What’s one way to make you sound like you have a different first language? (2 Viewers)

[Ahsoka]

By which I mean, what are some mistakes that are more common for people who speak English as a second language? And I do not mean in a bad way, I just mean in the sense of things about the English language that can be different for other languages, and therefore can be hard to learn for others.

I feel like articles (the, a, an) can be hard for Russian speakers learning English to understand. Which makes sense because those words don’t exist in the Russian language.

 

[Willow]

Yes but rarely nowadays…
We can hear the English influence in my accent now. Right? @Ahsoka

 

[litc]

By which I mean, what are some mistakes that are more common for people who speak English as a second language? And I do not mean in a bad way, I just mean in the sense of things about the English language that can be different for other languages, and therefore can be hard to learn for others.

I feel like articles (the, a, an) can be hard for Russian speakers learning English to understand. Which makes sense because those words don’t exist in the Russian language.

in many languages the plural of an animal (including people) noun is the plural of the male gender of that noun

like in English
man; men
woman; women

but two men & two women would be "people" or "persons" not "men"

and animals like "cats" "dogs" aren't gendered at all in English

I see pronouns (he/she) messed up a lot when people try to translate smth

some syllables

Lots of languages, particularly in Asia don't have the "r" sound, so like for example "irritate" is even hard for my mom to say

 

[Belgizen]

the tenses
def pronunciation as flemish people have quite "hard r's"

 

[Selfmate]

grammatical errors
(I can't think of any off the top of my head though)

 

[Ahsoka]

in many languages the plural of an animal (including people) noun is the plural of the male gender of that noun

like in English
man; men
woman; women

but two men & two women would be "people" or "persons" not "men"

and animals like "cats" "dogs" aren't gendered at all in English

I see pronouns (he/she) messed up a lot when people try to translate smth

some syllables

Lots of languages, particularly in Asia don't have the "r" sound, so like for example "irritate" is even hard for my mom to say

Yeah lots of Indo-European languages have genders for most things, if not all. That said I’ve never heard someone speaking English as a second language try to give genders to non human animals or objects.

pronouns yeah, for sure. Given how much they differ. And sounds for sure. I think Russians learning English as a second language could definitely struggle with the J and W sounds.

 

[Ahsoka]

grammatical errors
(I can't think of any off the top of my head though)

I was about to say I learned English as a second language as a joke based on this but I did technically

 

[litc]

Yeah lots of Indo-European languages have genders for most things, if not all. That said I’ve never heard someone speaking English as a second language try to give genders to non human animals or objects.

pronouns yeah, for sure. Given how much they differ. And sounds for sure. I think Russians learning English as a second language could definitely struggle with the J and W sounds.

Ah no I meant living things specifically

Bengali doesn't have genders for inanimate objects at all

And isn't English Indo-European

I meant that the plural of multiple men & women would be "men" while it wouldn't in English

I meant like Spanish - dog is perro for males, perra for females, 3 female dogs & 1 male would be perros

But mostly for people in the languages I know even if other stuff aren't gendered

Or the language has no gender for the word or pronoun & so translating it defaults to he even when they're trying to refer to a woman

That's why I see many people say "he" when typing comments on youtube vids when talking about girls, & not just indo-european, like southeast asians

According to this:

List of languages by type of grammatical genders - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

these are the indo-european languages without grammatical gender^

Many Asian languages have noun classifiers without having grammatical gender, which was what I was referring to:

Like I been saying, the whole Indo-European thing is not the most accurate, Bengali's literally close to Tibetan & similar form with most East Asian & Southeast Asian languages, yet other languages with Hindi loan words like Thai aren't considered Indo-European

these are the indo-european languages with male & female:

male female & neuter indo-european:

interesting that old persian had masculine, feminine, & neuter, but "persian" has no grammatical nouns & can use noun classifiers

idk anything about persian tho

 

[Ahsoka]

Ah no I meant living things specifically

Bengali doesn't have genders for inanimate objects at all

And isn't English Indo-European

I meant that the plural of multiple men & women would be "men" while it wouldn't in English

I meant like Spanish - dog is perro for males, perra for females, 3 female dogs & 1 male would be perros

But mostly for people in the languages I know even if other stuff aren't gendered

Or the language has no gender for the word or pronoun & so translating it defaults to he even when they're trying to refer to a woman

That's why I see many people say "he" when typing comments on youtube vids when talking about girls, & not just indo-european, like southeast asians

According to this:

List of languages by type of grammatical genders - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

these are the indo-european languages without grammatical gender^

Many Asian languages have noun classifiers without having grammatical gender, which was what I was referring to:

Like I been saying, the whole Indo-European thing is not the most accurate, Bengali's literally close to Tibetan & similar form with most East Asian & Southeast Asian languages, yet other languages with Hindi loan words like Thai aren't considered Indo-European

these are the indo-european languages with male & female:

male female & neuter indo-european:

interesting that old persian had masculine, feminine, & neuter, but "persian" has no grammatical nouns & can use noun classifiers

idk anything about persian tho

Oh yeah, that’s different than I was thinking. Nomenclature with how groups of living things are named isn’t something I thought much about before.
English is Indo European for sure. But I didn’t say all Indo-European languages have grammatical gender, I said most, which you seem to show well with the screenshots. Also Old English did have grammatical gender. But it was abandoned. As for classification, I get the feeling that even if you adopt vocabulary from another family, the language is generally considered to be where it’s roots are mainly from, not just from a vocabulary standpoint but grammatical as well. English is a prime example. It’s a Germanic language, but a large part of its vocab is from Romance languages, especially French. I asked chatgpt about Bengali (since I don’t know much about it) and it said that there are some notable differences seen in Bengali and other Indo-European languages that you won’t find in East or Southeast languages. Some include tone (East and southeast Asian have tone more often, Bengali doesn’t), word order (subject-object-verb, which is common in indo European, while Southeast Asia would use subject-verb-object often. Ofc not all indo European or Southeast Asian languages do this though), indo European languages usually conjugate for tense and some other stuff while southeast Asian don’t, ect ect. Just from my little knowledge of south Asian languages it seems like the indo European ones differ from the others in the region with grammar. I don’t doubt that it’s possible to understand someone who’s speaking a language from another family if their language has a lot of loan words from a language you know, but I don’t think that means that the language is necessarily super similar to theirs. It just has shared vocab. Of course with a category as broad as Indo European there will be significant variation among languages, as with any other major linguistic group. But given the history of said languages, there will be distinct similarities among most groups. And if more regional language patterns are needed for some reason, there are many more specific language families as well. So based on what I see I think Indo European is a fair classification. I do feel like humanity will reach a point sometime though where languages will be so mixed up that linguistic families are purely history and have no real application. That would be interesting to see

 

[alo]

for native hindi speakers i'd say:
1) referring to "hair" in plural and not in singular, because in hindi hair is plural (eg: "your hair are looking really nice today, what shampoo do you use for them?")
2) saying "return back" - this is interesting cause it's a mistake native hindi speakers make in hindi too for some reason
3) saying "doing a mistake" and not "making a mistake" because that is the literal translation of the hindi phrase. you do mistakes in hindi.
4) saying "to give an exam" when talking about writing an exam. the correct english expression is "to take an exam", but giving an exam is how you say it in hindi, so that's another literal translation