Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[PlainName]

English as a first language can be tricky!

[themadhippy]

English as a second language must be extraordinarily challenging. So many different used for the same words and phrases....

the serial killer had cereal for breakfast and dessert in the desert

pretty  simple really,compared to say Vietnamese were  1 word has multiple meanings depending how you say it

[Zeyneb]

English as a second language must be extraordinarily challenging. So many different used for the same words and phrases....

I disagree with this. The importance to understand English is huge. For example if you know the correct term in English for your DIY task at hand you might be able to find information on Wikipedia or a YouTube video. Or to navigate the McMaster-Carr website to understand which tools and materials do exist.

Once you're comfortable around the basics you learn the difference between serial - cereal and dessert - desert. At that time you can also enjoy English/American sitcoms, movies and books to further develop your English.

EDIT:

English as a first language can be tricky!

Would you elaborate a bit more on that?

[james_s]

I disagree with this. The importance to understand English is huge. For example if you know the correct term in English for your DIY task at hand you might be able to find information on Wikipedia or a YouTube video. Or to navigate the McMaster-Carr website to understand which tools and materials do exist.

Once you're comfortable around the basics you learn the difference between serial - cereal and dessert - desert. At that time you can also enjoy English/American sitcoms, movies and books to further develop your English.

Agreed on the value of knowing English, but I do think it is a challenging language, lots of native speakers have difficulty with using the correct form of there/their/they're, brake/break, tea/tee and other words that have multiple completely different words that are pronounced exactly the same. Then there are words like lead (the element) and lead (to lead somebody somewhere) that are spelled exactly the same but pronounced differently, and the past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced the same as the element lead.

On the other hand at least English rarely has the silent letters that French is notorious for, I never have really understood why French has so many gratuitous letters on the end of words that aren't pronounced.

[pcprogrammer]

English as a first language can be tricky!

Try Dutch, Germain or French for tricky, and lots of other languages for that matter.

I find English easier then my own native Dutch at times. But it is true that to know all the pitfalls, exceptions and "standard" phrases it takes more then just knowing basic English.

With "standard" phrases I mean expressions that are commonly used. Can't think of an example right now though 

[SiliconWizard]

English is relatively "easy" compared to many other languages, which is one of the reasons it has become the de facto international language. (The other reason probably coming from the british empire era, but quite a few other cultures had large empires and their languages haven't made it through as well, so its simplicity is probably key here.)

Of course it's not *that* easy either and there's still a lot of rules and false friends. But in that regard, it reminds me a bit of C in the programming languages realm. Its use is widespread, almost everybody thinks it's dead simple, yet only a small fraction uses it properly.

[TimFox]

Any foreign language is "challenging" to the new student, except maybe for a Scandinavian language to a student from a different Scandinavian country.

[pcprogrammer]

Another language is best learned when young, but needs the learner to be open for it, which is often not the case when you are young 

Neighbors of ours have a young son (~6 years old). They teach him French and Germain, because the mom is French and the dad is Germain. The kid picks up both languages quite well.

I now wish I was more open to lessons given in school when I was young, but liked to play more. 

[SilverSolder]

[...] I suspect the electrical actuators and associated electronics are still cheaper than the old mechanical stuff, especially if you want automatic climate control which I think is almost universally terrible but everyone else seems to want that now. [...]

Yes, that's another "upgrade" in my slightly newer old car (an '09 Ford Escape Hybrid).  The "new" car has auto climate control, which basically always blows air at the 'wrong' temperature, no matter what I set it at...  whereas with the older car, which had "bath tub faucet" heating controls, it was literally set-and-forget, unless the exterior temperature changed a lot (on a really long trip).

Against that:  the new car has a much smoother and better hybrid drivetrain, which is also about 10% more economical than the previous one.  It is not subtle, it is a huge improvement.  The interior is much nicer.  The audio system is excellent, a significant upgrade (both cars had the high end audio option, but the newer high end is higher!)

So, it looks like not everything goes backwards at the same time, thankfully!

[TimFox]

Another language is best learned when young, but needs the learner to be open for it, which is often not the case when you are young 

Neighbors of ours have a young son (~6 years old). They teach him French and Germain, because the mom is French and the dad is Germain. The kid picks up both languages quite well.

I now wish I was more open to lessons given in school when I was young, but liked to play more. 

I remember reading that learning a new language before puberty is much more efficient than after.
This is how young children pick up their native language from that spoken around them.

[pcprogrammer]

This is how young children pick up their native language from that spoken around them.

What helped me in learning English is that on the Dutch TV the English spoken films and series are broadcast with subtitles instead of dubbing the voices with Dutch, like done quite a lot in France and Germany with their native languages.

And it sounds awful when you see a series like "Two and a half man" in French. 

[Leeima]

- ANY programming language that requires semicolons to denote end of statements. there is a cr or cr/lf pair in the file already. use that. and , in case a line really is too long you should either : rewrite the code , or have a line continuation character. there are much less cases where you need to split a long line.
- Any programming language that makes a difference between uppercase and lowercase for statements and variable names.
- Any programming language using whitespace for flow control
- Any programming language that cannot understand when = means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'. This problem was solved in the 60's. And we are still fucking around with things like := and == because the parsers writers are stupid.

I can't think of many languages which won't peeve you...
..Assembly or LabVIEW work :S
Alternatively you could write your own preparser

[james_s]

What helped me in learning English is that on the Dutch TV the English spoken films and series are broadcast with subtitles instead of dubbing the voices with Dutch, like done quite a lot in France and Germany with their native languages.

And it sounds awful when you see a series like "Two and a half man" in French. 

That brings up another pet peeve of mine, when they dub over foreign language material, especially when the original audio is faintly in the background. It's distracting, I'd much rather hear the audio as originally intended, and read subtitles in my own language.

[Circlotron]

That brings up another pet peeve of mine, when they dub over foreign language material, especially when the original audio is faintly in the background. It's distracting, I'd much rather hear the audio as originally intended, and read subtitles in my own language.

Sometimes when a video is dubbed the original dialogue is still present but turned right down and so are all the other sounds as well, stuff that adds to the atmosphere. A good example is Garage 54 where there are all sorts of noises you want to hear but they are often drowned out by the translation.

[tooki]

I thought "made up" meant "consists of" or "comprises", as in "Cellphones are made up of a variety of components". {evil grin}

I would say that “to be made up of” is quite distinct from “to be made up”.

English as a second language must be extraordinarily challenging. So many different used for the same words and phrases....

Absolutely. My mother is a retired EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher, and she’s mentioned many such things!

With that said, I don’t think English is particularly unique in this particular aspect.

But man is English weird in other ways. Like how we have a gazillion vowels, but those don’t include the 5 monophthong vowels that are the most common worldwide, and that we use some really strange consonants, like the two ‘th’ sounds and the rhotic ‘r’, all of which are also really rare worldwide. English also has a, um, rather rich set of verb tenses, and then to top it off, we don’t use them to mean the same things those tenses mean in other languages. (For example, the simple present tense — “I eat” — doesn’t mean that I am actually eating right now (in the present), but rather that it’s something I do regularly. This incongruity drives English learners up the wall…

[tooki]

English is relatively "easy" compared to many other languages, which is one of the reasons it has become the de facto international language. (The other reason probably coming from the british empire era, but quite a few other cultures had large empires and their languages haven't made it through as well, so its simplicity is probably key here.)

Of course it's not *that* easy either and there's still a lot of rules and false friends. But in that regard, it reminds me a bit of C in the programming languages realm. Its use is widespread, almost everybody thinks it's dead simple, yet only a small fraction uses it properly.

I think it’s categorically impossible to say that a particular language is fundamentally easy or hard to learn. Instead, there’s an individual learning difficulty per language pair. For example, learning Italian is much easier for a Spanish speaker than an English speaker. For an English speaker, learning German will be easier than learning Japanese. But for a Korean, learning Japanese would be easier than learning German.

I also believe that language learning isn’t necessarily linear. English is a language whose learning curve starts shallow, so it’s easy to get started, but becoming expert at it is very hard. Other language are very hard to get started with, but once you’re over the hump, you’re good. And others are more linear.

[tooki]

I remember reading that learning a new language before puberty is much more efficient than after.
This is how young children pick up their native language from that spoken around them.

It’s not just efficiency. Childhood language acquisition occurs in a different part of the brain from adult language acquisition, and the child language part of the brain is basically designed to create language.

That’s why children can learn languages (yes, plural) easily and essentially perfectly, while adults struggle and are seldom able to achieve true native proficiency.

It’s also why children who grow up isolated (like those stories of horrific child abuse where the kid was kept in a closet for their whole childhood) never really develop proper language skills.

And it’s also why groups of children that grow up without exposure to a “proper” adult language (as happened in colonial times*) will automatically as a group fill in all the gaps in grammar and vocabulary!

And it’s how some sign languages developed: deaf children in institutions couldn’t speak, and started signing. And the magical child language brain created everything needed for complete language. (It is believed that American Sign Language significantly evolved from Old French Sign Language, which was one of those spontaneously-invented sign languages.)

*Like during the colonial era, where there are numerous examples of groups of immigrants, with no common language, who are forced to work together. The adults muddle their way through with very broken language (often, all speaking broken versions of a language that is foreign to all of them), using incomplete sentences, irregular grammar, etc. which is called a “pidgin”. But the children of those adults hear the pidgin and automatically fill in the gaps, and the resulting language, which is grammatically complete, consistent and stable, is known as a “creole”. After that, the creole continues for generations as a stable language.

I just think it’s amazing that it literally takes ONE generation to completely make a proper, complete language out of pidgin. Our childhood brains are literally built to embrace language.

[tooki]

What helped me in learning English is that on the Dutch TV the English spoken films and series are broadcast with subtitles instead of dubbing the voices with Dutch, like done quite a lot in France and Germany with their native languages.

And it sounds awful when you see a series like "Two and a half man" in French. 

That brings up another pet peeve of mine, when they dub over foreign language material, especially when the original audio is faintly in the background. It's distracting, I'd much rather hear the audio as originally intended, and read subtitles in my own language.

Be glad you aren’t Russian or Polish: they often dub things by using a “lector”, a single (!) voice, or sometimes luxuriously with one voice for men and another for women, who dubs all the dialog, just talking over the original dialog. I honestly don’t know how people can tolerate it; my ADHD brain struggles tremendously with the distraction of multiple voices at once.

[james_s]

I just think it’s amazing that it literally takes ONE generation to completely make a proper, complete language out of pidgin. Our childhood brains are literally built to embrace language.

It really is amazing, and interesting too. I work with people from all over the world and quite often they will speak somewhat broken English with a thick accent while their kids speak it fluently with no accent at all, in addition to speaking the parents native language fluently too.

I also am frequently entertained by the grammatically incorrect but often both understandable and humorous things many non-native English speakers say. A former (female) boss of mine was talking to me and a coworker once and wanted us to write up a proposal for something, but what she said was "I would like you guys to propose to me" which has an entirely different meaning, we all got a good laugh out of that.

[Circlotron]

But man is English weird in other ways. <snip> and that we use some really strange consonants, like the two ‘th’ sounds

But for a Korean, learning Japanese would be easier than learning German.

I have a Korean friend who spent several years In Australia while progressively learning (the local version of!) English and she cannot pronounce the word "Woolworths" to save her life.  And she was quite amused at the colloquial term "dilly dally" which of course means to procrastinate.

[vk6zgo]

I disagree with this. The importance to understand English is huge. For example if you know the correct term in English for your DIY task at hand you might be able to find information on Wikipedia or a YouTube video. Or to navigate the McMaster-Carr website to understand which tools and materials do exist.

Once you're comfortable around the basics you learn the difference between serial - cereal and dessert - desert. At that time you can also enjoy English/American sitcoms, movies and books to further develop your English.

Agreed on the value of knowing English, but I do think it is a challenging language, lots of native speakers have difficulty with using the correct form of there/their/they're, brake/break, tea/tee and other words that have multiple completely different words that are pronounced exactly the same. Then there are words like lead (the element) and lead (to lead somebody somewhere) that are spelled exactly the same but pronounced differently, and the past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced the same as the element lead.

On the other hand at least English rarely has the silent letters that French is notorious for, I never have really understood why French has so many gratuitous letters on the end of words that aren't pronounced.

I noticed that years ago, when travelling through Italy & France.

Italian words are relatively easy for an English speaker to analyse "by inspection" in their written form, & even make a reasonable effort at pronunciation.
French words look quite similar to Italian ones, but large numbers of letters are "dropped", so the end result sounds very different.

I also found that Italians were much less likely to snort "humph!" & ignore you if you have trouble in pronunciation.

[eti]

I find “some people” (or person) here are so gushingly overflowing with their own self-perceived “cleverness” and “insight” - I’ll add that to my pet peeve list here.

They know who they are.

[james_s]

I also found that Italians were much less likely to snort "humph!" & ignore you if you have trouble in pronunciation.

That has always seemed weird to me. If somebody is willing to speak my language the last thing I'm going to do is nitpick over their pronunciation.

[IDEngineer]

I thought "made up" meant "consists of" or "comprises", as in "Cellphones are made up of a variety of components". {evil grin}

I would say that “to be made up of” is quite distinct from “to be made up”.

Fine, I will amend my sentence to "A variety of components make up a cellphone".  Are we talking about a two-word phrase for women's cosmetics, a two-word phrase that means "comprise", a two-word phrase that means "go into", or...?

[Kasper]

When people refer to electricity as hydro.

Does this happen in other places or is it specific to BC, Canada?  There are lots of hydro dams and the main electrical utility company is called BC Hydro.