@stephane I concur. Language is an open standard, and people need to make the effort to adhere to it, otherwise it becomes much harder for us to unambiguously understand one another, and it's horrible for those who're not native speakers.
@lightweight @stephane That's a good one – don't forget the apostrophe in "who're".
One that has me stifling a smirk is when people say "consummate" (the verb) in place of "consummate" (the adjective).
And "enormity". Hardly anyone who says it seems to know what it means.
English isn't my first language so maybe I am more careful about these things.
@libroraptor @lightweight Yes, possibly because English is not our native language, we are more attentive.
@stephane @lightweight English is also not taught explicitly in New Zealand schools to any substantial extent. Even when I was little, there was almost no grammar or etymology. I got most of that from studying languages called "foreign", then re-applying it to English.
The biggest challenge in English, I think, is that it has such an immense vocabulary. I believe that there are no true synonyms in English and dictionaries don't help – the nuance needs to be absorbed from context.
@libroraptor @stephane agreed. There's a dearth of actual 'English' taught in NZ (and in the US, where I grew up). I was lucky that I had a 'quirky' teacher when I was 10yo who taught us grammar, and even *diagramming* sentences. As a coder-to-be, I loved it. Subsequently, my deep understanding of grammar gave me a huge advantage over my peers, even though I studied physics, maths, compsci, & engineering. Expressing myself in writing has been my super power.
@libroraptor @stephane The fact that I also spoke another language (German) and studied it (and Latin) in school, meant I had a steady stream of grammatical reinforcement, and could understand its value! Again, something many people never experience.
@libroraptor @stephane @lightweight
Very true. It was only relatively late in the piece that we had to start dealing with noun/adjective/verb stuff, but only really in limited ways
So, it was quite shocking when trying to learn some other foreign languages formally to have things broken up in that way
Ultimately though, if you have the time, learning via osmosis (i.e. daily exposure to few hours of TV dramas/films, followed gradually by music + interviews/docus) works *very* well in practice 😜
@aligorith @libroraptor @stephane the only problem, of course, being that widespread *wrong* grammar e.g. "her and I went to the shop" or "did you get that for him and I?" which you hear *everywhere* is parroted by people learning by osmosis because they don't know any better.
@libroraptor @stephane @lightweight
It's particularly effective when you stumble across episodes where they use a particular word a while bunch of times in quick succession within 1-5 minutes... aka Sesame Street Word of the Day style 🤣
Most recent example that came to mind typing that: toilet paper 😅
@lightweight @stephane I got four years of Japanese in high school. It is a wonderfully regular language (at least in the register taught) that makes fine fodder for the mathematico-logical thinker who thrives on systems and patterns.
I thought that I would get German but it has never felt intuitive to me. Italian and Chinese were my strongest other languages. Latin, like German, frustrates me with its ambiguity of form – articles in German, noun endings in Latin.
@lightweight @stephane Māori is also taught badly in New Zealand.
It seems to me that the poor quality is deliberate. My son had a compulsory semester of it in high school and gained less than I got in primary school. It came across as petty political tokenism that brazenly disrespects the language and its culture. Teacher gave me the impression of being there because he loved his fiefdom.
So he quit Māori; took Spanish in its place. And Chinese, as an extra, by correspondence.
@libroraptor @stephane Interesting - I haven't had the experience (yet) of learning te reo Māori... when I do, I hope it's well-taught.
@lightweight @aligorith @stephane I'm not so sure – much of that is register and dialect. It's usually not wrong.
@libroraptor @aligorith @stephane "her and I" or "him and I" is *always* wrong.
The next class I took was in college, on writing reports and letters, and although I went from getting an A+ to getting a C, the course taught fundamental writing skills such as considering your audience and not yammering on for pages and pages (given my long posts on the fediverse you could say I don't always follow that advice...) -- Despite ostensibly being a class teaching much more basic skills, it provided more important skills I use all the time in life.
In some ways it was like the high school curriculum was trying to get us to do advanced analysis of works when there was a lot of basic stuff they hadn't properly covered yet.
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@lightweight @aligorith @stephane I don't agree. It's wrong in academic English but it's not our business to prescribe another subculture's standard language.
I am one of those who still says "an" before words that start with "h" and an unstressed syllable. So many people tell me that I am "A historian". But it's none of their business, and I doubt that I will ever stop being "an historian". Plus, I can grammar and rhetoric and etymology and philology just about any of them under the table!
@lightweight @aligorith @stephane I agree that grammatical variation is a minefield for novices, though.
I battle often with my high school son on this. English was his first language but school covers less now than when I went through. I want him to know "the rules" not so that he will obey them, but so that he can choose to match the message that he wants to communicate and the audience that he wants to target or exclude.
@libroraptor @aligorith @stephane I love local dialects. I believe they have great authenticity and character. I also think that everyone who speaks such a dialect (most of us do!) should celebrate it - by using it from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance, i.e. they should learn a 'standardised' version of their language in public schools, too, which makes the rules and conventions clear. Consider it a '2nd language' if preferred.
@lightweight @aligorith @stephane
Colloquialisms and context-specific stock phrases, too. These pose big problems for international students who learn, by osmosis, what's respectable in one domain without realising that it's corny and cringeworthy in another.
Like when they pick up trendy phrases from business and government and apply them to, say, social science analysis. I see this far more often than I'd like to. And I don't know how to fix it, apart from one writer at a time.
@libroraptor @aligorith @stephane I had a lovely friend from the Canary Islands who flatted with me for a year a couple decades back - she was a fluent Spanish speaker & was doing university studies in Germany (in German). English was a third language. On the day she left, she took me aside and said "Dave, I've loved every minute here in Aotearoa, but I've been dying to ask... why are people here so fixated with the quality of onions!?" She'd always heard 'good onion' rather than 'good on ya'.