To expand further, “swear words” may be used to denote "profanity"in India.
“Four-letter-words” have still not caught on.
Bob Dylan wrote it; Joan Baez recorded it.
Substitute variety, then. People from different areas will use different idioms to express the same thing. My point is that, in my experience, Koreans, for example, are fully aware that people from Busan or Daegu will use different expressions than the people in Seoul; however, those same people have a difficult time grasping that the English language also has the same variety.
Yes, but the TLDR of the rest of my post is that this lady is likely to not quite meet the OP’s image of “a native speaker of English”; there is a high probability that it wasn’t her most-used language from birth and that she learned it simultaneously with several others, whereas for an Aussie, Brit or American, “native speaker” implies “monolingual”; not only that, but many times (I hope the Aussies are less bad about this than the Americans, not having Hollywood there) they expect idioms to be mutually understandable - who mentioned baseball? Ah yes, njtt. There is a greater divergence in vocabulary and idioms (note I’m not talking about pronunciation) between Indian varieties of English and those of the UK, the US or Australia than between any two of those three. As confirmed by the very-appropriately named indian…
- want the addy of my Translation Grad School? According to every teacher whose primary language was English, it’s impossible to be “native” in more than one language. As one of my classmates said after one such rant, “all I know is, when someone wants a translation into Galego I’m Galego, when into Spanish I’m Spanish, and when into Dutch hey that’s my mother’s tongue!” That’s something people who grew up monolingual have serious problems understanding.
Often Indians don’t seem to grasp that their pronunciations are way off what people in other countries are used to.
And I have to say, that sounds like an incredibly dumb and ineffective way to learn to read.
It is. You need to use a little bit of Look and Say (which is what it sounds like is being described in the OP), because not all words are phonically decodable and some words, the high frequency ones, need to be learnt quickly so that the child can access books, but synthetic phonics is currently the best way to learn to read because once children can blend phonemes they can self-teach and build their own vocabulary.
The goal is to transition the child to mental orthographic representations, which is how it is believed we read as adults, but that only happens when the child is reading fluently and frequently and they will make the transition naturally.
I’ve also noticed that Indian English can sound archaic. I used to work with this guy who used “whosoever” all the time.
Baseball idioms are all over the place in US English. We have the whole “three strikes and you’re out” metaphor, basically meaning that a person can mess up two times, often in terms of behavior, and it’s not too bad, but the third time is when you clamp down on them. We have the “base” system of dating (e.g. “I got to third base with her”), which is an article in itself. You can be “way out in left field”, you can be “in sight of home plate”, you can hit something “out of the park” if you achieve a great success, you can “touch base” with someone, you can play in the “big leagues”, and you can cover all your bases.
I think this is a very good point.
When I pointed out to my Indian colleagues that maybe some of their customers they speak to on the phone may not understand all their Indian English expressions, one replied with 'There is no Indian English or other countries English. There is only English." The other one said people in London understood him and that I undestood him.
Well I have lived in 5 countries including 3 years in Japan. I have worked with Indian Australians for years in Melbourne. I studied linguistics at university. I am not surprised that I can understand him. But people in country towns may not understand all his Indian English.
One thing he said was “Are there any alphabets in front of the numbers?” He was asking about a reference number that usually has 2 letters in front of it. When I asked him does that mean ‘letters’ when you say ‘alphabets’ he thought I was being facetious. He said everyone knew that usage.
continuing the hijack into the land of “what do you mean, it’s not like this everywhere?”…
In a project involving factories in over 60 countries, there’s enough people involved that you inevitably run into some who haven’t left home very often if at all; when the company is good at employee retention, you run into people who have only known that one company, that one factory, that one way of doing things. You run into people like that gentleman who, upon being told that “kg/gallon” was not an acceptable density unit, claimed that “it’s the one everybody uses!”
We referred to those people as the “‘the thumb is mine’ people”, after a strip (a Mafalda) where Miguelito (about 5yo) is playing at hiding a belvedere on top of a building with his thumb; Mafalda, a bit older and ancient beyond her years, asks “but do you know why you see the thumb bigger than the tower?” and Miguelito answers “yes, because the thumb is MINE”.
Bozuit Often Indians don’t seem to grasp that their pronunciations are way off what people in other countries are used to.
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Agreed 100%. “While in Rome …”
And I have to say, that sounds like an incredibly dumb and ineffective way to learn to read.
How?
True. Nevertheless, “teaching” a child to read by a progression of increasing number of letters in words is just asinine.
That she doesn’t know the implication of the expression “four-letter word” pales in comparison to such a delusional idea, and her apparent ignorance of the cognitive processes involved with learning to read.
Oh!
I got it now.
She was progressing from letters of Alphabet to two-letter words and so on. This is Indian way of teaching.
They may teach reading that way, but that’s not how the children learn it. Children usually learn to read despite misguided pedagogy.
Agree.
Because that’s not how people learn to read. You don’t just learn words in some logical order, you learn words that are often used, or perhaps even random ones. Maybe you start with “cat” and “dog” but the next word might be “rabbit”.
Really guizot put it best.
That is interesting considering her kid is in a school in Melbourne and is the only Indian kid in the class. The school is teaching that way, not the mother.
I thought mother was home-schooling the kid.:dubious:
I checked with some teachers here in India. None of them adopt the two-letter to three-letter to four-letter words. They were surprised too.
I’m also surprised to have learnt this teaching method actually comes from a school.
Perhaps he knows how to read to a reasonable level for his age, and he’s actually learning to spell the slightly less common words? I thought kids knew how to read before school anyway.
No: that happens sometimes (more easily in some languages than in others), but children are not expected to be able to read before starting first grade, much less previous ones.
My kindergarten teacher was shocked to learn I was already literate (age 5 when I started school).