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Tuesday November 09, 2004

Kids use of English

As anybody who has English as a second language knows, it's not an easy language to learn. Let's ignore slang and idioms for now, and all those occurances of words which have more than one meaning; just the ridiculous number of irregular verbs is enough to drive you crazy. Even then, there are differences between English and American (dived and dove for example). Argh!

What I've noticed from our son (who's currently six) though is that as he's learning the language, he says the most obvious way that a word should be said. For example:

I swimmed in the pool all afternoon.

One of my favorites from when he was about 3 went like this:

Dad: Would you like another drink?
Son: Yes please, I'm really drinkable.

Or course, what he meant was "thirsty", but he didn't know that word at that time, so he said the most obvious substitute.

To learn more about all things related to the English Language, check out The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

Also consider the Oxford English Dictionary,

the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium.

In printed form, this comes to twenty volumes. It's also available via CDROM and online. How many words are there in the English Language? It varies, depending upon how you define the question.

So why do we persist in having such a hard to use language? What can be reasonably done to simplify English. Is it something that's just too hard to fix? Wouldn't it be great to try to do reduce the number of words in the language that could be "standardized" by variants on other existing words? Maybe shades of Newspeak from the novel 1984? I encourage your comments on this matter. Especially from people who've tried to learn English as a second language. What sort of things helped you?

I'll leave you with a humourous attempt at simplifying English.

[Technorati Tag: Language]

[Technorati Tag: Kids]

( Nov 09 2004, 12:52:02 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [11]

Comments:

Actually, English is really simple. That's why it is becoming the international standard. For example French is more difficult. My native language, Dutch, even harder (in pronunciation, writing and grammar). And I've been told that Finnish is borderline impossible. For what it is worth : Dutch actually resembles the 'simplified' English you linked. s for soft c, k for hard c and f for ph. Also under some circumstances double vowels become one letter (sing:fotograaf, plur:fotografen)

Posted by bart on November 09, 2004 at 12:33 AM PST #

contrary to your belief, english is very EASY language to learn: a) only four cases, b) except for about 200 irregular verbs (wich isn't many) all words are fixed, (as appropriate for an analytic language) c) no grammatical gender d) very simple and straightforward morphology. the only thing complex in english is its verb tenses system. believe me, i have learnt several languages, english was one of the easiest :) and another thing: it really IS highly idiomatic.

Posted by just one curious on November 09, 2004 at 12:42 AM PST #

Rich, the "English spelling reform" is quite popular, and more satires of it have been attributed to Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, et cetera. As it has been noted, English is fairly easy compared to other languages (eg. Serbian has male, female and neuter gender, 7 declinations, thus making it 3x7=21 times harder than English :-), except for the spelling, which is not handled well even by the Americans :-) Phonetic alphabet is big advantage when it comes to reading and writing (and with written forms being de-facto standard learning aids in modern times, this would really be important advantage :), so that's the only problem of English for foreign speakers I can see. On the number of words issue, I believe no language is (significantly) smaller, but most of those words are not used in practice. And one learns words through practice best.

Posted by Danilo Segan on November 09, 2004 at 02:10 AM PST #

Interestingly enough, George Orwell touches on this subject in his well known book 1984. The government at the time works on simplifying the english language. Its affect not only makes the english language easier to learn, but also puts a very positive spin on the language. For example "bad" becomes, "not good". This kind enforcement ensures that people are focusing on the positives in their life, while Big brother dominates them in every other aspect. I can see positives and negatives for language reduction and simplification although any kind of restriction on a language would be against the evolution of the language. English is an interesting language to follow throughout history. Ol' english from the early playwrites is still intelligable now by the average teenager. Although the syntax and words have come in and out of fashion the meaning of each word have not. This kind of "portability" will help reduce the chance that english will become a dead language that students will be reading about in text books in years to come. With the globalisation of the Internet, the language barriers have dropped and even in the professional arena, some sacrafices have been made to reach a more international audience. Advertisements are using simpler language, localised "slang" is being removed. Although with the advent of instant messaging and the Short Message Service (Text Messaging), I often have to wonder what evolution that todays youth are bringing to the english language. Id h8 2 see tech paprs typd lik ths.

Posted by Wade Mefaling on November 09, 2004 at 02:45 AM PST #

I'm currently reading a book (Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less by Guy Claxton) that suggests children will actually learn the correct irregular form, and then continue to play with what they know to be the wrong form as part of learning and reflecting on what they have learned.

This is a general learning trait, e.g. children who learn how to balance a shape will then experiment with unstable options to test their learning.

Posted by dave on November 09, 2004 at 02:48 AM PST #

English isn't so hard to learn. I've had English teachers (I'm spanish) who needed about 3 years(even more) to reach an acceptable level. Consider other languages with non-arabic alphabets like Chinese, Japanese or Russian (oops!). Woody Allen said something like "life's too short to learn dutch" XDDDDD

Posted by rubén on November 09, 2004 at 03:56 AM PST #

Thanks everybody. A couple comments/observations.

1/ W.r.t. (sorry Wade ;-) the text messaging letter reduction. It reminds me of a manager I had in Australia in the mid 80's when telexes were still popular. He'd literally remove all the vowels from what he sent (which was pretty terse anyway), just to save money. Nevermind the amount of time wasted trying to understand the message that had been sent.

2/ Do you think English is harder to learn depending upon what culture/language you are starting from? For example, is English harder to understand if your first language is Chinese or Japanese (or other such "pictogram" languages)?

Posted by Rich Burridge on November 09, 2004 at 07:13 AM PST #

Regarding the number of words in the English language, I would argue that any word in any language can be considered valid English. All languages take words from others where needed, but I'm not aware of any that does it to the same degree. It's the Borg of languages, assimilating anything it encounters.

Posted by Simon on November 09, 2004 at 01:02 PM PST #

you might like the book: "the languaje instict" by Steven Pinker. it talk precisly about how human languaje works.. even manages to throw some of chomky's grammar into it. =). also, another very very very good book by pinker is "How the mind works". one of my all-time favorites.

Posted by Luis gutierrez on November 09, 2004 at 05:14 PM PST #

Take an advise from a german who's experiencing such a spelling reform right now: Don't do it! At least, not at once. Very small steps every 20 years or so may work. English is easy enought to make yourself understandable in rather short time. And as someone who's naitive language is not English: Thanks to all the native speakers out there, for forgiving us to spam the whole internet with our mistakes. It must be a pain in the eyes, sometimes.

Posted by clausi on November 09, 2004 at 07:35 PM PST #

As stated earlier, English is not that hard to learn. I'm from Norway, and we teach English in third grade or so, and German/French at seventh. Norwegian is much closer to German than it is to English, but still I found English to be easier to learn.

I think the main reason is that being an international language, English surrounds us much more than other non-native languages, and therefore is easier to pick up. In Norway, a great deal of the music being played has English lyrics. A great deal of shows on TV originates from US of A or England, and most movies we watch have English speech and Norwegian subtitles (no dubbing).

Also, there is the internet. Sites you visit that are not in your native language, are usually in English. So the fact that you hear it, and read it more often, makes it easier to learn.

Posted by Rune Hammersland on November 12, 2004 at 07:17 PM PST #