to mispronounce or misspell whilst leaving abominations like "Wednesday" alone, and reverting some of his better changes like "wimmen"

That said I think English would be much more useful as an auxiliary second language if someone as bold as Webster was willing to actively promote a distinctive "International English" with a more consistent orthography (I quite like Valerie Yule's, but even fixing though/through/tough/cough/bough would be a start)

We need a standard technical document describing a subset of the natural language English, which is suitable for increasing clarity of technical documentation and discussion. Maybe evolve it like we do so many software projects(in a revision control mechanism, with an issue tracker).

I know somebody is going to say “But there's ASD-STE100!”, unfortunately ASD-STE100 is a closed standard, and it's not even exactly clear how one might get a copy(without working for a DoD contractor or some similar).