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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

Your English is excellent. It's sad that a single non-idiomatically phrased sentence can "blow" your cover though, e.g. "some few words", that gave it away instantly.

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Hey, thanks. Yeah, being able to recognise non-native speakers (based on accents and non-idiomatic sentences) is apparently a significant evolutionary advantage. I remember reading most people can identify a person speaking in a foreign accent within 80ms. That's pretty impressive!

I'm currently trying to actively get rid of my accent. I've been asked a few times whether I'm actually British, and pretty much nobody can actually guess where I'm from.

I always hated it when I was learning German when people would point out that I'd said something silly but not tell me the "right" way to do it.

In that spirit, as a native speaker: "...from the context and the few words I recognised." would work just fine.

That's english for you. When the peasants are revolting, its very different from when the food is revolting...

Yep, thanks. Getting a basic handle on English is not too hard, because of the lack of gender pronouns and a few other things, but masquerading as a native speaker is exponentially harder :)

I think "a few words" is probably just slightly nearer the intended meaning than "the few words".

How long have you been living in Britain, for people to think you're British from your accent?

I started pretty much the same way, trying to make sense of C++ and VB manuals when I was young and I think I have pretty good reading and writing skills now, although a native speaker can notice English is not my primary language.

Spoken English is still an obstacle for me, I moved to London a year ago, I got a pretty good pronunciation, but I still find it much harder to convey my thoughts, compared to writing them. And I'm trying hard to lose my Italian accent, luckily it's not as pronounced as the stereotypical one.

Though I have to admit I've never been a good speaker, not even in my native language.

About a year now. My spoken English was pretty rough back then, but I started copying the sounds I heard when other people spoke, and it seems to have helped.

Yeah, it's a lot harder to convey thoughts by speech in a foreign language, and I think it's because you have to make a conscious effort to find the right words or expressions. It's like getting data from RAM (foreign language) or from the L1 cache (native). It gets better though, with practice.

I would guess you aren't thinking in the language in question. You are translating your native language sentence into the appropriate english sentence on the fly. To use a programming analogy, it is like writing Haskell code as if it was C. Because you aren't thinking functionally, for every imperative step the C code in your head takes you have to translate it to some sort of functional analog.

You can get through it, but it is slower, and looks "funny" to a "native".

I am curious. What exactly is wrong with "some few words"? In german it would make total sense.

It's just not common in an idiomatic way, really. Technically, it is 'incorrect' because 'few' is the object of the sentence, not 'words'.

But there are plenty of examples of phrases in English which are acceptable but which break grammar rules.

In short, you would say "a few words".

In Spanish you should also say "unas pocas palabras" (perhaps jdiez is an Spanish name). The adjective of Google perhaps should be in lowercase. Remember perhaps should be recall. As I almost never speak English I (don't have the opportunity or the like of it) I find it very difficult I will ever grok English, but that is my ever unsatisfied greater aspiration (aside from getting a bigger salary and other pleasures for a young male man).

I'm not sure if it is "wrong," per se, but not idiomatic. Here (in the midwestern part of the US, at least) you would pick one or the other, so "some words" or "a few words."

You can't say "some few". Either are fine, but not together.

It makes sense to me, but I'm not a native speaker either so I don't know if there's an actual rule behind this.

Sometimes you use few with a countable name. Some is for not countable. A few friends means that you know perfectly how many friends you have, if you have some friends the number of friends you have is subject to a great uncertainty from 1 to infinity. So some few is saying you have few but are uncertain or don't want to say how many, but that is not very rational. Why this reasoning? Because it can help you to avoid repeating the same error (or unidiomatic expression). The simple fact of analyzing any mistake it a way of becoming vaccinated against it.

It's probably ok. Just not extremely common.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/some-fe...

As a note, while, as others have mentioned, it's non-idiomatic, and dropped in casual speech would come across as a trifle awkward, it -can- be made tenable in sufficiently florid prose that is clearly intended to be delivered verbally.

That is, while "some few" is ungainly, pausing and delivering it as though 'few' is reinforcing or clarifying 'some' (through a change in tone or similar) would sound a little archaic, perhaps, but completely natural.

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