List of things you cannot do with English (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

List of things you cannot do with English
Tags: Discouragement from learning
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

60 messages over 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next >>

William Camden
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6070 days ago
1936 posts - 2333 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French

Message 33 of 60

27 March 2012 at 12:09pm | IP Logged

Марк wrote:

William Camden wrote:

English is also, IMO, quite a phonetically rich language, and this is also potentially helpful with L2s.

It doesn't seem to be the truth.

Most Germanic languages have lost the sounds th as in thing and these, and the first in particular gives learners of English problems. It is interesting that English has retained both sounds, which is part of what I mean by phonetic richness. Turks learning MSA struggle with the fact that their own language lacks a whole array of MSA sounds, yet English, also unrelated to MSA, does have some of those sounds, notably both the th sounds I have referred to.
4 persons have voted this message useful

Izzu
Bilingual Triglot
Newbie
Indonesia
Joined 4530 days ago
2 posts - 5 votes
Speaks: Indonesian*, Javanese*, English
Studies: German, Japanese, Arabic (classical)

Message 34 of 60

27 March 2012 at 7:04pm | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

I remember in particular my experiences with a guide to Bahasa
Indonesia, which has maybe the most regular and trustworthy orthography in the world.
For some reason the book presented an English 'pronunciation help' in a screaming green
color in the center of each page, and you automatically thought that this language had
a completely raving mad pronunciation which it would take years to master. Then you
looked to the right and saw the correct pronunciation in the form of the official
spelling of the language itself - at half the length of the English rendering. I had to
stop using that book - it was like getting a punch in the face each time you looked
something up.

Now Bahasa is special in this respect by having such a straightforward orthography, but
with the possible exception of Irish I can't imagine a language which would be less
suited for 'pronunciation help' than English.

And yet it is by far the most used for the purpose.

Perhaps thats why my mind sometimes screams "WTF?!" when I learn a foreign language
pronunciation.
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Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6954 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes

20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

Message 35 of 60

27 March 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged

vonPeterhof wrote:

IronFist wrote:

Chung wrote:

- One could not see how varying tone (including pitch-accent) can be lexically or morphologically relevant (e.g. Cantonese)

English does a little bit of that.

CONstruct (noun) vs. conSTRUCT (verb)

There are a few more examples but I'm tired and can't think of them now.

There is a tonal difference between these two words, but it is not perceived as crucial to their differentiation. The difference is mainly perceived through volume, vowel duration and reduction (or lack thereof). There are no cases in English where tone alone distinguishes one word from another. For example when one says "But it's MY car!" the word "my" would have a descending tone, differentiating the sentence from the simple stative "it's my car", but not the word itself. In a language like Vietnamese the tonal difference between the two my's would probably make them different words altogether.

IronFist wrote:

Quote:

- One could not realize that phonological inventory may include clicks (e.g. Xhosa)

English has clicks in expressions but not in words. I don't know how to transcribe clicks. For example, there's a click sound that you make, which sometimes precedes a nasalized/whispered "uh," when you just realized you've been treated unfairly or found out something that disappoints you. For example:

"Hey, you know that TV show we've been watching that we both love?"

"Yeah"

"Well I just heard they're taking a 4 week break before they show anymore new episodes!"

"*click* uh! That sucks!"

I can upload a vocal sample if necessary.

There's also a double click in English in a "told you so" type of situation, and then there's the clicking often accompanied by shaking your head back and forth that means "ah ah, you shouldn't have done that (look what happened now!)."

These clicks in English are more like interjections than fully-fledged consonants capable of forming syllables and words.

Thank you for clarifying those points, vonPeterhof. Indeed the first instance is treated as a matter of stress placement (and the attendent changes to the vowels' quality and length) rather than tone or pitch-accent.

As for clicks, I remember when I was talking to my mother about Xhosa and kept clucking my tongue at the beginning of the language's name (I had picked this up in high school from a South African geography teacher). After a few times, she asked me why I kept clucking my tongue to which I explained that the term includes the click and that the language uses clicks to make lexical or morphological distinctions, whereas we English speakers (and those of non-click languages) relegate them to a few interjections as noted. In some ways clicks in English seem akin to body language for interjections since they express meaning without words.
1 person has voted this message useful

clumsy
Octoglot
Senior Member
Poland
lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4976 days ago
1116 posts - 1367 votes

Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish
Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi

Message 36 of 60

31 March 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged

Well thanks for the answers.
hmm, well there are people who don't speak English, but you don't find many of them on the Internet, or maybe it's just me.
I can remember one woman from China who could not understand English, and that's all.

I can also add that Chinese gives you a possibility to learn a lot of other languages spoken within China.
These are not popular subjects of study... but...
it's fun.

I have never meet anyone who speaks those languages though.

1 person has voted this message useful

nway
Senior Member
United States
youtube.com/user/Vic
Joined 5213 days ago
574 posts - 1707 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean

Message 37 of 60

31 March 2012 at 11:57pm | IP Logged

clumsy wrote:

hmm, well there are people who don't speak English, but you don't find many of them on the Internet, or maybe it's just me.

There are over a billion of them, but people who don't speak English aren't likely to visit English-language websites, so you're not likely to encounter them...

clumsy wrote:

I can remember one woman from China who could not understand English, and that's all.

I can assure you, she's not the only one of her kind in China...
6 persons have voted this message useful

Jinx
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
reverbnation.co
Joined 5491 days ago
1085 posts - 1879 votes

Speaks: English*, German, French
Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish

Message 38 of 60

01 April 2012 at 7:58pm | IP Logged

You couldn't watch Tatort, my favorite TV crime series from Germany! :) (As far as I know, there's no English dubbing available, and English subtitles are few and far between.)

You couldn't experience the sheer linguistic gorgeousness of Romantic-era German poetry. No translation could come close to capturing the brilliance of Goethe.
1 person has voted this message useful

Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6954 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes

20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

Message 40 of 60

03 April 2012 at 5:10pm | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

Quote:

- One could not understand that grammatical relations can be expressed meaningfully with little use of analytic typology. (e.g. Georgian)

I don't even know what that means :)

In layman's terms, one can tell how the words in a sentence relate to each other (i.e. which part of speech is each word in a sentence) primarily by our understanding of word order. This is part of "analytic typology" because the components of a sentence are "analyzed", "separated" or "broken-down". For example, saying "IronFist sees Chung" is different from saying "Chung sees IronFist" even though the words involved have the same form. In a language that isn't very analytic, the distinction would be marked through other means (usually endings) while the word order can stay the same and convey the same fundamental meaning although the nuance may differ.

E.g.

1)
Chung vidí IronFista "Chung sees Ironfist" (Slovak)
IronFista vidí Chung "Chung sees Ironfist" (Slovak - i.e. Ironfist is seen by Chung - "It's IronFist whom Chung sees")

2)
IronFist vidí Chunga "Ironfist sees Chung" (Slovak)
Chunga vidí IronFist "Ironfist sees Chung" (Slovak - i.e. Chung is seen by Ironfist - "It's Chung whom IronFist sees")

Each pair of sentences conveys the same basic meaning despite the different word order. Changing the word order changes only the emphasis or voice (i.e. active or passive) since the case ending (-a in this instance) is enough to indicate the basic relationship between me and you.

In English, one can see that we compensate for the scarcity of case endings by using word order to keep the separated components from yielding unclear or meaningless strings. The declensional endings that we use are most often restricted to number (i.e. singular vs. plural), possession (i.e. IronFist vs. IronFist's) and pronouns' relationships (e.g. they vs. them)

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