I have interacted with English since kindergarten, and for the last four years I have been living in the US, using solely English for daily communications. Despite my effort of continual self-improving, I can’t quite understand the language. There have been explanations, of course, such as how it’s not my first language, how cultures and traditions get in place… Only recently, it strikes me with a more understandable reason: English is an ineffective language.
There are so many disadvantages of English. First of all is the way one person talks to another. You can only use “I” and “you” no matter if the person you’re talking to is an earthworm or a high king. The same with “he”, “she”, “it”, and “they”. All the languages that I have ever associated with, which are French, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cantonese, they have different words to address different people. I believe this should be the way to talk, since each person requires to be treated with respect, order, and love. Calling everyone the same is one step toward having a barcode on each of our foreheads.
If the efficiency of addressing others are a bit debatable for a language, let me talk about some basic stuffs, like spelling and pronouncing. I understand that the ultimate role of spelling is to help with reading, i. e. pronouncing. That’s why when we meet someone with a strange name, you would ask “How do you spell it?” English doesn’t do a good job on that. Words like “women” and “read” can be read in two ways, depends on the context. “Stephen” sounds like “Steven” sometimes, and you pronounce “Christian” as if it was “Kristian” instead. And there are problems another the way around too: when hearing an English word, you can’t be 100% sure how to write it down! There is always a risk when one decides to use certain innocent words such as “beach” or “in fact”. This gives birth to another linguistic disaster: spelling manipulation. Since there is inappropriateness when saying undesirable things, I have started seeing stuffs like this: “I’ll keel you!” “Your daed.”
In his fantastic book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explains why Asian people tend to be good at math. Asian people are not any smarter than the others, and the reason for their superior Math abilities is their numerical vocabularies. The way a Japanese or Vietnamese word expresses a number also provides a meaning to that number. For example, 20 is pronounced “two tens”, and people who say that word innately understand that twenty is equal to two tens. Little things like this give confidence and comfort to the language users, making them think better of Math, and thereby perform better. Objectively concluded, English numerical vocabulary is much less efficient than several other languages’, and it has quite possibly restrained English-using mathematicians from greater achievements.
I took GMAT recently, which is a required exam for master degrees’ admission in Business fields. A good portion of this 4-hour exam is Grammar Corrections and Reading Comprehension. While preparing for GMAT, I found these two sections having the potential of being extremely challenging. It’s hard to believe that in any other language, a native speaker, when looking at five similar sentences, knows not which one of them is correct immediately. Yet in English this can get really debatable. You can successfully confuse any reader by using deliberately complicated grammar. Why, transferring one’s ideas to another in a clearest possible way should always come before achieving a more sophisticated expression. What good would a genius’s book do, if absolutely no one else can understand it? Would a children’s book not more valuable than it? There really are problems with English’ structures and grammars.
I am not an English hater. Showing the incompleteness of someone or something in an honest and constructive way is also to express the love. Nonetheless, if one day things change and the Chinese raise their power over the world in a surprising level, it’d not be too strange for their language to take over.
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That Joe Roelle Guy
I totally agree with you. English is a dreadfully inefficient language. However, some of English's qualities of versatility and mutability (though perhaps not wholly unique) lend themselves to beautiful language as well. I agree that today's English is not the most appealing language, but the linguistic masters of the past have brought out its beauty too.
ReplyDeleteI merely say this to add to your comments. I definitely agree with all the points you made.
I don't really pay attention to things like this but a song came out by one of my favorite bands, and they are talking about a relationship ending and the lyrics are either "split into pieces" or "split in two pieces." A very minor difference in meaning for this context so I didn't think about it any more. But your post makes me rethink how confusing it English is.
ReplyDeleteNot that I disagree, often finding myself at odds with the inefficient and ineffective aspects of my native language, but this isn't only a problem of English.
ReplyDeleteHaving some command of Spanish and Japanese as well, while fully proficient in neither, I have found each language has it's strong and weak points.
Spanish is fairly solid, especially in phonetics (the letters actually match the sounds!) and has a few more pronouns than English. It also has a fairly comprehensible verb conjugation system. The existence of a subjunctive tense also makes Spanish far more useful than English.
Spanish speakers tend to speak very fast, so the learning curve can be high and non-natives (like me) stand out like a sore thumb. It is also more complicated than English, with masculine/feminine vocabulary, extra pronouns, more flexible grammatical structures, etc etc.
Japanese is a mess. The sheer amount of idiomatic expressions is staggering; don't forget the ever-growing number of arbitrarily shortened expressions. The entire language consists of about 50 distinct sounds, resulting in a bewildering number of homophones. There are not only extra pronouns, but entirely different sets of vocabulary for speaking to friends, family, superiors, inferiors, customers, and the emperor. Different words are used to count objects of different sizes and/or shapes and numbers are delimited into groups of FOUR not THREE.
Japanese speakers take a lot of shortcuts. If you can keep up with them, the language does become very useful as you can pack a lot of meaning into very short phrases. Unfortunately, misunderstanding a single sound can derail a conversation.
Wow, that's certainly some good insights about Spanish and Japanese. I've tried Japanese myself at one point and soon gave up because of the confusing alphabetical systems.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your comment! : )