In
<dc74548a025aff4a85f46926802a9b230555b...@chsa1035.share.beluni.net>,
on 11/02/2010
at 09:31 AM, "Hunkeler Peter (KIUP 4)"
<[email protected]> said:
>You'll surely gonna explain to me what intelligence has to do with
>the knowledge of a foreign language? Remember, there many people on
>this list for whom English is not the native language.
The programmers from other cultures whom I encountered professionally
did not have a problem with vocabulary. Their problems with English
were mostly in two very different categories:
They frequently carried over grammatical constructs from their
native languages.
They failed to understand common idioms.
The types of errors that I'm referring to were not the result of not
having learned arbitrary rules, e.g., what preposition to use when,
rather than a lack of structural understanding or vocabulary. They may
be made by someone with a larger English vocabulary than a native
anglophone who would not make those errors.
>In (probably) every language there are fine nuances in the meaning
>of words depending on context.
You can get in trouble even if you know those nuances, because an
idiom has semantics based on factors beyond vocabulary. Understanding
the individual words perfectly doesn't help.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
