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English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#211

Post by song »

raverbashing wrote: post #65
xixixao wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

A bit of anecdotal evidence that hopefully can be confirmed with more certainty The number of subtitled movies in France (or at least in Paris), what they call VO/VOST, in the last 10 years in cinemas has increased considerably

That's pretty specific to Paris. In the smaller cities there's been a small increase of VO/VOST movies but it's still not that popular outside of the arthouse kind of cinemas. For example in Rennes, only one of the two main cinemas in the city ever offers VOST movies...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#212

Post by micampe »

camillomiller wrote: post #172
xixixao wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

It is correct. First and foremost, in Italy we dub our movies so well, the dubbing itself could be considered a mastered art. We really like our dub actors. George Clooney, in Italy, has a very specific voice, for example, and that's the voice of Francesco Pannofino. That's so bad that when you hear the same actor dubbed by someone else, you feel like something's out of place in the movie. Italy has a very strong his…

> First and foremost, in Italy we dub our movies so well, the dubbing itself could be considered a mastered art.

I think that's just what we tell ourselves to feel better and for national pride. I started watching movies in English many years ago and, even when my English was not yet very good and I had to use subtitles, I preferred watching the original version, the real actor is just much better. Now, after living in the US for a few years, when I hear dubbed movies they sound just ridiculous: everyone speaks with the same flat intonation, there is no emotion in the words, it all sounds fake and, funny detail, I'm now much more aware that the voice is out of sync with the lips. It's both hilarious and painful to endure.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#213

Post by leoc »

stevekemp wrote: post #148
tricolon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

'Feoffer' is probably the worst word there. But just maybe the worst snare in English is 'positive' — the other 'positive' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_organ . Yes it's obviously some kind of loan-word, but then so are most English words...

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#214

Post by song »

GolDDranks wrote: post #84
petke wrote: post #16

Ever 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…

Dubbing / subtitling isn't everything, although it certainly helps. According to the theories of language acquisition, it is processing of linguistic input (connecting form to meaning to be able to understand the meaning) that makes the internal, unconscious representation of language to develop. Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers…

I think the biggest impact of subtitling instead of dubbing is when kid shows are subtitled. Small kids cannot get the mean from the subtitles since they cannot read or if they can often cannot read fast enough. This means that those kids get a crash course in the language by associating actions with English words and getting used to the pronunciation of the English.

Kids also tend to have more patience when it comes to watching something that they do not fully understand due to language issues so they're less likely to give up.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#215

Post by __david__ »

ajmurmann wrote: post #175

One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got an apple" instead of just "I have an ap…

As s native English speaker I say "have got" in certain situations. "Do you have an apple?" "I've got 5!"

Also the past participle. "I've gotten to level 5".

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#216

Post by ajmurmann »

vorg wrote: post #193
skuhn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one would ever say "have got", it's the sort of redundancy that naturally gets distilled down to the minimum required in everyday language. I imagine this sort of focus on technically correct but functionally useless things is pretty common when studying languages. I took a few years of German in school, and literally 25% of our time was spent memorizing the various forms of der and matching nouns to them. I haven…

I never say "I have got an apple", but also hardly ever say "I have an apple". I virtually always say "I've got an apple", or even "I got an apple" if talking really quickly and informally. I'm from New Zealand.

Now that you contract it like that I think I hear people say it all the time in the US and also use it myself, but never the non=contracted form. It's amazing how much of language usage is outside of our awareness. I guess it's all "system 1" as Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow would call it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#217

Post by kibwen »

ams6110 wrote: post #195
vorg wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hiccough" is spelt "hiccup" by nearly everyone nowadays. In comic books, "though" is often spelt "tho", and "through" spelt "thru". The US and UK should get together and create a small language spelling reform group to suggest more such changes to the 20% of words that cause 80% of the problems, e.g. changing "thorough" to "thuruh", "rough" to "ruff", and "cough" to "coff".

It's happening by default anyway. Schools now encourage "inventive spelling" rather than correct spelling, so you have kids in 8th grade who can't spell basic words correctly but rather they write them how they sound.

For a historical anecdote, this sort of simplified phonetic spelling was championed in the early 1900s by Andrew Carnegie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#218

Post by StavrosK »

robochat wrote: post #78

As 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…

> people will assume that you are stupid if you can't speak their language fluently

Yep, and this is an unconscious process, as well. If someone doesn't speak any of the languages I know, I find myself thinking "wow they're stupid" even if they're the sage of the mountain, and I hate my brain for it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#219

Post by StavrosK »

samuel wrote: post #42
xanderstrike wrote: post #21

As 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…

Spanish here. One of biggest differences is that spanish vowels always sound the same, that's why spelling contests aren't a thing here. It's pretty confusing at first, until you embrace the fact that there aren't shortcuts: you hear the word or you don't actually know how to pronounce it. See http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/04/spanish-vowels-vs-english-... for a comparison.

And vice versa, you read the word or you have no idea how to write it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#220

Post by kibwen »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #130
bazzargh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A Glaswegian here, who learned phonetics for a text-to-speech project. A Glasgow accent actually has the closest correspondence between spelling and pronunciation of any accent of English. We don't all speak like Rab C. Nesbitt. The reason you might find it difficult to understand some Glaswegians is not so much lack of familiarity with their accent, but because they don't speak Standard English. What you're hearing…

You can't in good conscience link to the Wiki page on Scots without linking to version in Scots. :)

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_leid

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