Even Greener Pastures

I found this quote by Confucius and I'm a bit confused (no pun intended).

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."

The words "noblest" and "easiest" are without "the", followed by "the bitterest". I'm aware that the article can be omitted in casual speech or when talking about the same thing at different times of the day/year for example (change is hardest at the beginning = change is at its hardest) but the example above doesn't fit either category. Reflection, imitation and experience are all uncountable in this particular context. It seems random to me. Can someone please explain this?

I think 'the' serves to emphasize bitterest as the superlative. I suppose that it's not needed, strictly speaking, but it sounds completely natural to me. I would never have noticed it as an odd bit of grammar.

But as Confucius says: "Native speaker not always keen on explaining grammar"

Have a look at this, Nikola:

(Ignore what they say about the question having been answered already, scroll down to (9), where they explain about predicative vs. attributive use of adjectives.)
Stackexchange almost always delivers.

@Alharacas
Thank you so much, that's really helpful. Once again, you tamed the wild google. So Stackexchange is good for language dilemmas?

Thank you all for explaining what sounds natural to you. I think that the combination of your comments and proper terms and rules Alharacas found, made it a lot clearer. There is a rule and in this case it says you can choose. The person who translated this quote chose to omit the definite article in the first two cases, and use it at the end to emphasize the point.

Oh and look, Truman and SHL agreed with each other. What a great day.

Glad you found the link useful, Nikola.
Yes, Stackexchange is great, also for questions about German (explanations in English). Plus - and I cannot emphasize enough how extraordinary this is - there are rarely, if ever any mistakes in their German example sentences. (There are lots of other sites where the grammar explanations are often just as good, but then they give a few examples, and these usually vary from strangely un-idiomatic to downright wrong, if not completely nonsensical.)

Thanks, Alharacas, for that great link to Stackexchange. It is good and a lot of fun. I joined the German site and they really do give good answers.

I`ve also used Linguee a lot, but I think it`s user-contributed and not done by professional translators? And, Linguee can be used for just about any language. You just open up a box and pick the language you want, but I think they are all from one language into English only? Not sure about that, but some of their English translations are really pretty weird sounding. I`ve found myself reading the English translation of something three times and asking myself, „what in the world is all this supposed to mean?“

Like you said, some other sites give nonsensical,  wrong or just weird translations. But, Stackexchange is good.

If I may digress to speaking about "Alice" for a moment.
I was thinking about why an English speaker would forget the rule about using 'an' instead of 'a' as the article before a word beginning with a vowel.  In English it is a rather magical moment to have such a cut and dried rule, with no exceptions.  Almost unheard of!

The answer lies in accents, dialects, and patterns of speech.  There is a whole population of English speakers in the US that pronounce a or an as just 'uh'.  It is not the difference between a airplane or an airplane, they pronounce either one as 'uh'.  Remember she also argued that 'the' is always pronounced 'thuh', and never 'thee'.  It is the same with the whole use of the word the.  Some accents/dialects just swallow the word completely.

I think in the written example above it was done for emphasis, but it is an insight to some people who 'teach' a language that have no academic qualifications.  In the end they are only communicating how they and their friends speak the language.

I don't think that is such a good idea.

Not to digress too much, Neal, but I`m not so sure that some of these speech patterns of native speakers can be ascribed to just regionalisms. A little, maybe, but not always. I think many people, like Alice, really don`t know how they are pronouncing words because they`ve never studied it and don`t even hear the difference.

I have to admit, until I read the thread about the difference between the pronunciation of „the“ in English as either „thuh“ or „thee“ I didn`t know there was a difference. Yet, in spite of this, I always pronounced „the“ in these two different ways never even noticing it.  In Alice`s own introductory video she pronounces the as „thee“ when saying „I live in thee United States“, yet she argued in post-after- post that she never pronounced „the“ anyway other than „thuh“, that nobody she knew ever did and she was never told there was a difference. I`m sure she never was taught there was a difference. I wasn`t.

 That´s why when I hear non-native speakers of English say, „English is such an easy language to learn“ I usually just say, „so I`ve been told. I`ve not noticed it (among those learning English as a foreign language).“

It does come back to the old argument about the best way to learn a new language, from books and rules and grammar or from just speaking it.  I think there must be a mix, and even a community tutor has to have enough basic knowledge to not lead students to break the rules.  Otherwise it becomes counterproductive.

I guess we aren't language experts just because we are native speakers.

I suppose language classes and teachers are supposed to stick with the literary standard in their instruction. But, students need more than that. If the student has the chance to go to a country where the target language is native, then they´re going to learn a whole different way of speaking, the way real people talk from day-to-day. The literary standard is fine as a starting point but there`s so much more to add to it. I think the goal of most students is to sound as natural as possible, in ordinary conversation with natives,  and I`m not sure how that´s actually taught, other than by films and documentaries maybe. Community tutors might be helpful if this is what the student wants.

I recall sitting in a German class once one evening and having a fellow student walk in the door, and saying to him „nabend“ (or it could be spelled n`Abend. I`m not sure because It`s not something I would write). It was just a spontaneous thing I never even thought about. And this was an advanced class.  The guy looked at me like I was crazy, not understanding what I had just said. It´s just a shortened form of „Guten Abend“, like saying „evening“ in English. Can you imagine saying „evening“ to someone in English and them not having a clue what you just said, because you left the „good“ off?  That´s the problem with formal language learning. It needs to incorporate stuff like this in the instruction. But, how you do it is the question. If all you teach is the formal literary standard the person learning this is going to go to Germany, Austria or wherever and not understand half of what people are saying on the street. Like the word „wegschmeißen“ in German, to throw away. That´s all I ever heard on the loading dock in Braunschweig. No one used the more standard „wegwerfen“. I knew what „wegwerfen“ was but no one said that. Years later a native speaker told me „wegschmeißen“ was colloquial. In checking Duden I found that was true, but I had no idea.

I`ve never understood teaching only the formal standard language to students. It would be like teaching students of English the phrase „throw away“ but never mentioning the phrase „to toss out.“ Can you imagine knowing what „to throw away“ means but have no clue what „to toss out“ means? That would be just as ridiculous.

Susan,

That was an interesting thread, and su.ki is quite authoritative in her knowledge of English (isn`t she a University professor someplace or something)?

Yes, certainly native speakers of a language are not taught pronunciation anymore than they are taught the grammar or vocabulary of their language. They just acquire it as soon as they start forming sentences.

I do agree that our brains tend to not only anticipate what a person is going to say before they even finish their sentence, which is why people interrupt one another so frequently, but unconsciously fill in sounds we expect to hear in words, even if in a song, or movie, that would otherwise sound distorted or muddled. I think it´s part of simply how we de-code sounds.

It all depends on how much familiarity we have with a language. Among native speakers of English, of the US variety, there are all sorts of muddled sounds that we can understand that are based on regionalisms that would throw off a non-native (mostly early) English speaker, even one with a high level of fluency. It´s a bit like anticipating what someone is going to say before they say it, based on the context.

Another thing I always keep in mind is that, in listening to anything on the internet or wherever, the sound quality could be poor, or the recording, or there could be any number of technical reasons why a sound comes out distorted sounding. So, maybe that´s got a little to do with it too.

The three THE pronunciations, based on whether the preceding noun starts with a consonant or a vowel, or whether you are using „the“ for emphasis, is a very subtle distinction that I doubt many Americans are aware of (maybe few Brits as well). I would bet that if I deliberately went around pronouncing „the“ as „thuh“ for any word, no one would ever notice or even hear the difference. It would be hard for me to do, because I`m not used to it, but I`d venture to say no one would hear the difference.