[nkrisc]

Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear rules for verb conjugation and tenses, few irregular words I needed to learn, and very regular pronunciation. If I wasn’t so rusty I might still even remember all 14 tenses.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

Oddly enough, I actually learned more about the mechanics of English through learning Spanish than I did through high school English class. The English curriculum was geared towards reading literature and summarizing the morals and themes rather than learning the rules of English language.

Having to understand the concept of grammatical tense through conjugating verbs in Spanish made me actually think about things like past tense, the present participle, the fact that English does not have a future tense, and much more. I’m really thankful for the realization but a little disappointed now that I realize our English curriculum in the United States is basically a culture class more than it is a language class.

[InitialLastName]

I've always thought that "English" class was a misnomer.

There are really two different pedagogical goals:

- Learn to read and write accurately and clearly in the English language (what would, in Spain, Germany or China also be "English Class")

- Practice a REPL regarding things that other people have written (in the context of a larger corpus of things that people have written), by happenstance in English because that's what the students are most familiar with[0]. This could better be called "Language Arts" because presumably they do similar things in Germany, Spain and China but they (also presumably) don't call it "English Class".

[0] I had an angry moment in high school (among many) when I found out that my English class would be spending an entire year reading translated works.

[dragonwriter]

Those aren't separate goals; the thing you call a REPL for Literature that happens to be in English is exactly for learning to read (the Read part of REPL) and write (the Print part) English accurately.

There are different components (the REPL part is called “Literature" when separated out, and other major, though conceptually lower-level, parts are called “Composition” and “Grammar”, and there are probably more; equal with Literature, and also a kind of REPL, are “Conversation” or “Speech”, where the P and, in the former case, the R of the REPL are oral rather than written.)

Foreign languages are often taught similarly, including the REPL parts.

[mbg721]

Studying Latin is great for that purpose, since mostly you get to skip the "Good evening! My passport is in the fishpond. Where is the bathroom?" lessons. I think the biggest a-ha moment there for me was realizing when an entire clause is acting as a given part of speech.

[handrous]

> The English curriculum was geared towards reading literature and summarizing the morals and themes rather than learning the rules of English language.

English class is usually a bunch of things. There's a reason they've moved away from just calling it "English", now. Comprehension is a huge part of literacy, yet most adults are pretty bad at it despite all the time schools spend trying to teach it to them.

[mlinhares]

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish).

My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese and know how to pronounce it but now that I see even natives struggling i don't mind it that much anymore HAHAHA!

[elboru]

You made me remember that one time I tried to pronounce the word “facade” during a call. I knew the word and the meaning, since I had read it before several times in different situations. But, I had never heard the pronunciation before and that was the first time I had to use it in conversation. Hopefully people understood by context. Coming from Spanish spelling has been a headache while learning English.

[ziml77]

Try "segue"! I was either in my late teens or early 20s before I learned that was pronounced "seg-way". It didn't help at all that Segway transportation devices were getting lots of news coverage at the time.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

English spelling is also inconsistent with diacritics. You can write ‘facade’ but also ‘façade’, just like ‘naive’ and ‘naïve’.

The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.

[ziml77]

The flip-side of that pronunciation thing is that we're flexible on how things are pronounced. Just listen to the differences between British and American English or even regional differences in those countries. Us native English speakers know all the different ways our letters can sound, so differing pronunciations tend to remain recognizable as long as you don't form a homophone with another word that would work in context.

[mlinhares]

Nah, that's no flip-side.

Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_.

And this just doesn't exist in English as there are multiple words that are written the same but are pronounced differently. So while there are some rules as to how English is spoken the written language does not encode them, mostly because someone somewhere decided to use an orthography that would link the word to its source word in latin or french or whatever.

[euroderf]

And in that sense, English to some degree resembles written Chinese. Not only do spellings often not indicate pronunciation, but also pronunciations of words can vary drastically from area to area.