I know our irregulars suck but you’ve got to give us credit for depth of vocabulary.
You should see French—we have even more exceptions to our rules. German manages a much more sane exception/rule ratio, but that’s mostly by having much more rules.
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn’t irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs—the way say “give up”, “give in”, “give out” or “get up”, “get away”, “get about” etc. all mean different things that can’t just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn’t irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs—the way say “give up”, “give in”, “give out” or “get up”, “get away”, “get about” etc. all mean different things that can’t just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it’s impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles. Most of the languages in this family do not have definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the Baltic languages and most Slavic languages.
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).
English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results. H. Beam Piper (Little Fuzzy or Fuzzy Sapiens)
For “Norman” read “French-speaking” and for “Saxon” read “Germanic-language-speaking.” I’m told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary. Here’s a quote which evokes a time in which the two languages had not fully mixed, at least not in every context—it is a record from a court of criminal law:
[A judge] fuit assault per Prisoner la condemne pur Felony; que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute et fix al Gibbet, sur que luy mesme immédiatement hangé in presence de Court.
P.S. Originally copied and pasted this quote from the web. Later, looked it up in a dead trees copy of “The Language of the Law” by Mellinkoff. The book cited a passage with spelling that was further from standard French...updated to reflect.
I’m told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary.
That’s true only for highbrow written English (and even then, I’m not sure if French words would outnumber those coming directly from Latin). Everyday spoken English still overwhelmingly consists of Germanic words.
Also, that sample you cite is Law French, a very peculiar historical sort of formal legal language. Nobody ever used anything like that as everyday spoken language.
I love how we’ve managed to list like eight English words that would do the trick. What an amazing/preposterous number of synonyms.
I know our irregulars suck but you’ve got to give us credit for depth of vocabulary.
You should see French—we have even more exceptions to our rules. German manages a much more sane exception/rule ratio, but that’s mostly by having much more rules.
I think the biggest problem for foreign learners isn’t irregulars, but the preposition in phrasal verbs—the way say “give up”, “give in”, “give out” or “get up”, “get away”, “get about” etc. all mean different things that can’t just be deduced by what you know about the verb or the preposition alone.
Emile:
These are indeed very difficult, but in my experience (and also from my observations of other fluent non-native English speakers), by far the hardest problem is the definite article. With a lot of practice and experience, you learn to use it with perhaps 90% or 95% accuracy, but then your improvement stagnates and it’s impossible to ever get it 100% right like a native speaker.
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).
Of course an exception is just another rule that happens to have a small scope...
Although general rules and specific rules may be implemented differently in the human brain.
For “Norman” read “French-speaking” and for “Saxon” read “Germanic-language-speaking.” I’m told that English is now a Germanic language with a more-than-half Latinate (mostly French) vocabulary. Here’s a quote which evokes a time in which the two languages had not fully mixed, at least not in every context—it is a record from a court of criminal law:
P.S. Originally copied and pasted this quote from the web. Later, looked it up in a dead trees copy of “The Language of the Law” by Mellinkoff. The book cited a passage with spelling that was further from standard French...updated to reflect.
Costanza:
That’s true only for highbrow written English (and even then, I’m not sure if French words would outnumber those coming directly from Latin). Everyday spoken English still overwhelmingly consists of Germanic words.
Also, that sample you cite is Law French, a very peculiar historical sort of formal legal language. Nobody ever used anything like that as everyday spoken language.