3. TIL that in 1961 JRR Tolkien was rejected by Nobel Prize committee because The L...

TIL that in 1961 JRR Tolkien was rejected by Nobel Prize committee because The Lord Of The Rings had 'not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality'.

Well, first of all non-native and native speakers don't learn words/grammatical structures in the same order.

For example, as a child around kingergarten we learn words like "giggle", "chuckle", "snap", "crush", "fuzzy", lots of different 'colourful' and emphatic words, most even little mental textures or sound effects (the sound of leaves rusting, a twig snapping). Words like "recieve" and "data", that kind of stuff is more year three stuff. And of course, as you become a teenager you learn more difficult words like 'incidental' and various five dollar words/phrases you find in news papers like "tech savvy". Assuming you're a twenty year old speaker and know, say 20,000 words, than that means you've spent 20 years mastering those words, and know when to say 'incidental', when to say 'happy accident', when to say 'happenstance', and so on. Vocabulary lists for non-native speakers seem to mix words like 'incidental', 'recieve', 'puddle', 'crack' all together at once.

And native speakers can intuitively understand finer shades of meaning which non native speakers struggle with, stuff like phrasal verbs (turn in, give up, etc), different prepositions and choice between the definate and indefinate article, that kind of stuff.

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - tolkienlibrary.com
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