Not-p. Only weenies hold that p.
Only people who're missing a kidney don't hold that p.
They could be uncommitted.
But it looks like I'm out a kidney.
Only people who put chorizo up their nose for fun hold that p.
If p, the terrorists have already won.
Looks like it's just me and the looney bins in here.
The only thing we have to p is p itself.
8 and 9 aren't even wrong.
Are they less than wrong?
11 fills a much-needed gap in the comments.
Yeah, but see, if you'd really gotten into the swing of things you and your best female friend would have wound up having an affair with some baron named Max, all of you going to Africa together at some point, and she would have had to have an abortion, and really it would all have been very tangled and strange, all happening against a background of menace. So really you're better off.
No I think the baron named Max is in NYC and already involved with AWB or somebody.
I was under the impression that English is a pretty easy language in which to achieve at least competence. No genders, waaaay fewer cases than many. Am I wrong? Or maybe you were just making a swipe at your classmates' seeming assumption that everyone else should just speak English?
15: I have the impression that English is a language in which successful communication becomes possible at fairly low levels of fluency -- that there's a broad space in which you sound like Frankenstein ("Me, lunch. Food want, now! Sushi?") but people will get your drift. I'm pathetically monolingual, but I have the further impression that that space of successful communication without real fluency is smaller in most other languages -- that someone who can make herself understood in French at all is probably very close to fluent.
16 -- that's what fuckin Micro$oft wants you to believe.
You can do French Tarzan-style and people will understand you.
There also would have been way too much singing and androgyny involved. Max.
My experience is that the French aren't willing to meet you halfway if your French is rudimentary. Mispronounce one vowel sound and they'll act like they have no idea what you're saying. Or they'll correct you on minor things even if it's clear that you're struggling with the broad strokes.
This stands in contrast to Spanish, where I've had much better luck with caveman-speak and mispronounciation -- even though getting a vowel sound wrong can change the tense or subject of a verb, I've never had a native-Spanish speaker correct me, and they get apologetic if they can't decipher what I'm trying to say. The French seem to get frustrated.
I speak retarded two-year-old French, and most everyone I met in Paris was willing to humor me. They either took it as an opportunity to work on their English or my French. But sure, you've got to be able to take correction gracefully.
You only have this experience, text, because you speak the international language of flirty winks.
17: I think you're right about this. I also think people are relatively used to hearing broken English, and tend to be more tolerant of the attempts of non-fluent speakers. Germans will still switch to English with me at my first small mistake or american-accented word, though their English is seldom as good as my German.
On my most recent trip I didn't try to speak to many Parisians, but it probably would have worked better. Anyone who lives in Paris and is annoyed by foreigners probably drops dead from stress before long.
These experiences were formed trying to communicate with rural French/wo/men -- possibly more similar to the guys who admonished me on the train to stop speaking English.
You only have this experience, text, because you speak the international language of flirty winks.
He has to compensate somehow for his wee willie.
it does help me get by, from time to time.
no fair! I didn't know 27 was going to be there.
22 -- I never had that experience but I was only in France twice for a total of llike 5 or 6 days. I actually got a compliment from one frenchman on my language competence, which was quite rudimentary.
Anyone who lives in Paris and is annoyed by foreigners probably drops dead from stress before long.
Paris is about eight kilometers in diameter and is the most visited city in the world.
27 - I never had that experience but I was only in France twice for a total of llike 5 or 6 days. I actually got a compliment from one frenchman on my competence, which was quite rudimentary.
re: 22
I speak caveman Czech -- I know lots of nouns and a smaller number of verbs but I'm basically useless at inflecting the words properly and have almost no functioning knowledge of grammar at all.*
I found a few times that people wilfully misunderstood me, as in with the French in 22. People aren't particularly tolerant of bad Czech.
*Czech grammar is insanely complicated though.
anyway, stop repressing me with your unrealistic standards, standpipe.
I'm picturing a Ministry of Flirty Winks down the road from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
(come to think of it I also had the opposite experience to Neil when I was in Spain.)
I was in Spain for the first time a few months ago and managed to function quite happily in Spanish with little more than a few hours of practice before I went.
I didn't get the sense that people were annoyed with my rudimentary Spanish.
stop repressing me with your unrealistic standards
Say the safeword and it shall be done.
In Barcelona, people were very patient and kind with the mishmash of French, Italian, Latin stems, and English that I was using to communicate. I was very grateful.
I saw Zombi play with Isis just before they released their lates album. It was a good show! I'm always afeared that the bands won't be able to broadcast the synths loudly enough.
I've had the common experience of Parisians switching to English on me, but I guess I've assumed I was being given some credit for trying. I've experienced a range of reactions to my French from annoyance to matter-of-fact acceptance, and it seems normal to me. It was a triumph to make my whole day when I carried on an exchange of say, three sentences entirely in French without correction or restatement in English.
Ontario: where your French accent reflects years of instruction by people who themselves don't speak it and resent having to teach it.
38: you just didn't understand them well enough to know how irritated they were.
26 sheds light on my 30 + 37 -- it must be more an urban/rural divide than characteristic of the languages -- I was speaking to Parisians in France and to villagers in Spain.
(In Germany I spoke mostly to villagers and found them quite tolerant of my mistakes; but (a) my German is better than my French or Spanish, and (b) I was in one place in Germany for a longish time and knew the people I was interacting with for some values of "know".)
I don't want to say your magic word anyway. You'll never tame me! I will run, run through the town all night long! Upstairs and downstairs!
re: 43
Yeah, that's possible. They could have been muttering in Spanish about the 'Scots idiot' and I'd never have known.
Although one experience in Prague -- where I was holding an underground ticket in my hand, pointing to it and repeating the word 'ticket' (in czech) while the arse behind the counter kept repeating 'I don't know' to me in Czech -- suggests I can usually tell when people are being obtuse pricks!
In Barcelona a lot of people will switch to English if you speak Spanish because they resent you not speaking Catalan. "No parlo Catala" is more or less essential. Otherwise in most countries you get props for trying, and being apologetic without cringing.
ttaM - he probably thought you were asking where the ticket was to.
re: 49
No, he knew perfectly well what I was asking. The tickets aren't to anywhere. They are a flat rate for travel across the city.
He was in a tobacco stall and booth that mostly sells cigarettes and underground tickets. I was even asking him for a '12 crown' one. This was way outside the city centre in the outskirts of Prague where tourists never go and where people have little incentive to be nice to them.
Confession: When I lived in Paris, I occasionally pretended not to understand tourists' French and not to speak English when I thought they were being rude to me.
You were going about your business in the city you lived in and tourists were walking up to you and being rude to you? Whaaa????
I once tried to pull off pretending not to speak English when I was in Germany -- I don't remember the situation -- I don't think it worked very well.
I speak retarded two-year-old French, and most everyone I met in Paris was willing to humor me
This is me, too. I found people were very kind when I prefaced every request by saying, "Je suis très désolée, je ne parle pas Français, mais...."
You were going about your business in the city you lived in and tourists were walking up to you and being rude to you? Whaaa????
Rubberneckers holding Baedekers used regularly to block my every perambulation in the heavily touristed city where once I worked. But that was a long time ago, and in another country....
And I think I've told this story before.
52: Funny, when I was in Germany I just pretended that I spoke German. It seemed to work rather well.
52.--I didn't say I was particularly proud of having done so. No, the thing is, it's considered rude in French culture to ask a stranger questions without some preliminary overtures, like Excusez-moi, madamoiselle, s'il vous plaît, je suis perdu...
When I first moved to New York, the people I asked directions from on the street thought I was pretty much insanely circumlocutious.
Also, young women in Paris get hassled about four times an hour. But that's generally not by tourists, per se.
Rubberneckers holding Baedekers
Well, yeah. I used to live in what's possibly the most heavily touristed city on earth outside Italy (where McGrattan abides), and you're exactly right. but if you simply regard them as misplaced pieces of street furniture, they're usually not actively insolent.
if you simply regard them as misplaced pieces of street furniture
If only they were mounted on castors, you could shove them painlessly aside.
My French is no longer very good, but I do have a very good accent, so I get props for that. One of my highschool French teachers who was himself French was super strict and told my advisor that I had an exquisite French accent, and she said that that was a rare thign for him to say.
Frecnh people always speak to me in French--even the Air France woman who helped me stay overnight when I missed my connecting flight, and she was trained to speak English.
One summer I spent in Paris, my roommate and I were walking down the street to our host family's apartment. Some American tourists asked us for directions to one of the Metro stops which we gave. As they walked away the father shouted back, "You speak English very well." We didn't look particularly French, so I'm not sure why he said it.
I was regularly mistaken for a native when I lived overseas. American tourists would ask me directions or advice, and their faces would fall when they heard my accent. No matter how good my suggestions, they hadn't authenticity when uttered in that voice, you see.
but if you simply regard them as misplaced pieces of street furniture, they're usually not actively insolent.
However, if you treat them as sexual furniture. . . .
The best takedown of tourist rudeness I ever heard was by a clerk in a hotel in Portugal. She gave the wrong sort of American a price for something in Escudos (this was a while ago), and he yelled, "What's that in real money?". So she took her time, and looked it up for him in Euros, then in Sterling, then in French Francs, then in Swiss Francs, then in Yen, and after about ten minutes in US dollars.
The rest of the staff were wobbling from the effort of keeping a straight face.
Accent vs. vocabulary is interesting in French. An English speaker can easily acquire the one much more than the other. My wife's accent is much better than mine. We would sometimes discuss an encounter beforehand, and it was always better if she pronounced the words, while I was the person who knew the words.
I've read that Jefferson, who had corresponded with Diderot and Rousseau, was unable on arriving in France to tell the porter to take his bags to the hotel.
I found learning the accent to be crushing. In my college study we were allowed to take a divergent track for our higher courses that emphasized reading and writing French over speaking it. By the end of the course I was (nearly) reading Rousseau's travels in India, but couldn't follow along if I overheard a conversation. Russian, Spanish—all went along the same track. I'm foreign language retarded.
56 I think Germans are unusually tolerant of people who just dive in. I had a cousin who lived in Stuttgart for decades and always spoke in the infinitive.
IDP: I know where you're coming from. My Spanish could be mistaken for native unless you expected it to mean anything.
My mother has the reverse problem -- thirty years as a flight attendant all over Europe, and a good ear, has left her with a really solid accent in French, and Italian. But her vocabulary is limited to the merest smattering of guidebook/menu/politeness, so she's always greeting people, or shopping, or doing some sort of limited interaction that she can handle inside her circumscribed vocabulary, and then having to stop them when they think she can talk to them in any sort of unrestricted way.
I have a very location and class specific French accent, but every once in a while, I'll just mutilate a vowel out of carelessness, at which point the conversation stops, as I've just said something incomprehensible, and then the mockery begins.
JM, out of idle curiosity,is it possible to survive in Paris these days without understanding verlan?
64 -- what did he do, just stand there repeating "Real money!" every time the price was given him in units he did not like? He didn't at some point say "No, I'm talkin bout US Dollars!"?
66: All language classes should be taught using the communicative method! (Language instructor now sticks her head back in her copy of 'Unterrichtspraxis'.)
Vocab is always a strange issue when learning a language in an academic setting. I knew the word for 'barbed wire' in German before I knew the word for 'sink'.
71 - He stood there making noises as though he was working up to a fatal infarction. Fortunately that didn't happen. I was next in the queue, so it would have been messy.
re: 54
yeah, I do the same thing in Prague:
'Pardon, ne mluvim ?esky. Ale, maš ... '
My experience this time 'round has been that, in some cases, people switch to English almost immediately after I open my mouth, and in other cases no amount of fumbling with my words and looking dumb at their words will convince someone that maybe English would be easier (of course I could make this decision as well, but).
70.--Yes, it is possible. However, if you're under forty, you should be able to understand the basic twenty or so words that seem like they've crossed into (white) slang permanence. I would say which immediately come to mind, except that I have no idea how to spell them. Um, the verlan for: femme, mec, fete, flic, joint, n'importe quoi...
I have been told that my pronunciation in French is pretty good. However, it's been nearly 20 years since I last studied it (at school) and I've rarely had to use it for more than a few words.
I sometimes wonder if being Scottish helps for pronunciation in other languages. Not because of anything intrinsic to being Scottish, but just because speaking English with what is clearly identified by all and sundry as an 'accent' makes people a bit more self-aware when it comes to pronunciation.
Yeah, I have the accent over the vocabulary, because I started learning French very young. I met a French guy in London, and I spoke a little with him in French, and his response was "Jesus Christ, your accent is good. You could fool me." But I couldn't carry on any kind of intelligent conversation, and can barely understand the relatively higher-level things I try to read without the dictionary.
The same thing with Arabic, except my accent is even better and my vocabulary even worse. I need to fix that.
I take it no one cares about Weasel Walter singing Meat Loaf.
Oh, and after nearly 6 years of trying, I am finally getting to the point where I can pronounce '?' - r with hacek -- about half the time, without Czechs laughing.
6 years! That shit isn't funny. It's some sort of initiation test to keep foreigners looking stupid.
See http://locallingo.com/czech/pronunciation/soft-consonants.html for examples.
After about six years of immersion and near-immersion, my French "u" reached an accuracy peak at 75%. I'm at about 50% now.
'u' as in 'Tu'?
Is it particularly difficult?
My Russian accent was said to be pretty good in college; I'd go to a tea room and practice with old ladies. Learned to shift the glass [ctakan?] to keep from burning my fingers. Better than my dad's: his accents were always poor.
It used to amaze me that someone as close to me as that could speak a foreign language at all. When I was seven, I once watched him buy diarrhea medicine for me in a tiny village in Quebec. "L'extract des fresces savage," and it worked like magic, the guy brought it right away. Merci.
80: I was just going to say that Czech sounds extremely difficult, partly because of that r with hacek. And apparently the grammar is more difficult than Croatian, and Croatian grammar is like doing math in your head.
I have a very good accent when I say the few Croatian things I know, because I grew up hearing it. This prompts Croatians to respond at breakneck speed because they assume I'm a native speaker.
Lots of things are extremely difficult about English: conditionals, idiomatic expressions, proper sentence stress and intonation. But there are no "easy" languages or "hard" languages. There's a popular impression for instance that Arabic is insanely hard, but like anything else, some elements are hard and some are easy.
DA's third paragraph was the line I was trying to run in disputation, but I wasn't having much success with it.
It doesn't, probably, matter.
Lots of things are extremely difficult about English: conditionals, idiomatic expressions, proper sentence stress and intonation. But there are no "easy" languages or "hard" languages. There's a popular impression for instance that Arabic is insanely hard, but like anything else, some elements are hard and some are easy.
This gets it exactly right. Thanks, DA.
Do all languages have an "Igpay-" form that young children who do not speak the language in question use to imitate it, or only Atinlay?
DA, you're probably too young to remember him, but Pete Mahavolich, the Leafs star of the early sixties, was the first person I ever heard described as such. I think he may have been from St. Catherines. Croations common in Ontario, more common still in Chicago, where I live now. Used to go to restaurants on the far South side when we lived in Hyde Park.
re: 84
Yeah, there are 4* genders and 7 noun cases. Plus, there are nearly 20 different standard noun declension forms. Which makes for an utterly absurd amount of stuff to know/remember just for declining nouns.
* (or 3 and a bit since masculine animate and masculine inanimate are sometimes distinguished)
No, the thing is, it's considered rude in French culture to ask a stranger questions without some preliminary overtures, like Excusez-moi, madamoiselle, s'il vous plaît, je suis perdu...
Perhaps this is what I was observing.. I was being socially incomprehensible rather than linguistically.
Is [u] particularly difficult?
Yup.
re:
Is [u] particularly difficult?
Yup.
It doesn't seem hard to me. It's possible that's because I am getting it slightly wrong.
Or, and this is a possibility, since Scots english has a much larger range of monophthongal vowel sounds* than either English English or (the damn-near univowel'd) GenAm, it may just be objectively easier for me.
Or, a bit of both. i.e. it's easier for me to get close but I'm still doing it slightly wrong.
* Including one pretty close to the French 'u'
Is [u] particularly difficult?
It should be somewhere between "oo" and "ew," but either of those would be wrong wrong wrong.
93 makes a decent case. I'm originally from California, the land of the irregular dipthong, so I might have an additional vowel handicap.
Czech has four genders. Oh my god.
IDP: yeah, I've never heard of him, partially because i'm too young but partially because I have managed throughout my life to almost completely ignore hockey, which is no mean feat. (And explains why I'd never heard, "The Maple Leaf Forever.")
Hamilton, where I'm from, is chock-a-block with Croatians.
I was in Chicago a couple times this year, and one of the things I like about it is that you see indications of Croatian and Polish (my mom is Polish) communities (there's a street in Chicago named after a Croatian dude, and you see the Polish eagle on signs). Reminds me of home. In a good way.
land of the irregular dipthong
Isn't this inscribed on the Golden Gate?
I remember in a phonetics and phonology class as an undergrad, the lecturer giving us the classic:
'Merry mary wants to marry' test.
Which, in Scots english contains 3 different monophthongal vowel sounds in each of the words beginning with 'm'. For some poor Americans with standard GenAm accents every single vowel was a rhotacized schwa.
This is deja-unfoggd, since I'm sure I've mentioned this in a previous thread.
I've never found [y] (French "u," German "ü") to be a particularly difficult sound to make.
98: Not a rhotacized schwa but a rhotacized [?]. (This is true of my dialect, and yes, we've discussed this before.)
East Coast American distinguishes all three of those vowels (although I don't know what the boundaries of what I'm calling ECA are, or what it's really called. But I do, in New York, and I expect native New Yorkers to.)
Having a good accent in a foreign language is all about getting the vowel sounds right.
Happily, I was exposed to other languages growing up so I can do a wider range of vowel sounds than a lot of Americans. And I can roll my r's.
And I think I've said this as well, last time around. But by god I'm proud of my rich heritage of distinct vowel sounds.
100: New Yorkers distinguish all three. Philadelphians distinguish two (merry Mary vs. marry).
Hamilton was always a football town anyway, cause of the 'Cats. Sort of Canadian Green Bay.
Let us know when you come back, and we'll arrange a meetup. You can hear silvana's accent, or we'll drive into the desert. Well, the prairie.
I think most non-western dialects distinguish between the three.
I have a friend here who distinguishes two, but not the same two I mentioned in 103.
There's a popular impression for instance that Arabic is insanely hard, but like anything else, some elements are hard and some are easy.
Likewise Japanese. Easy pronunciation, no declensions, genders or even plurals to speak of, and relentlessly regular. I found it much easier to achieve conversational competence in Japanese than in French. Even the writing system isn't as difficult as it's made out to be -- that is, it's not hard to grasp, it just takes a lot of work to memorize.
103: My southern Ontariao dialect is evidently close to the Philadelphian one in this case.
I pronounce, eg., the name "Larry" as "Lerry" and when it's pronounced differently, the speaker sounds to me like they're from the 1940s.
[y] (French "u," German "ü")
I dispute that those are all equivalents.
Texans can break nearly any vowel into two syllables.
Scottish English has a smaller range of vowel phonemes than R.P. English -- it lacks a number of the dipthongs used in RP.
It has two extra consonant sounds though. The [x] from <loch> and the [?] used in words like <what>.
110: My ex is from Texas. His name is Ayundee.
104: "Oskee wee wee, oskee wa wa." Even I have seen the Ti-Cats play at Never Win (uh...Ivor Wynn) Stadium.
I'll let you know if I make it out to Chicago again.
As ttaM knows, I am of that ilk, but I hear no difference in those words, so the distinction must not have survived the passage.
Despite the current Romanticisation of Nova Scotia Scottishness, the Highlanders were heavily evangelized early on, and most gave up all their traditions for that North American Protestant rural culture we all love so well. When musical ethnologists began to collect ballads, about a hundred years ago, they had to learn them from the Acadians, who had picked them up before the Scots lost them.
109: They're close enough for IPA. Do vowels in different languages ever sound the same? ü and swedish y isn't the same sound either.
It's quite awful how little time in foreign-language classes is spent on phonetics. I took French for 5 years and never realized that "u", "ou", and "eu" were three different sounds. None of my teachers, not even the native speakers, were able to explain the difference. It was only once I took a couple linguistics classes for unrelated reasons that I thought "Hey...maybe even a language similar to English, like French, has different vowels." And I looked, and sure enough, it was a little easier to speak French when I realized that "vous", "vu", and "veux" were not homophones. No teacher had ever corrected me when I pronounced them exactly the same (as "vous").
It's only after you learn something about phonetics that you can actually reason out how to say the vowels in foreign languages. In English, we don't end words with lax vowels like the "e" in bed. In Russian, they do, but there's no effort made to teach people that Russian words that end in "e" are actually ending in the short e sound, not in "ay".
I'd forgotten IPA doesn't distinguish between english 'ee' and swedish i, even though the difference is pretty noticeable. The english [i] sounds like a cross between our [y] and [i] to me.
115.--The canonical off-color example for why learning French phonetics is important is: con, queue, cul, cou.
114, 166.--I don't know from the IPA. In fact, I'm depressingly ignorant about linguistics.
88 -- Pete never played for the Leafs. He was in the Red Wings system at first (Hamilton before DA was born, Fort Worth -- he was out star -- in time for me to see him) then Montreal.
53 -- I've pretended not to speak English in Germany when talking to American servicemen. I couldn't fool a German.
109, re 99 -- I agree with 109. Also, the ü is easy, but I can't say 'Hegel' without setting off a round of Ridicule the American.
115: Yeah, [ei] for [e] is the one thing that, to my ears, goes beyond having a heavy accent to mispronounciation, but most anglophones doesn't seem to be able to hear the difference.
Even my first English textbooks all used IPA, when I was ten.
I don't think anyone actually learned IPA, mind you, and it wasn't actively taought, but it gave you some understanding of phonetics all the same.
it's considered rude in French culture to ask a stranger questions without some preliminary overtures, like Excusez-moi, madamoiselle, s'il vous plaît, je suis perdu...
Doesn't everyone, when accosting people on the street, say "excuse me, can you please help me find..."?
I actually found most Parisians to be pretty nice and helpful.
Despite the fact that my French accent is so twisted from my having learned Spanish first that a French/Greek friend once told me I sounded "as cute as a Portuguese maid." (!!!) It didn't charm one waiter in a shockingly busy restaurant on the Champs Elysee, but then, who can blame him?
Also, Czech is notoriously and hilariously impossible.
Doesn't everyone, when accosting...
No.
I surprise myself sometimes in NY by how brusquely I ask for directions or the time from complete strangers. "Hey, do you have the time?" here gets an equally brusque--but totally amiable!--response.
Yeah, there's sort of a double-reverse politeness about the brusquerie: it conveys (1) I'm not going to waste your time and (2) I'm going to let you know that my request for your attention is a legitimate and reasonable one absolutely upfront, without making you wait through circumlocutions.
One summer I spent in Paris...Some American tourists asked us for directions to one of the Metro stops which we gave. As they walked away the father shouted back, "You speak English very well." We didn't look particularly French, so I'm not sure why he said it.
this happened to me last month in Italy. After I gave him directions for parking, the tourist said, "You speak English very well." And then he gave me a Canada pin.
Canadians are weird.
(maple leaf trinkets for the - apparent - natives?? dude.)
Something similar happened to me but instead of a Canada pin, he gave me a Bhaghavad-Gita translation.
(Also it was not in a foreign country and there was no discussion of accent quality.)
Yeah, the brusque thing is odd. I feel like it's more about communicating a kind of overfamiliarity that actually works in some situations, in the "we're potential buddies" way. But that isn't quite something one would use in a strange city, speaking a strange language, you know?
100: New Yorkers distinguish all three. Philadelphians distinguish two (merry Mary vs. marry).
teofilo, do you happen to know if there is a good resource (online? in print?) for helping practice the difference between various a and e vowel sounds? i would be muchly grateful. i mispronounce them all the time in English, as well as (although weirdly, to a lesser extent) in all the other languages i speak - and it is driving me nuts. i want to find a way to retrain my ear.
on the other hand, the french and german ou, u, and ü have always been quite easy for me. depends on what you heard around you as a small child, surely.
I've read that what helps in that sort of situation is to sit with a tape recorder and listen to yourself repeatedly, as you try adjusting your pronunciation.
(maple leaf trinkets for the - apparent - natives?? dude.)
I have seen this given as advice in books on backpacking. "Bring little mementoes from your country to give to people you meet along the way."
But boy, does it annoy me when Canadians trumpet their Canadianness abroad. And Americans who pretend to be Canadians are worse.
126 - you win!
(although the canada pin was nice because it reminded me of those glass beads that explorers were supposed to take with them to trade with the natives when they went to "uncharted territories." also, he dug it out of his fanny pack for me).
Hey this thread reminds me: Ever since leaving college I have wanted to enrol in some foreign language class and learn to speak a little. But have never got around to. Well, next month I shall be starting a Chinese class! I am taking it along with my daughter -- it is a parents and children class offered by a Chinese language school in a neighboring town.
And Americans who pretend to be Canadians are worse.
What should we pretend to be then?
131- but sometimes i have trouble hearing the difference.
that third "marry" of "merry Mary marry." eep.
and even the first two sometimes.
118: Your're right, now that I think of it, Frank is who I remember playing for the Leafs. Possibly an older brother or uncle?
It's quite awful how little time in foreign-language classes is spent on phonetics. I took French for 5 years and never realized that "u", "ou", and "eu" were three different sounds.
please don't scare me, cryptic ned, i am about to teach first-year language classes to undergrads for the first time ever, in about 15 days. !
on the other hand they are supposed to be beginners - it's a first-year course - so maybe it will be okay.
(is much better if people are starting from scratch... clean slates...)
137.--See, I have the opposite problem. I can hear the difference, but to me the differentiated "Mary" and "marry" sound like the kind of weird Eastern nasal accent that I don't want to emulate.
139.--Eh, you'll do fine. First-year students need you to dance around and act things out, rather than precise instructions on phonetics.
What's the problem? Don't emulate us. We'll just mock you for your vowellessness.
In my youthful peregrinations across the Continent, more fun than pretending to be Canadian was pretending to be Finnish. No ordinary American tourist speaks Finnish.
I'm told I speak Russian with a French accent. Fortunately, I don't speak French with a Russian accent.
I am now attempting to learn Welsh, just so I can pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
The problem is in the foreign languages. I can hear the vowel distinctions just fine, but I can't reliably produce them.
(Well, okay, I have another problem, which is my wandering accent, careening wildly from my dad's Canadian "oots and aboots" to my honey's New York accent to my roommate's upper-middle-class English accent to my native California's drawling dipthongs. It attracts deserved mockery.)
134: Great parent-child activity, Clownæ. If you're interested in supplementary materials, I enthusiastically recommend wenlin, a great all-around software package, and HyperChina, which is more basic but a thorough, nicely designed introduction nonetheless. They're both expensive, but maybe your library has them or can get them for you.
Also, if you're interested, there are two biscuit conditionals in this comment.
144: One of my sisters and I were sent to a speech therapist when I was in first grade. Our odd accent apparently marked us as learning-disabled to our teachers, but when they found out that my mother was from Boston and my father from Brooklyn, they decided that therapy was unnecessary.
when they found out that my mother was from Boston and my father from Brooklyn, they decided that therapy was unnecessary
Not that therapy was doubly necessary?
138 -- Older brother. And that's Senator Mahovlich to you and me.
teofilo, do you happen to know if there is a good resource (online? in print?) for helping practice the difference between various a and e vowel sounds? i would be muchly grateful. i mispronounce them all the time in English, as well as (although weirdly, to a lesser extent) in all the other languages i speak - and it is driving me nuts. i want to find a way to retrain my ear.
What, you mean like a site with recordings? There are such resources around, although I don't know of any offhand--I can look into it. Most introductory phonetics books will have something similar, but they won't all be equally helpful.
136 -- Yes, but Flemish, and not Walloon.
And that's Senator Mahovlich to you and me.
A Canadian Senator? Wow! What's he done to deserve that honor? Community Leadership? Has he been a politician?
You have to realize, when I was sold into American slavery, Lester B. Pearson was P.M. So long ago, and in another country.
mmf: This is probably not what your looking for.
I was lucky enough to spend almost a year doing nothing but learn to pronounce all of the IPA sounds and reliably recognise them. I can, in theory*, even do all the clicks and things from some of the Southern African languages and the implosives. Some of the latter are pretty amusing to English speakers -- they sound like the 'glug glug' noise made by a bottle of water being emptied.
I was taught in the old-skool British phonetics and phonology 'tradition' so, at least in theory, I can make the IPA cardinal vowel sounds properly. There's no striaghtforward way to learn the cardinal vowels except by imitation.
Daniel Jones, who invented the system, taught David Crystal, who taught Mike MacMahon, who taught me. So, in theory, it's been passed down in an apprenticeship type system.
To quote Jones himself:
Cardinal Vowels can only be learnt from a teacher who knows how to make them or from a gramophone record or tape record.
They were never intended to get exactly right tthe distinction between different languages precise pronunciation of particular vowel sounds. They are phonemic rather phonetic categories. You need to add stuff to get it right -- 'fronted', 'labialised' etc.
* I have to stress the 'in theory' bit since it's been years since I was 'trained'.
148: Maybe "futile" is more to the point.
-- "Hold that p" isn't a love song.
-- It is if you're another p.
Clicks and implosives aren't actually that hard in isolation. Saying phrases containing them is another story.
The cardinal vowels were intended as reference points for describing the vowels of languages. They aren't used much these days; people mostly just either record the sounds or describe them less precisely.
people mostly just either record the sounds or describe them less precisely.
But not out ttaM!
You have to realize, when I was sold into American slavery, Lester B. Pearson was P.M. So long ago, and in another country.
You might as well have said that Wilfred Laurier was P.M., as far as I'm concerned.
I know my memory is frozen in time. I travel, and measure the changes, but it makes me very old there, a person always measuring against what was. In 1998, I was with a colleague in Toronto over the Simcoe Day weekend, and I went on and on over the phrase "The Two Solitudes," its origin and history, which I'd seen in the paper. That evening, I got caught up in Caribana, and thought to myself "This is a different country.
Is it just me or anyone else do a little swoon when Teo starts talking linguistics? Half the time I have no idea what he's saying but it just sounds so official.
152 -- He played for the Leafs and for les Canadiens, winning six Stanley Cups. What've your American Senators ever done?
Actually, I'd guess that having met you, she's simply objectifying you. Except that that never happens to guys.
Becks—via Language Log, this is highly swoonable. (Lyrics.)
152 -- He played for the Leafs and for les Canadiens, winning six Stanley Cups. What've your American Senators ever done?
Hey, one of our five worst Senators has 7 All-Star game appearances, two no-hitters, and is in the Hall of Fame. Imagine how talented the rest of them are!!
165 - It was meant as a compliment. Take it.
166: Yeah, that's probably it.
167: The last line is so, so true.
169: Gotcha. Thanks.
re: 158
Well, that's pretty much what I was saying. They are a set of reference points. Less than twenty reference points aren't going to capture all of the vowel sounds in all of the worlds languages. They're just a starting point to hang an analysis on.
Also,
They aren't used much these days; people mostly just either record the sounds or describe them less precisely.
Yeah, that's why I said I was taught 'old-skool'. It's been 10 years since then and it was pretty old-skool at the time. We also did some recording and some digital analysis of the recordings, Fourier analyses and the like: but that was fairly new at the time and we were only given the barest flavour of it.
Yeah, see, these days it's all about the spectrograms etc. We listened to a recording of Jones saying the cardinal vowels, but it was basically presented as a novelty; people who care about the exact realization of vowel sounds (and IPA is of course not nearly fine-grained enough to distinguish all of them) just record them, and people who don't, which seems to be most field linguists these days, just assign the closest IPA values they can find. Very few people describe vowels in relation to the cardinal vowels anymore.
I am proud not to be able to distinguish Mary/merry/marry.
139: phonetically challenged mmf (!), there are specific Aussprache exercise that are written into the schedule— a different one each day focusing on a single vowel or dipthong. But 141 also has it right: your time until then is better spent practicing your dancing.
Here's something that might help mmf!
162: Simcoe Day weekend?! What is that?
Caribana is totally fun.
Would anyone have any (nonexpensive) langauge tape/software recommendation for someone going to a Mandarin-speaking area for about three weeks, leaving in about 7 weeks from today?
hey, thanks, teofilo, Blume, Weman, LB et al for the tips.
i'm not worried about pronouncing 'a' and 'e' vowel sounds for my teaching, because i'm teaching first-year *german*, and for some reason that language has way fewer words that cause problems in that area. (christian names like "Per" being a major exception). plus speaking german is just comfy and i don't want to overanalyze it. however i would like to improve my own personal english & french pronunciation skillz, so i will definitely follow teofilo's link!
You are a native speaker of English, are you not, mmf!? I don't see how you could be mispronouncing English vowels, but if that page helps you, great. It won't help with French, which has way more vowels.
182- oh, i sometimes pronounce english a little weirdly, even though i am a native american english speaker. it's because i've had different accents in english at different points in my life. i didn't grow up in the US and we moved a lot, so the english that was spoken around me changed a lot, very confusing. (children get their accents from their peers, not their parents. plus in general i am especially an accent-chameleon in order to fit in as much as possible wherever i am). added onto all that, i have trouble hearing parts of the a/e/e spectrum.
(i got a lot of remedial french instruction in school that included reciting these awful rhyming jacques prevert poems about a "père" and the "cimetière"...which is where it was originally pointed out to me that i can't easily reproduce the difference between 'père' and a more 'a' sounding pronunciation...blarg. it's not a super-super obvious thing, but it's there).
okay, and that's enough about me. sorry folks, back to your regular programming.
French has almost completely taken over the portion of my brain reserved for foreign languages. It's my native foreign language. I speak German with a French accent. I can make myself speak with an okay German accent, but I just think "foreign language," and I start talking from the back of my throat.
Ben: what you should have done while you were here? I don't guess you went to that Ramones museum run by the weird dude in Kreuzberg?
(Ramones fandom in no way necessary for the appreciation of said museum's weirdness.)
Ah, god praise the uncanny propriety of Dinosaur Comics!
This is also pretty sweet. Geoff Pullum, I think, was involved in a book describing phonetic symbols that provides an unexpected amount of fun: flip to a random page, read about what sort of sound the symbol stands for, place of articulation, etc, and then try to produce it.
I did not know there was a Ramones museum in Kreuzberg, nor do I know where it is, but if you want to enlighten me, I remain in the city until the 31st, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to do, except periodically return to the goethe institut to see if they've found my grades and wonder if I should have taken the test, and go to a concert Saturday night.
There are lots of things I should have done! I should have signed up for a tandem thingy so as to practice speaking outside of class. I should not have let the coldness of some of my classmates prevent me from spending time with others. I should have gone outside of the city (Potsdam probably doesn't count). I should have eaten a greater variety of foods, instead of sticking to the same places. I should have just been more relaxed. I should have spent less time online (actually in the beginning I did). I probably should have gone to some of the museums, galleries, etc, since there are scads of them and I only went to one, probably because I find it hard to drag myself under my own power to such (though I know that, when I get there, I will enjoy it, USUALLY).
In the end this was not such an interesting exercise.
I guess not having known that it existed implies not having known its location.
174 gets it exactly right.
that's fine if you don't care about, you know, *talking to other people.* (effectively)
All you need is context. I don't see the problem.
people treat you differently if you sound like a great big alien to them, even if they understand your meaning. people are tribal like that, even nice people.
