Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy.
Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on.
Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont read but just listen, and automatically learn to understand English at home in front of the TV. By the time they get to study English at school, they already know how to speak it. English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that.
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0]
The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform).
From Italy here, can confirm. It is more than accent tho: has something to do by not being exposed to the full spectrum of sound the humans can produce.
We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it.
Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif
Not sure it's down to the size of the country. More likely, it's the size of the community speaking the language, and the closeness of the language to English, together with some other factors.
During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English.
So why the difference?
Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different.
Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English.
Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French.
Not many tourists go to Liège.
Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.
If you look at the countries in Europe that are good at speaking English it's actually two big factors you see:
- The consumption of English media you mentioned
- Other Germanic languages. Even though English has moved away quite far from the other Germanic languages, there's still quite some Germanic heritage in for instance in how to generally express yourself. The problems arise when things are actually different. Swedes for instance often have a problem pronouncing the /tʃ/ sound and pronounce chip like ship. But for speakers of Germanic languages the problems are fewer.
For some reason, I thought every country subtitles movies/tv-shows that are not produced in their own language.
When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.
> Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on.
Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.
I'm From Portugal and can confirm this, and I'd say almost everyone especially people between 12-45 know how to speak english fluently.
Most of this is because we grow up watching movies and tv shows with subtitles. Heck, I even remember watching Cartoon Network without any subtitles at all.
Another thing I noticed is how good the english accent is from people from Portugal and Sweden.
Dubbing / subtitling isn't everything, although it certainly helps. According to the theories of language acquisition, it is processing of linguistic input (connecting form to meaning to be able to understand the meaning) that makes the internal, unconscious representation of language to develop.
Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot.
(Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.)
I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.
Sounds plausible unless you happen to know that children's programmes are dubbed, at least they are in Norway and as far as I know in the rest of the Nordic area.
As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian.
English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little etymology you can figure out a lot because when you know where the word comes from you can then find out what set of rules are to be used for it. I'll admit that there are still difficult words :-)
You make it sound too easy. You don't "automatically" learn a language by hearing its sounds on TV (although it most likely helps). You need to engage with a language, preferably by real life interaction. Not dubbing movies is not a silver bullet to second language learning.
I think it's much more plausible to say that the smaller countries of Europe have more of a economic necessity to be proficient in a second language (which often happens to be English).
Spelling English is a pain. Can modern text reduce this pain? How can you see the sound in text?
Written and spoken English can sync CAPS in sylLABles while vocaliIZED. http://th.ai youtube CCaptions=ON, text=monospace, see syllables precisely while you hear them, playback SLOW.
In theory, constant experience of SYNCHronous vocALized TEXT will help you spell better faster.
That's exactly how I learned English when I was young, although most of my classmates didn't. Maybe those suckers actually spent time studying instead of watching cartoons!
No, kids don’t really start school pre-equipped with English skills. In fact, most preschooler shows are dubbed.
The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled.
Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).
As an Englishman living and working in Paris for a few years, my eyes have been opened to the difficulty of working in another language. I used to be a little bit dismissive of foreigners who hadn't completely mastered English but now I realise that they were almost fluent. On the other hand, I haven't really managed to master French at all.
His observation about becoming introverted in a foreign language is something that I experience too. Something that he didn't mention though is that often people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language fluently, this is made even worse since you are indeed dedicating 80% of your brain just to following the conversation, so that in a sense they are correct in their judgement at that moment in time. It's painful to be on the receiving end of this and again this is something that I was unconsciously guilty of when I lived in London.
We just need to occasionally remind ourselves when the other person is not speaking in their native language that they are having to do a lot of extra work just to communicate with us.
Oh, I like you mentioned that. It reminded me of a quote I'd read recently and which I'd liked. Here it is:
"For me, the hardest thing about functioning in a foreign language was not the long hours it took me to get through a text, not the heightened anxiety, accompanying every social interaction, but the sense of reduced personality that comes with limited verbal expression. For someone who prided herself on writing music criticism for one of the largest Russian newspapers Vedomosti, a branch of The Financial Times, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Even though I communicated perfectly fine, I missed being able to say more with less, to say the same thing in several ways, to express character, not only literal sense. What came out of my mouth felt crude, stiff, and trite."
Great to see you move your viewpoint on such a thing based on personal experience. I think the world as a whole would be a lot better if we all spent considerably more time in places other than those that we were born in.
> people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language fluently
Yep, and this is an unconscious process, as well. If someone doesn't speak any of the languages I know, I find myself thinking "wow they're stupid" even if they're the sage of the mountain, and I hate my brain for it.
As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across).
I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like Italian, has a very simple set of rules for pronouncing words. But even so, clearly different groups of people have different ideas about how these words should be interpreted (not to mention just straight up dropping syllables).
I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. Yeah we have lots of whacky accents and exceptions to pronunciation rules, but if a language is spoken by huge swaths of people across the world there's going to be a lot of variety.
English does not have a simple set of rules for pronunciation or dictation. Spelling bees don't exist for most languages, but it's a thing for English.
So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually difficult language in this respect.
Understanding different accents of spoken English is sort of beside the point, I think.
> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.
ough:
Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up)
Spanish here. One of biggest differences is that spanish vowels always sound the same, that's why spelling contests aren't a thing here. It's pretty confusing at first, until you embrace the fact that there aren't shortcuts: you hear the word or you don't actually know how to pronounce it.
by "phonetically broken" I think he means that there is not enough consistency regarding what you write and what you pronounce. I give you some examples: door and tool. The same two letters 'oo' are pronounced differently. 'en' in 'broken' and 'en' in 'enough'. I suspect Italian, Romanian and Spanish inherited some consistency from Latin where AFAIK 'a' is pronounced the same everywhere and even in combination with other letters it's still very predictable and the same is valid for nearly all the vowels and consonants. I don't know Portuguese but French is definitely "broken" too ('o' = 'au' = 'eau' = 'aux' = holly cow !)
Actually English has a defective phonemic orthography system [0] that makes mastering the language an unpleasant and daunting experience esp. for beginners. In a nutshell, English language is high-maintenance.
In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible).
In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.
You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.
I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.
Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.
Another Italian checking in, agreeing with everything Antirez says. I've been living in England for 13 years, but talking to inner-city-ghetto youth to order a mcburger can still be a hellish experience.
English is the QWERTY of languages: historically messed up for reasons that don't matter anymore, but an imprescindible standard enjoying unmatched global popularity. It's simple enough to allow non-natives to achieve good productivity very quickly, but mastering it phonetically is harder than in most other languages. This complexity means that it's constantly getting stretched by people with limited formal education, and effectively enforces class separation.
Anyway, I'll never forget when I started studying it and realized that words I was familiar with because of gaming experience (LOAD, FOR, NETWORK etc) were actual everyday words that programmers simply borrowed. Suddenly, coding made so much sense! To this day I value language clarity so much, I prefer Python to everything else ;)
As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often treat me as if I am retarded.
I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.
> There is just one problem, it has nothing to do with the real English spoken in UK, US, Canada, and other countries where English is a native language.
"Real" English is a bit of a misnomer. There's really no such thing. English has developed, over time, from a mix of various other languages (French, German, Anglo-Saxon, Norse), and also split several times throughout its history, developing dialects that have different points of divergence from 'UK' English.
For instance, I speak Canadian English, which is very much 'textbook' English that would probably be equivalent to a 1930's or 1940's style of British English plus a few Americanisms, and one or two native quirks.
My wife speaks Caribbean creole (as well as more 'proper' English now), but also learned an earlier version of British English, which leads to some hilarious misunderstandings (she knows lots of archaic words, doesn't understand some of the more modern, technical words, and of course Caribbean creole adds all sorts of words, grammar, and pronunciations).
I also speak French, which in many ways is easier - more consistent spellings/pronunciation, grammar, but can be difficult at times because there are so many French words in English, but we change the meaning of many of them. There's also English words that have no direct equivalent in French, and vice versa. You need to 'think' differently to speak each. Plus, as French modernizes, it adds more and more Anglicisms, French people cheat on grammar all the time, and of course slang evolves rather quickly.
Anyhow, while English is a pain due to its history, I think as the world becomes more and more cosmopolitan, these 'quirks' just get absorbed into the language, and aren't really a problem. After all, there was a point when the language of nobility in England was French, that changed, likewise the notion that 'proper' English is the only real English will change over time too.
> One of the things that shocked me the most with my experience with the English language is how not mastering a language can switch you into an introvert.
Too real. I've spent some time in Italy where, due to my broken Italian, I was very much so an introvert. People noticed it too when Americans would come by and I'd talk to them - they said I "became a different person."
Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me:
Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton.
I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the differences in pronunciation: there are also vocabulary differences.
If it's any consolation, I understand that North Americans find Glaswegian quite challenging, especially when watching "Trainspotting" (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4).
I sympathize, because I occasionally try to pair program in French, and yeah, it can be a struggle—and French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the silent letters.
But if you're having trouble with listening comprehension, there's a fairly rapid way to improve that seems to work for many people: Watch lots of TV. A couple of years ago, I started buying DVD box sets in French, and just watching entire series straight through (both native French series, and dubbed US ones). My comprehension still isn't 100%, but it got a lot better, and I was pleasantly surprised when I started understanding a lot more people in Montréal, who tend to have strong accents related to European French speakers.
As a general rule of thumb, to improve a specific language skill (reading, listening, speaking), you're going to have to actually do a bunch of it. European programmers read a ton of English, so they can usually read it just fine. But unless your country shows a lot of subtitled US television, you're going to have much weaker listening skills.
Being an academic, I often hang out with people of various nationalities, usually each with it's own english-based language, slightly modified by grammar quirks and foreign vocabulary. A linguist friend call that "international english", which I like quite a lot. After a while, you can play "guess the nationality" based on the grammar quirks.
And everyone is still easier to understand than Scottish people. :)
I got lucky in that I learned english not only by reading, but also by watching a lot of series (both american and british). Watching english series with english subtitles was a huge help for me, and I think it's a decent way to learn nowadays, much more effective than english classes.
> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it.
My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language.
Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it.
I am also learning English, don't know whether my suggestions or corrections are appropriate.
Also, sometimes I watch a TV series in which police is trying to solve a 50 years old closed case. What I find interesting is how sad the life of that people are, never a joke, sharp sound, short sentences, never a smile. Perhaps, it is a mirror of a society. In Spain the eyes of people are full of life, the doom is outside of our frontiers (or so I think).
"I'm still not great at English but I surely improved over 15 years": => (I have surely improved) or: I haven't mastered English yet, but I am sure I have improved a lot in the last 15 years.
Without to mention how trivial is to go back in the learning process as long as you stop talking / listening for a couple of weeks… => To top it all, if you stop talking/listening for a couple of weeks you begin going backward in the learning process.
My long term hope is that soon or later => My long term hope is that sooner or later.
Another reason I find myself. => Another reason why I find myself.
NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound. => (how it sounds)
I can related with the OP. I guess most non-native English speakers can.
> Before 1950, when the "TV Language Unification" happened, everybody was still taking with their dialects and italian was only mastered by a small percentage of people. Sicilian itself, the language talked the most by my family, predates Italian by centuries.
For a hands-on example about what he is talking about, those of you who learned Italian try to understand what this song[1] says, without actually studying the lyrics. It's an awesome Sicilian tune by an ethnic group Messinese[2] group called Kunsertu (concert).
I can relate to this despite being a native English speaker from the UK. I misspent my childhood in IRC and messing around with dozens of UNIX machines.
I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in conversation, people have no idea what I am talking about, I have only ever been exposed to them via text. I realised that I have never heard people say them before. This was probably not helped by the fact that I prefer an essay to a videoed talk any day.
I like the idea of Globish, though I have to admit both that I have not studied it, and, as a native English speaker, my enthusiasm is somewhat self-serving.
John McWhorter's 'magnificent bastard tongue' has many quirks to trip up anyone learning it as an adult, and which could be simplified without making the language unintelligible to those who already speak it.
One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got an apple" instead of just "I have an apple". I live in the US now and have never heard that and also don't recall ever having heard that in the UK either. What's up with that? Sounded like BS even to my fifth grade self who knew nothing about English.
One of the great benefits of the Hacker News community compared to most online communities is that Hacker News is truly international. We are blessed here with comments by participants from all over the world, many of whom did not grow up speaking English. But English is the common language (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, as the Greeks would say) here, so learning English is an interest of many Hacker News participants.
I had to learn Chinese up to a high level of proficiency as I studied Chinese as a major subject at university, lived for three years in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and then worked for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter all over the United States. I'll try to share here some information that helped me learn Chinese as a second language after starting out as a native speaker of English, in hopes that it will help readers here learn English better.
Any two languages, even closely related languages like Spanish and Italian or standard Thai and standard Lao (and, for that matter, different regional dialects of English or of Italian) differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.[1]
But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in phonetics. Disregarding sound distinctions that don't matter in one's own language is part of having a native language (or native languages). You can't imitate what you can't even perceive, so learning to perceive the sound distinctions in the language to be learned is the crucial first step in learning a second language.[2]
For most people it is brutally hard (especially after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to notice sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is extraordinarily hard when the sound distinction marks a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. To give an example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and in Mandarin Chinese there are no such consonant clusters at the ends of syllables at all. Even worse for a Chinese person learning English, Chinese has no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs, so it is difficult for Chinese-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).
If software authors who write foreign-language-learning software simply included information about the sound system of the language to be learned, such as a full chart of the phonemes in that language, with descriptions of the sounds in the standard terminology of articulatory phonetics,[3] that would be a big help to language learners. Even better would be for all language-learning materials to teach the notations needed from the International Phonetic Alphabet[4] for each language to be learned.
Language-learning books, sound recordings, and software always need to include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the language to be learned. No software program for language learning should lack pronunciation drills and listening drills like that. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That's a hard problem that needs more work.
Even before learners think about learning pronunciation, they think about learning vocabulary. But the vocabulary lessons in many language-learning materials are very poorly focused and ineffective.
The typical software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. The map is not the territory, and words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. Every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.
The best way to learn vocabulary in a second language is day-by-day steady exposure to actual texts (recorded conversations, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, and so on) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. The late John DeFrancis was a master teacher of Chinese, so I'll quote him on this point here. In the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, DeFrancis writes, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.
I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,
and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.
The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language.[5] It is well worth your time to make formal study of the grammar of your native language and of the language you are trying to learn, especially in materials for foreign learners.
I enjoy watching foreign movies with subtitles, and then trying to learn a few words in the language that way. I watched a French movie a few days ago that way, and was surprised at how many French words I already knew.
I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles.
[+] [-] petke|10 years ago|reply
Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on.
Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont read but just listen, and automatically learn to understand English at home in front of the TV. By the time they get to study English at school, they already know how to speak it. English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that.
[+] [-] xixixao|10 years ago|reply
The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|10 years ago|reply
We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it.
Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif
but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable
[+] [-] DonaldFisk|10 years ago|reply
During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English.
So why the difference?
Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different.
Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English.
Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French.
Not many tourists go to Liège.
Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
- The consumption of English media you mentioned
- Other Germanic languages. Even though English has moved away quite far from the other Germanic languages, there's still quite some Germanic heritage in for instance in how to generally express yourself. The problems arise when things are actually different. Swedes for instance often have a problem pronouncing the /tʃ/ sound and pronounce chip like ship. But for speakers of Germanic languages the problems are fewer.
[+] [-] angry-hacker|10 years ago|reply
When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|10 years ago|reply
You're in good company since many native speakers can't spell either. English's greatest virtue is a high degree of fault tolerance.
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|10 years ago|reply
Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.
[+] [-] phatbyte|10 years ago|reply
Most of this is because we grow up watching movies and tv shows with subtitles. Heck, I even remember watching Cartoon Network without any subtitles at all.
Another thing I noticed is how good the english accent is from people from Portugal and Sweden.
[+] [-] farmdve|10 years ago|reply
But like you said, it's not 100% perfect, nor is it even 80%, neither orally nor in writing.
[+] [-] GolDDranks|10 years ago|reply
Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot.
(Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.)
I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|10 years ago|reply
As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian.
English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little etymology you can figure out a lot because when you know where the word comes from you can then find out what set of rules are to be used for it. I'll admit that there are still difficult words :-)
[+] [-] andreasvc|10 years ago|reply
I think it's much more plausible to say that the smaller countries of Europe have more of a economic necessity to be proficient in a second language (which often happens to be English).
[+] [-] th-ai|10 years ago|reply
Written and spoken English can sync CAPS in sylLABles while vocaliIZED. http://th.ai youtube CCaptions=ON, text=monospace, see syllables precisely while you hear them, playback SLOW.
In theory, constant experience of SYNCHronous vocALized TEXT will help you spell better faster.
[+] [-] ddorian43|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mariusc23|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rue|10 years ago|reply
The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled.
Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).
[+] [-] AlexeyBrin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] based2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robochat|10 years ago|reply
His observation about becoming introverted in a foreign language is something that I experience too. Something that he didn't mention though is that often people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language fluently, this is made even worse since you are indeed dedicating 80% of your brain just to following the conversation, so that in a sense they are correct in their judgement at that moment in time. It's painful to be on the receiving end of this and again this is something that I was unconsciously guilty of when I lived in London.
We just need to occasionally remind ourselves when the other person is not speaking in their native language that they are having to do a lot of extra work just to communicate with us.
[+] [-] wwwater|10 years ago|reply
"For me, the hardest thing about functioning in a foreign language was not the long hours it took me to get through a text, not the heightened anxiety, accompanying every social interaction, but the sense of reduced personality that comes with limited verbal expression. For someone who prided herself on writing music criticism for one of the largest Russian newspapers Vedomosti, a branch of The Financial Times, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Even though I communicated perfectly fine, I missed being able to say more with less, to say the same thing in several ways, to express character, not only literal sense. What came out of my mouth felt crude, stiff, and trite."
(from http://www.rma.ac.uk/students/?p=2646)
It is so true for me, this thing about reduced personality.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
Yep, and this is an unconscious process, as well. If someone doesn't speak any of the languages I know, I find myself thinking "wow they're stupid" even if they're the sage of the mountain, and I hate my brain for it.
[+] [-] cjsthompson|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xanderstrike|10 years ago|reply
I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like Italian, has a very simple set of rules for pronouncing words. But even so, clearly different groups of people have different ideas about how these words should be interpreted (not to mention just straight up dropping syllables).
I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. Yeah we have lots of whacky accents and exceptions to pronunciation rules, but if a language is spoken by huge swaths of people across the world there's going to be a lot of variety.
[+] [-] metafunctor|10 years ago|reply
So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually difficult language in this respect.
Understanding different accents of spoken English is sort of beside the point, I think.
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
ough:
Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up)
That's broken.
[+] [-] samuel|10 years ago|reply
See http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/04/spanish-vowels-vs-english-... for a comparison.
[+] [-] leaveyou|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gotchange|10 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography
[+] [-] Certhas|10 years ago|reply
In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.
You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.
http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html
[+] [-] gone35|10 years ago|reply
Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
[+] [-] toyg|10 years ago|reply
English is the QWERTY of languages: historically messed up for reasons that don't matter anymore, but an imprescindible standard enjoying unmatched global popularity. It's simple enough to allow non-natives to achieve good productivity very quickly, but mastering it phonetically is harder than in most other languages. This complexity means that it's constantly getting stretched by people with limited formal education, and effectively enforces class separation.
Anyway, I'll never forget when I started studying it and realized that words I was familiar with because of gaming experience (LOAD, FOR, NETWORK etc) were actual everyday words that programmers simply borrowed. Suddenly, coding made so much sense! To this day I value language clarity so much, I prefer Python to everything else ;)
[+] [-] kansface|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tailgate|10 years ago|reply
I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|10 years ago|reply
"Real" English is a bit of a misnomer. There's really no such thing. English has developed, over time, from a mix of various other languages (French, German, Anglo-Saxon, Norse), and also split several times throughout its history, developing dialects that have different points of divergence from 'UK' English.
For instance, I speak Canadian English, which is very much 'textbook' English that would probably be equivalent to a 1930's or 1940's style of British English plus a few Americanisms, and one or two native quirks.
My wife speaks Caribbean creole (as well as more 'proper' English now), but also learned an earlier version of British English, which leads to some hilarious misunderstandings (she knows lots of archaic words, doesn't understand some of the more modern, technical words, and of course Caribbean creole adds all sorts of words, grammar, and pronunciations).
I also speak French, which in many ways is easier - more consistent spellings/pronunciation, grammar, but can be difficult at times because there are so many French words in English, but we change the meaning of many of them. There's also English words that have no direct equivalent in French, and vice versa. You need to 'think' differently to speak each. Plus, as French modernizes, it adds more and more Anglicisms, French people cheat on grammar all the time, and of course slang evolves rather quickly.
Anyhow, while English is a pain due to its history, I think as the world becomes more and more cosmopolitan, these 'quirks' just get absorbed into the language, and aren't really a problem. After all, there was a point when the language of nobility in England was French, that changed, likewise the notion that 'proper' English is the only real English will change over time too.
[+] [-] shockzzz|10 years ago|reply
Too real. I've spent some time in Italy where, due to my broken Italian, I was very much so an introvert. People noticed it too when Americans would come by and I'd talk to them - they said I "became a different person."
[+] [-] bshimmin|10 years ago|reply
Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton.
I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the differences in pronunciation: there are also vocabulary differences.
If it's any consolation, I understand that North Americans find Glaswegian quite challenging, especially when watching "Trainspotting" (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4).
[+] [-] ekidd|10 years ago|reply
But if you're having trouble with listening comprehension, there's a fairly rapid way to improve that seems to work for many people: Watch lots of TV. A couple of years ago, I started buying DVD box sets in French, and just watching entire series straight through (both native French series, and dubbed US ones). My comprehension still isn't 100%, but it got a lot better, and I was pleasantly surprised when I started understanding a lot more people in Montréal, who tend to have strong accents related to European French speakers.
As a general rule of thumb, to improve a specific language skill (reading, listening, speaking), you're going to have to actually do a bunch of it. European programmers read a ton of English, so they can usually read it just fine. But unless your country shows a lot of subtitled US television, you're going to have much weaker listening skills.
[+] [-] Drup|10 years ago|reply
And everyone is still easier to understand than Scottish people. :)
I got lucky in that I learned english not only by reading, but also by watching a lot of series (both american and british). Watching english series with english subtitles was a huge help for me, and I think it's a decent way to learn nowadays, much more effective than english classes.
[+] [-] gamesbrainiac|10 years ago|reply
Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it.
[+] [-] lovboat|10 years ago|reply
Also, sometimes I watch a TV series in which police is trying to solve a 50 years old closed case. What I find interesting is how sad the life of that people are, never a joke, sharp sound, short sentences, never a smile. Perhaps, it is a mirror of a society. In Spain the eyes of people are full of life, the doom is outside of our frontiers (or so I think).
"I'm still not great at English but I surely improved over 15 years": => (I have surely improved) or: I haven't mastered English yet, but I am sure I have improved a lot in the last 15 years.
Without to mention how trivial is to go back in the learning process as long as you stop talking / listening for a couple of weeks… => To top it all, if you stop talking/listening for a couple of weeks you begin going backward in the learning process.
My long term hope is that soon or later => My long term hope is that sooner or later.
Another reason I find myself. => Another reason why I find myself.
NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound. => (how it sounds)
[+] [-] atmosx|10 years ago|reply
> Before 1950, when the "TV Language Unification" happened, everybody was still taking with their dialects and italian was only mastered by a small percentage of people. Sicilian itself, the language talked the most by my family, predates Italian by centuries.
For a hands-on example about what he is talking about, those of you who learned Italian try to understand what this song[1] says, without actually studying the lyrics. It's an awesome Sicilian tune by an ethnic group Messinese[2] group called Kunsertu (concert).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQSoTGwun4
[2] Messina is the port-city that gates the most beautiful island in the world: Sicily! :-)
[+] [-] tyho|10 years ago|reply
I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in conversation, people have no idea what I am talking about, I have only ever been exposed to them via text. I realised that I have never heard people say them before. This was probably not helped by the fact that I prefer an essay to a videoed talk any day.
[+] [-] kawera|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_(Nerriere)
John McWhorter's 'magnificent bastard tongue' has many quirks to trip up anyone learning it as an adult, and which could be simplified without making the language unintelligible to those who already speak it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3143472-our-magnificent-...
[+] [-] ajmurmann|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
The Italian practice of overdubbing English language movies and TV series doesn't help either.
[+] [-] tokenadult|10 years ago|reply
I had to learn Chinese up to a high level of proficiency as I studied Chinese as a major subject at university, lived for three years in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and then worked for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter all over the United States. I'll try to share here some information that helped me learn Chinese as a second language after starting out as a native speaker of English, in hopes that it will help readers here learn English better.
Any two languages, even closely related languages like Spanish and Italian or standard Thai and standard Lao (and, for that matter, different regional dialects of English or of Italian) differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.[1]
But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in phonetics. Disregarding sound distinctions that don't matter in one's own language is part of having a native language (or native languages). You can't imitate what you can't even perceive, so learning to perceive the sound distinctions in the language to be learned is the crucial first step in learning a second language.[2]
For most people it is brutally hard (especially after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to notice sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is extraordinarily hard when the sound distinction marks a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. To give an example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and in Mandarin Chinese there are no such consonant clusters at the ends of syllables at all. Even worse for a Chinese person learning English, Chinese has no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs, so it is difficult for Chinese-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).
If software authors who write foreign-language-learning software simply included information about the sound system of the language to be learned, such as a full chart of the phonemes in that language, with descriptions of the sounds in the standard terminology of articulatory phonetics,[3] that would be a big help to language learners. Even better would be for all language-learning materials to teach the notations needed from the International Phonetic Alphabet[4] for each language to be learned.
Language-learning books, sound recordings, and software always need to include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the language to be learned. No software program for language learning should lack pronunciation drills and listening drills like that. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That's a hard problem that needs more work.
Even before learners think about learning pronunciation, they think about learning vocabulary. But the vocabulary lessons in many language-learning materials are very poorly focused and ineffective.
The typical software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. The map is not the territory, and words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. Every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.
The best way to learn vocabulary in a second language is day-by-day steady exposure to actual texts (recorded conversations, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, and so on) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. The late John DeFrancis was a master teacher of Chinese, so I'll quote him on this point here. In the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, DeFrancis writes, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.
I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.
The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language.[5] It is well worth your time to make formal study of the grammar of your native language and of the language you are trying to learn, especially in materials for foreign learners.
[1] http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
[4] http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Soluzioni-Practical-Contemporary-Routl...
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Italian-Grammar-Practical-Gramm...
http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Modern-Italian-HRG/d...
http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles.