Undoubtley, linguists and people who speak many languages have a gift for it; and people with poor memory and a bad ear for sounds have a hard time of it. Still, it’s usually said that one of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker - so how good is your japanese after 15 years?
Did you look up the etymology of the word, and look at the sound changes over time, or just shrug it off?
Did you tell her about Ghoti ?
Yes, I meant anthem, but couldn’t remember the correct word. However, even if the choral singers don’t know it, that still leaves history professors or immigrants etc.
I remember another typical question was about Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson; what if the person is from a family (Amish, Jehovahs witnesses, whatever) that forbids TV or lives out in the woods without electricity and thus can’t watch TV?
I mean, looking at the Dopers, no matter what aspect of American culture that’s discussed, there’s always somebody from somewhere who comments “I never encountered that in my life /until I moved to <state> …” It seems to me far too narrow considering how various people’s lifes are.
No, I didn’t think it unremarkable. If you asked me about the 3rd verse of my national anthem (we no longer sing the first two, because they were written in the 19th century in a nationalistic tone and refer to territories that no longer belong to us, so they would send the wrong signal) I might get it together after some time (and with even more time, I might remember the Bavarian anthem I learned in primary school), but I couldn’t tell you the 1st and 2nd verse. I wouldn’t expect the average Joe to know all three verses.
But knowing the first verse would not make that person an automatic neo-nazi to me (they tend to sing the first verse to make people mad, and then get into trouble), he might just be interested in history. (Singing the first verse is different from knowing it - though with songs, singing the melody helps me to remember the words better).
My grandparents (native language = Mandarin) had a difficult time with aspects of grammar that didn’t exist in their mother tongue - subject-verb agreement, changing the verb to reflect tense, etc.
I’m not convinced that it is that simple:
“There’s an apple in the bowl, next to the banana.”
One specific apple.
“The apple of the Zambian apple tree is unusually sweet.”
Any old apple of those trees.
They are ALL official meanings. A learner is as likely to encounter meanings 3 and 4 as they are meaning 1 (with meaning 2, it depends on their lifestyle :D).
I agree about it being easy to think of other reasons someone might know the second verse to the national anthem; it would be very unusual, but it wouldn’t automatically mean you were a spy.
I bet there are a few people on this board who’ve learnt the second verse simply out of curiosity and/or wanting to know more than other people.
@Guizot? 15 years? You beat me by 2. 
You’re right - it is much, much more complicated than that. I have a tree diagram I use with my EFL students that I think explains it really well, but I can’t go on my own computer right now, and I’m not sure this is the right thread for this anyway. 
Agree with the posters who say it depends on the native language of the student.
As an anecdote though, one thing that stands out in my mind as the topic most likely to be a complete mess in class is the Third Conditional. (Or possibly, maybe I just suck at teaching the Third Conditional.) This is what we use when we talk about situations that didn’t happen in the past, so “If I had studied harder, I would have passed the exam.”
Also, native English speakers are incredibly sloppy in many cases when they make statements using the Third Conditional (usually by using the simple past instead of past perfect), which makes it difficult for the students to pick up on examples of it outside of the classroom.
One thing I find particularly annoying:
how do words spelled almost the same are pronounced completely differently
e.g. beast and breast; tough and though
Exactly. I taught EFL for a little while, and the distinction between “the,” “a/an,” and no article is not as uniform and clear as one would expect. Like “he’s at home,” but “he’s at the house.” “He’s in school” vs “he’s in the school.” Even British and American English has differences between “He’s in hospital” vs “he’s in the hospital.” And this is just what immediately pops into mind.
They may have fewer problems than speakers of langauges which don’t have definite articles at all (like most Slavic languages), but, in my experience, perfectly idiomatic usage of articles, especially the definite article, is still difficult among speakers of Germanic languages.
Maybe these rules on how to convert spelling to pronounciation would help you?
I would still say the answer is phrasal verbs. Universally, learners have problems with those even long after every other aspect of the language has been mastered - even those few who end up being perfect in their use of articles will occasionally use a phrasal verb incorrectly.
Really random things tend to trip my students up. I am CONSTANTLY correcting them when they say “I’m boring” when they mean “I’m bored”. Or when they say “I’m going to my home” - and I tell them to say “I’m going home” instead.
Prepositions are a bitch as well.
Yeah, I’ll change my initial answers and agree with phrasal verbs.
Quite amusing… He appears to have replaced a short lookup table with a long set of “rules”, and still only claims 59-85% accuracy. It’s an interesting statement about the limitations of data compression, but it doesn’t say much about the English language.
Actually, “… since I am biking to work” sounds fine to me, with “since” meaning not only “from a certain point up until now” but also “because of”.
I agree proper use of articles is a big stumbling block, not to mention the th sound, or sounds rather, because you have the soft th in “theater” and the hard th in “that.”
An old German prof of mine once said: “Prepositions are the flavor of a language.”
Another obstacle – and this holds true for just about any language – is the time and effort needed to master it at even a rudimentary level. I’ve never taught, but still many Thai students have asked me how they can improve their English. You could see the disappointment on their faces when I told them: “Study and practice.” They all seem to hope for a magic bullet that will allow them to wake up suddenly one day and know English.
An American lady I know found a similar experience in Indonesia. She and her husband, who are stateside now, used to live in Thailand. Later he, an engineer, worked on a project in Indonesia for a few years, and she was with him. To fill the time, she started teaching English, on the island of Lombok. She said the local community was enthusiastic at first but dropped out quickly once they realized there was no process of osmosis to put this English in their heads.
It’s not the most difficult thing by a long shot, but many students are tripped up initially by “countable” vs “noncountable” nouns. What’s the difference between “I eat a cake” and “I eat some cake”?
It’s probably not specific to English, but I have the impression that the hardest thing to do when learning any foreign language is to do math in your head. Math and language are located in different bowls of brains, or some such.
Honestly, nobody knows any of the other verses. Probably less than a third of Americans even know that there ARE other verses. (There’s a higher proportion of know-it-alls on this forum, of course.) I’d bet even money that there are more Americans-- a LOT more-- who know the value of pi to 25 or more decimal places than know all five verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Asking an American about the second verse of the national anthem would be like asking them the middle name of Andrew Jackson’s second cousin. They’d look at you like you were pulling their leg.
I’m not saying nobody knows the other verses, but those who do are aware that they’ve made a conscious point of memorizing something unusual.
I’m afraid that Asimov has rather proved his point in your case-- a non-American wouldn’t be likely to understand this particular cultural quirk, just as I would never realize that singing the first verse of the German version would make me look like a skinhead, not a patriot.
Heh - my girlfriend, a native Spanish speaker, would say that and it always made me giggle. I eventually corrected her.
She also has a lot of trouble with the “th” sound since that doesn’t exist in Latin-American Spanish, and distinguishing all the vowel sounds besides the 5 that are in Spanish. (In English I can think of at least 13 distinct vowel sounds) Irregular verbs are a bitch for her as well.
Wait, what? I’ve never really done any math in English, if I need to calculate some numbers I’ll translate it over when I have a finished product to work with instead. I’d probably have to get back to you if you wanted a centigrade to fahrenheit conversion though, since I’ve never been able to do that in my head in any language. I can generally get close enough with metric to feet by converting to 40 inches per meter and dividing by twelve, however, so that’s at least something.