I've found http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=either useful for clearing up some mispronunciation issues / doubts. Link also shows some English awkwardness...
English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
71–80 of 249 posts
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#72> In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it. My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language. Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before l…
> Really good points on learning to speak before writing. Trying to learn japanese now, and I'm glad that someone told me to learn to speak it fluently before learning to write it.
Japanese is a very different issue. It is structurally very simple and the phonetics are highly regular (there's a reason why japan has had successful voice-synthetized singers since the early 00s), but reading and writing fluently it requires learning 3 different scripts, including a logographic one.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0] The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they…
I think you're wrong. Dubbing or subtitles make a big difference. In Flanders (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) we have 8 years of French in school and only 5 years of English. Even though France is our neighbor and 40 % of Belgium's speaks French, most young people their English is still much better than their French. It's because we grew up surrounded by English; English songs, English tv shows and movies with subti…
You don't supply an argument why that's because of dubbing/subtitling. I think the real reason for the change is that English has become more important as a cultural language, at the expense of French, in this case.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.
> Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).
In the past only some kids shows were dubbed but even the cartoons for the most part had subtitles. Today it's a bit different.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#75As a native English speaker who is hard of hearing, I can echo his pain with phonetics. I learned most of English from reading and writing, and I say a lot of words incorrectly. People I am talking to that do not know me well often treat me as if I am retarded. I can imagine it is far worse for people like antirez.
English is my third language; I've read and written English almost every day for 30 years, but I've only ever spent two weeks in English-speaking countries. I sometimes find myself unable to pronounce words that I've used for decades in writing – often, it's the type of more formal vocabulary that doesn't often come up in movies or TV series. For instance: cuticle, paean, echelon, emaciated, heinous, comely, disreput…
kyoo-tih-kul, pee-uhn, esh-uh-lon, eh-may-she-ay-ted, hey-nuhs, cuhm-ly, dis-reh-pyoo-tah-bul, hahrth, derth, kuhn-too-muh-ly, bee-at-if-iy, sub-seh-kuent
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#76Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me: Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton. I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the diff…
Of course none of the accents in that clip are supposed to be Glaswegian...they're all meant to be from Edinburgh (though Robert Carlyle was born in Maryhill in Glasgow). For the full Glaswegian effect, try this bit of Rab C Nesbitt, parodying the fact that previous series of this show had been shown subtitled in England https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9LT7R60kU#t=6m30s on the other hand we from Glasgow don't seem…
Thanks for the correction - it's years since I've seen "Trainspotting" and somehow I relocated it to Glasgow in my mind; that said, Wikipedia helpfully informs that it was actually mostly shot in Glasgow!
"The Wire" is an interesting example since two of the protagonists (McNulty and Bell) are played by English actors (the former an Old Etonian, just like our prime minister!) putting on Baltimore accents; there's even a delightful scene where McNulty attempts a deliberately dreadful English accent.
You are also correct about Geordies - I lived in Newcastle for a number of years and never really understood the locals except by way of sign language.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0] The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they…
Nope, I think the reason that user "petke" has mentioned is correct. I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but here it is: I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). S…
Wow, that's an awesome natural experiment. Can you share the name of the town? Or would any town near the border do?
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#78As an Englishman living and working in Paris for a few years, my eyes have been opened to the difficulty of working in another language. I used to be a little bit dismissive of foreigners who hadn't completely mastered English but now I realise that they were almost fluent. On the other hand, I haven't really managed to master French at all.
His observation about becoming introverted in a foreign language is something that I experience too. Something that he didn't mention though is that often people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language fluently, this is made even worse since you are indeed dedicating 80% of your brain just to following the conversation, so that in a sense they are correct in their judgement at that moment in time. It's painful to be on the receiving end of this and again this is something that I was unconsciously guilty of when I lived in London.
We just need to occasionally remind ourselves when the other person is not speaking in their native language that they are having to do a lot of extra work just to communicate with us.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#79I think this fact (and he's obviously not wrong, though I don't know if I'd label it a secret - everyone knows this about English, I thought?) is inevitable from any language which gains the reach English did, or at least, gained the reach English did at the time English did... whether it would be different now we have global communication all the time remains to be seen I suppose. How do you have a language spoken b…
English has been "weird" for the reasons you're describing since before it spread anywhere.
It has more to do with the number of different cultures that have conquered England, combined with the fact that written English has existed for a very long time compared to most European languages. The fact that there isn't an authority that can dictate major spelling reforms doesn't help either.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.
> Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).
Germany dubs everything. Unless you invest in Sky, the German television broadcasters don't even bother broadcasting the original language as an alternative tone, which I assume over cable isn't a massive extra expense. Only Arté bothers to do so in both German and French.
German home made programmes are also particularly dire. Their long running police drama series Tartort is their single saving grace.