Phonetic English: http://unspell.it/
English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
141–150 of 249 posts
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#142Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…
No, kids don’t really start school pre-equipped with English skills. In fact, most preschooler shows are dubbed.
The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled.
Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#143Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…
It may also involve the language roots : Saxon (easier path to English) versus Latin.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#144"The nonsense of english spelling": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjeoQ8gRmQ
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#145As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across). I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like I…
> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. ough: Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up) That's broken.
There's no phonetics there; just orthography.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#146That's weird. I have pretty much the opposite experience from the author. I'm talking with americans, canadians, english people, australians and a few slavic europeans in english (myself being from a slavic country) and the only ones I have a little bit of trouble understanding are australians. And that one guy with the lisp.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#147That's weird. I have pretty much the opposite experience from the author. I'm talking with americans, canadians, english people, australians and a few slavic europeans in english (myself being from a slavic country) and the only ones I have a little bit of trouble understanding are australians. And that one guy with the lisp.
As an Australian, the only English speakers I have trouble understanding, are the Scots.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don't forget words that are pronounced differently with identical spelling, for added hilarity: * Polish people live in Poland. * Polish your boots.
Obligatory link to Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos": http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
New to me, thanks for sharing.
Some great examples there, such as "minute" and "minute". heh.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#149As 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 somethin…
Oh, I like you mentioned that. It reminded me of a quote I'd read recently and which I'd liked. Here it is:
"For me, the hardest thing about functioning in a foreign language was not the long hours it took me to get through a text, not the heightened anxiety, accompanying every social interaction, but the sense of reduced personality that comes with limited verbal expression. For someone who prided herself on writing music criticism for one of the largest Russian newspapers Vedomosti, a branch of The Financial Times, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Even though I communicated perfectly fine, I missed being able to say more with less, to say the same thing in several ways, to express character, not only literal sense. What came out of my mouth felt crude, stiff, and trite."
(from http://www.rma.ac.uk/students/?p=2646)
It is so true for me, this thing about reduced personality.
Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
#150As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across). I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like I…
In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible). In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heterony…
French isn't as deterministic as you make it sound.
For example many letters are silent and it's not always obvious why. Contrast the last sounds of these words: grec (ɡʁɛk) and tabac (ta.ba), chef (ʃɛf) vs nerf (nɛʁ), six (sis) vs prix (pʁi), etc. There are also some heteronyms, for example, les poules couvent (ku.v) but les soeurs restent au couvent (ku.vɑ̃).