#读文章学英语#只会用very表达非常的意思?看看还有哪些更地道的说法

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这期的文摘,是一个Airbnb的实习生在实习结束后写的总结,我认为是一个学习写作的相当好的范本,我们会对一些我们认为特别值得学习或者关注的部分进行标注和解读。其中尤其值得学习的一点是,对于英语中一些近义词的运用,不仅使得文字更加地道精确,而且避免重复使用同一个词造成的单调。当然值得学习的肯定不止这些标注的地方,相信每个仔细读仔细思考的人都能从中得到更多的收获。

原文地址:medium.com/airbnb-engi…

以下是本期文摘,enjoy!


At Airbnb, downtime is not just an inconvenience — there is often substantial real-world impact on our users. As a constant reminder of this incredibly important fact, we created a prominently placed poster of a single tweet from many moons ago. Roughly paraphrased, it reads:

@AirbnbHelp Help! I’m locked outside, and can’t contact my host as Airbnb is down.

注意这一小段里就有3处表示非常如何如何的句子。

先看一下 substantial, incrediblyprominently三个词的解释(我一直强调学英语的时候要用英英词典,用英语解释英语,所以一般我会放英英词典的解释)

substantial: of considerable importance, size, or worth.

incredibly: to a great degree; extremely or unusually.

prominently: so as to catch the attention; conspicuously.

如果我们只会用very来表达“非常”的话,这三个地方可能会被写成:

very big real-world impact,

very important fact,

very clearly placed poster.

感受出区别了吗?这就是普通表达和地道表达之间的区别。

一方面,原文中的用法比这3个very更加精准,比如substantial虽然基本是very big的意思,但是更加突出size。incredibly基本可以和very互换使用,但是程度比very更高一点,而且注意在口语中incredibly可以配合上夸张的表情更加突出一种出人意料的感觉。

另一方面,通过这样多样的词语组合,避免了在一段文字中重复使用一个单词或者句式的单调感,这点在口语中不明显,但是如果要在书面语中做到地道,是必不可少的,因此地道的书面语要求的词汇量会大的多。

Of course, a website could go down due to various reasons. Maybe a flaky test acted up and allowed us to push bad code. Maybe a box unexpectedly failed. Maybe a large-scale vulnerability fix impacted kernel performance. Fortunately, every team at Airbnb plays their own part in ensuring this scenario doesn’t occur, making downtime exceedingly rare. On DeployInfra, we focus on the deploy box in the software development life cycle — basically, once code is written and ready for use, we’re responsible for getting it onto the appropriate servers (which covers a lot of territory!). Almost all of Airbnb’s many apps/services are shipped using our homegrown deployment service, Deployboard, which in many ways makes us the last line of defense against “bad code” (after us, the code is — by definition — live!).

due to various reasons: 由于各种原因。

due to ... 是很常见的用法,如果要表达因为...不止because一种说法,除了due to 还可以说 for ...

flaky test 这个用法不是很常见,因为这里的flaky是一个非正式用法,有点口语化,先来看看flaky的字面意思

flaky: 1. breaking or separating easily into small thin pieces. 2. (informal) crazy or eccentric

明显这里用的是这个词的第二种意思,也是一种informal的用法,但用在这里反而显得很合适。但是这种高级的用法如果不是native说实话很难写出来,能够看懂就ok了

exceedingly rare: 又来了一个非常...的新说法!exceedingly用在这里比very更精确,因为有一种超出标准的意思

homegrown 这个词一般都能懂意思,其实在实用中也很有用,比如说在简历里面会说“用了一套自己开发的系统”,a homegrown system,是不是比 a system developed by ourselves 简介多了也优雅多了?

With this great power comes even greater responsibility. While almost all Airbnb engineers interact with Deployboard regularly, these interactions are typically short and more of a means to an end. As a result, we cannot rely on familiarity as a crutch; we need to make sure the deployment process is carefully designed and potential misuse is minimized. In particular, we hold our interface to extremely high standards for ease-of-use and intuitiveness. Anything less, and mistakes run rampant.

With A comes B, 一种非常常用的句式,用更简单的英文重写就是We have A, but also have B. 重点是说B。大家可以试试用这个句式造句,比如With the ever-increasing size of data, comes with a huge challenge to store and process them.

more of A to B, 这是一个更常见的句式,更像是A而不是B。

extremely high standard: 已经是本文第5个表示非常的用法了,而且5个没重样!不过不要觉得这样就可以随意换着用,这里如果换成exceedingly high standard 或者 incredibly high standard,都不是很贴切,只有extremely最适合,当然用very也是可以的。

This work needed to be done extremely carefully. As Airbnb has grown over the last half-decade, Deployboard has been right there with it, now handling thousands of deploys daily. Suffice it to say that Deployboard is quite integral to Airbnb’s operations, and so making substantial changes to it — especially in its critical sections — requires a rather steady hand. Thus began a multi-team collaboration to develop a solution proposal, a process that was meticulous, extremely cautious, and very detail-oriented; I felt almost more like a PM than an engineer for the first few weeks of my internship! Finally, after many mockup iterations and hundreds of document comments, the end goal took shape.

extremely careful,这里又用了一次extremely,不再赘述

integral to, 类似于important to,但是integral更强调作为整体的一部分的重要性,所以程度一般比important更重一些。平时写书面语的时候偶尔可以用integral代替important,例如:my work is integral to the company's success. 是不是听起来很nb?

critical: 一个多义词,有非常多不同的用法,这里的意思是relating to, or being a turning point or specially important juncture。简单点说就是very important,和上面的integral类似。但是critical更强调非常关键,容易出错的概念,因此这里用integral不如critical贴切。

took shape: 形成或者成型。比如说,our website starts to take shape.

(此处略过原文的若干段落)

Disable targets that shouldn’t be deployed to (i.e. it has dependencies that have not yet been deployed to). This one sounded probably the simplest, since we already have a DB table for deploy, but turned out to be by far the hardest change. As it turns out, we have so many deploys that retrieving the deploys associated with a change in the naive way is prohibitively slow. This problem persisted even after adding the appropriate indices, which was quite surprising.

turn out to be: eventually becomes. 有一点出乎意料的意思,也是很常用的一个用法。比如:The new project turns out to be a great success.

prohibitively slow: 这里表示非常慢,无可忍受的慢,这又是一个比very slow好的多的用法。

prohibitively: in a way that forbids or prevents something. 表示因为太慢而产生某种困难,如果只是用very slow就没有这个感觉了。当然不是所有可以用very的地方都可以用prohibitively替换,因为very本身是中性的,而prohibitively是负面的

Of course, completing the technical work wasn’t the end of the project — there’s no value in developing a solution if nobody uses it! Thus the last few weeks of my internship were dedicated to promoting the project to various Airbnb teams, requiring a flurry of demos, presentations, and many, many emails. In the end, a number of key services — including Deployboard itself! — ended up adopting deploy pipelines, substantially improving the developer experience.

dedicated to doing: 用于做某件事情,注意这里是to doing 而不是to do, 因为这里to 后面是名词性的,比如可以说my weekend was dedicated to the project.

a flurry of demos: a sudden occurrence of many things at once,这里的意思是突然之间要做很多demo

substantially improving: 又见substantially,这下大家应该不陌生了吧


总结时间

书面语和口语中都要注意避免重复用同一个单词或者用法,显得过于单调,所以掌握一些常用词的同义用法可以让我们的表达更加原汁原味

这篇文章中和very 具有相近意思的表达有:

    substantially: 侧重规模大

    incredibly:基本可以和very互换,程度更高

    prominently: 非常显眼地

    exceedingly: 偏正面,程度很高,基本可以和very互换

    extremely: 程度很高,基本可以和very互换

    prohibitively: 偏负面

当然,类似的同义词还有tremendously, immensely等等很多,这也是为什么我们要尽量用英英字典,因为你学一个词的时候可能同时能学4-5个词

表达类似very..的词汇是如此之多,有老外甚至专门整理了“不要用very,而要用这些词”的表格,大家可以慢慢欣赏,看看自己认识其中多少个词呢?

very...
其他值得学习和注意的词语和用法:

    due to some reasons: 由于某些原因

    more of A to B:更像A而不是B

    critical:非常重要的

    turn out to be:最终成为

    integral to ...:对...必不可少

    dedicated to doing:全心全意做某件事

建议大家点击查看原文可以完整的看一遍原文,阅读时尽量不要尝试把他翻译成中文来理解,而是用英语思考,如果有不认识的单词也尽量用英英字典查看,相信会有更好的收获。

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