> Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem.

There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph.

You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.

I think he might be implying some issues related to the caste system. It’s been discussed on HN before about how some members of the upper caste may not treat other team members from a lower caste appropriately. Despite no longer being in India, and despite that behavior not being acceptable in the host country.

> It’s been discussed on HN before...

Yes, it has been used on HN as a bludgeon but the reality is a little different!

Yes, the ancient caste system still exists in India. But today it is only relevant when it comes to politics and marriage. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...

The fact you believe it to only be relevant in marriage and politics goes to show the naivety of your understanding of how prevalent this 2000+ year caste system is. I'd go as far as calling it the oldest system of systemic slavery in the world. The fact it plays such a level to this day in the modern lives of individuals shows how the Indians have normalized it in their society and often directly bring it into our own. It even goes as far as impacting children, and starts from their. Who they know. Who they can interact with. Where they're accepted. At every step impacting and controlling their lives. To claim what you have said to trivialize it is kind of shocking to me.

A lot of false claims in this thread are being made by people who see these immigrants as a competitive threat.

From personal experience, I've heard plenty of caste-based insults when I was there a decade or so ago, as well as other forms of prejudice. This manifests most explicitly when it comes to marriages I think, but it would be naïve to assume nepotism, and by extension caste-based discrimination, doesn't proliferate to other aspects of life.

The sentence referred to here:

> All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost.

…Is not referring to a problem that has, at that point in the story, been revealed. It is being evocative in a sort of dog-whistle technique - before jumping into the generalisations that follow.

India works on a caste system, said caste system being very discriminatory.

What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes.

It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in.

I mean, legally they are not in a caste, right? Does the Indian state recognize caste?

Yes Indian state recognizes all castes. That is the core problem. For the system to be dismantled you need the Indian state to stop recognizing castes and implement US style Affirmative Action and only provide Reservation opportunities to those from low income groups.

But the first ones to fight against this reform would be the "lower caste" strata of the population. Who would give up freebies, Government jobs as well as in education Prestigious Universities where you can guaranteed it based on your birth caste and not on merit? No one would. If I am born in any of the "lower caste" groups I can easily get a Government job, free/subsidized education in any Prestigious University irrespective of my scores/performance. Now there is talk of reservation/quotas in land distribution as well (comments by a politician in a recent speech to his base). Idea is that if you want to purchase land some section of the land is reserved if you belong to a particular caste (and will probably be available for lower than market rate as well). However ridiculous it might sound.

Affirmative Action in US doesn't have a quota system or reservation. It instead focuses on equal opportunity (no denial of opportunity to anyone based on their race/creed/color/sex/religion etc). This is different from India's Caste based reservation system where you are guaranteed of a job/education if you belong to lower caste. Doesn't matter if you are merited or not. Doesn't matter if you are rich or not. Even seats in the Parliament of India have reservations/quotas for lower castes.

It is ridiculous to talk about dismantling caste system while in the same breath prop up structures that actively promotes this same caste system on the Government level. And the Politicians do not want to dismantle said system because it helps with their vote bank.

That is a very far fetched statement. I am an Indian and technically from Other backward class (OBC) as classified in the system. I have never had a problem in my city. Off course that doesn't mean that India is not a huge and complex country with 100s if not thousands of groups differentiated based on region, class , caste etc. You are colouring a very complicated and nuanced issue with your personal biases.

What bias is it you think I have?

The only comment here that actually spoke the Facts as it is. Another commenter even said there is "systemic slavery" in India. Don't know whether to laugh or cry at the naivety of this individual. To think that 1.4 billion people, of which 80% belong to the so called "lower caste" strata, and that the rest 20% are enslaving the 80% is not only laughable but downright insane proposition. I wanted to respond but I know it is not worth spending my time and energy on such individuals.

Just goes to show how bias clouds reason and logic. Propaganda in full swing!

Thank you for speaking facts.

I said nothing about slavery, what are you talking about?

Did I say it was you? I said "another commenter". If I wanted to say it was you, I would have said it was you.

you lumped me in with them, implying an attitude I don't have.

And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother. The English language has implicature.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/

I lumped you in with propagandists. Some spread propaganda of there being "systemic slavery" while others say "What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes".

Both are not borne out of facts but malicious propaganda.

"It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in."

You are implying this in a negative manner. The reason people don't talk about caste is because we have progressed a lot in the past century. No one gives a damn about caste in their day-to-day life. It only props up in political rallies where talking about caste based discrimination is a precursor to lay the stage for either increased reservation or introducing new reservation in the already prevalent discriminatory quota system that exists in India (which should have been done away with in 10 years after our Independence as envisaged by Ambedkar himself but nevertheless continues to exist 70+ years after Independence corroding our society further).

> And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother

I don't have to. You are a propagandist. I stand by that.

right, you lumped me in with someone talking about slavery.

That might have been the first indication you were being unfair.

The poster I responded to thought they were talking about money, the poster was talking about castes.

Leave your religious wars at the door please.

About a month ago I watched an Indian man absolutely go off on another Indian man after hearing his name (this was over zoom). The Indian Man being accosted just took it, and yes, the disagreement was about the name.

I've both read about it and seen it first hand. You don't typically see it expressed so publicly as the above anecdote, most of the time it comes across as an odd sort of subservience. Almost the way you would expect a mail room worker to act towards the CEO.

No one said all Indian's are like this, but it has to do with the Paradox of Intolerance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

All it takes is for 1 or 2 individuals to have this attitude and it will eventually take over.

No one ever said it was everyone, but the issue exists.

I assume that he meant they are well educated, skilled and thusly won’t be working for dirt cheap as they’d have better options.

He said the problem isn’t with hiring Indians, it is with cheap labor.

It's used to be the case that, high caste people (Brahmins mostly) are the ones who can afford higher education and in turn they can speak English fluently compared to others in India. They were also the first to emigrate and likely hold high level positions in many companies.

Fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly. I don't see any caste discrimination in my line of work (urban IT companies). Nearly none of my coworkers know my caste, they don't care, neither am I.

It does happen in rural villages, specially inter caste marriages are still frowned upon. But it getting less effective over time. Determined people go make money and caste is not a hinder in many cases.

Maybe you should dust off your reading compression skills, his paragraph is pretty self explanatory. He is saying that those who speak English usually come from wealthy families and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly.

> Maybe you should dust off your reading compression skills, his paragraph is pretty self explanatory

Thank you for your suggestion :-) Can you show where this specific point: "...and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly" is made in his (we are assuming it's a he, aren't we? how bad of us) comment?

I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written.

English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time.

(Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)

English is the simplest Latin based language. This has nothing to do with pronunciation but not even knowing basic words. Or how to communicate. Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated. The Indian English Education system is the same one the Japanese and Koreans use. And they don't know English. The reality is it's like if you learned Spanish in middle school to highschool. That's the average English proficency. Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use. It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

Whilst it uses a lot of Latin words (mostly via French), English is actually a Germanic language.

I know it comes from the Angles of Angaland.

What do you mean by Latin based language?

Or what are the other "Latin based languages" that you are comparing it to?

Pronunciation and orthography vary in many cases, not simple at all. Unless you already come from a germanic language, then it's relatively easy.

Coming from another Germanic language helps you deal with pronunciation and orthography varying in English?

What's the relationship?

You can just speak it in your native way and you will mostly be understood. But the "relatively easy" was to the language as a whole.

English grammar is very simple to learn if you come from a Germanic language, but I think English pronunciation and orthography is a mystery to all of us.

Even if you know the origins of the word, you still have to guess: facade is pronounced correctly, but the pronunciation of Uranus was apparently left up to a 5-year old to decide. Kindergarten and doppelganger are pronounced the German way, angst and flak aren't. The non-loanwords are somehow as inconsistent, after pronunciation changed but the spelling was preserved (and the other way around). For an unknown word you can come up with reasonable guesses, but they might be totally wrong. The only thing that makes us good English speakers is extensive exposure to English media.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.

A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).

I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.

It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

There are people who measure language difficulty. The uS state department does it from a US perspective but I’ve seen others

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

Well, I learned it by watching HBO, so it can't be that hard...

Congrats! That's awesome.

> most things are written in the languages they use

Do you know anything about India or are you merely talking out of your ass? This is patently false—nearly all documents are in three languages: English, Hindi and the state’s local language.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages).

It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules.

So, at least by that measure, English is far from being the simplest.

> It's not clear how you measure simplicity

Compared with other european languages the english grammar is much simpler and the number of words needed to communicate is also not so high.

Compared with German, it's complicated. German has only "Past Perfect" and "Past simple" tenses.

English has at least 4.

> Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use

What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.

> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated

Where is the data for this?

> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

And where do you get this data from?

English is a language borne out of centuries of diversity. Its turdness is its strength.

You’re giving the original poster too much credit. He’s just straight up being racist. If he heard Singaporean English m, ai lah this ang moh would also call it incomprehensible.

> He’s just straight up being racist.

I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult.

> Singaporean English

I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.

> English is such a turd language.

I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)

Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.

Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].

It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.

That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.

1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.

2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiK5BWmKSqE

English is an official language over there, but it is spoken differently.

Hindi in the cities is interesting, it can turn into a 50-50 blend of English and Hindi, with English used for most nouns, and sentences strung together with Hindi otherwise.

Having said that, actual conversational skills in English were lacking even in Delhi. You can throw out words and hope there's enough of a shared vocabulary to get ideas across, but the majority of people aren't fluent, or even conversational in it. I've heard the Southern part is somewhat better though, as Hindi is less pervasive, and English is used more often as a second language if you travel out of state and the likes.

Different indeed. Every sentence sounds like a question with a small delay before the last word of the sentence.

I have no idea why this is, but you can see it in literally any Indian engineering lecture recording on YouTube.

Hmm, this is interesting. Never realized this was a thing. Care to submit a specimen link?

I find this quirk quite endearing for some reason.

> It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.

Only to people who judge competence based on diction.

> Many of them just can't speak English correctly.

I’m someone who loves seeing well written and hearing well spoken English. The standards I hold myself to are quite high.

However, I have never had a problem with people- native or foreign born- with less than perfect English communication skills.

Going down that route smacks of elitism, xenophobia and a hyper-normative mindset. The way you get good at standard English is by practice, which they are doing every day at work using the skills (technology) they have mastered. Some of my family are ESL and my place of birth (in the UK, for God’s sake) was and is looked down on for the dialect.

Is it really that hard to just ask someone to repeat or restate themselves?

I agree, though there’s a point at which no repetition helps, which is really awkward. And honestly stresses me out going into meetings with them (not Indians in my case).

if only we could all be as enlightened as you are, you are obviously not of this earth :pray:

I'm not a native English speaker. I've been practicing English pretty much every day for decades but speaking with someone who has an unfamiliar enough accent or dialect – or sometimes culture – is really hard for me. After asking them to repeat/rephrase a few times, I feel rude and/or stupid.

Me speaking with an Indian with a non-{US, British} accent means that very little information is going to get across during the conversation, because this problem shows up in both directions.

Of course, the issue essentially vanishes when the conversation is written down. Unfortunately, many native English speaker that I've been in touch with fail to understand the cognitive cost of oral communication.

>Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem.

As a non-Indian, the caste problem seems so endemic that the only solution seems to be to not hire anyone born in India. Their American-born children will, presumably, have overcome the issue.

(Not 100% serious, but not 100% joking.)

It's one of those dumb human antipatterns like racism, sexism, and most other legitimately bad -isms: pick attribute A and make that undesirable while making attribute B desirable. Perhaps in Indian and Western schools alike, they should consider the (in)famous eye color discrimination exercise to give a glimpse of how horrible it is. Comfortable, sheltered children tend to grow up to be ignorant adults bordering on clueless. It's only when someone has experienced what it feels like can they grow a modicum of empathy or sympathy.