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From: Peter T. Breuer on 16 Dec 2005 10:03 In comp.os.linux.misc Tobias Brox <tobias(a)stud.cs.uit.no> wrote: > [Peter T. Breuer] >> The ordinary people don't speak any english. Many don't speak anything >> intelligible to most people as far as I can tell. Yes, my colleagues >> spoke english, which meant I didn't have to learn any spanish for a lng >> time. > I have the same problem when I'm in Russia. I'm usually hanging > around with people from the academic circles, then I simply don't have > to speak Russian. Occationally I wander a bit around for myself, I > pick up hitch-hikers and taxi customers, For the benefit of readers, I will explain that in russia finding a taxi is easy: you just flag down any passing car and negotiate with the driver. > I'm pretty sure I would have > been able to speak Russian pretty well by now if I had to, all the > time. Still, it's very hard to get started just from scratch, in > addition to exposure and practice I think it's really needed to look a > bit in books and dictonaries, and ask people in English when beeing > uncertain about things. Well, one needs enough info to bootstrap with. I always like solving puzzles and reading something in which x of the words are unknown and y are known simply leads me to solve for x in the space of all possible solutions. I merely need problems with a small enough solution space to start with so that I can get going. One can usually get that from being in situations where the theme is known: everyone learn how to ask for coffee, for example, but once known you can figure out the word for milk or white or black and so on. Speaking french and english of course gives me a good handle on spanish anyway - I can identify the ancient common root of a word fairly easily, by comparison and back-interpolation. The same thing happens with dutch, because I can speak german and english (though I'm wildly out of practice in german, it turns out I can speak quite a bit when placed in germany - I always seem to get into arguments at german airports with officious burocrats, and making them address me as Herr Doktor Prof.. works wonders). I like reading dutch - if I sound the words out loud in the context of the sentence I can usually guess. Looking at the word on its own however just makes me laugh (or sneeze). > In urban areas, I've never had problems finding people beeing able to > speak English - neither in Spain, Russia nor China. In madrid it would be about as much of a problem as it would be finding people who speak spanish in england. Yes, all children learn english, but about half the population have trouble tying their shoelaces up ... as is the case everywhere. You have no chance negotiating for a lamb chop in english at the butcher's. Especially not at a halal butcher. You have no chance in any shop I can think of, EXCEPT at the big department store chain (there is only one). On the tourist coasts of course the situation is different. > It's just to look a bit around, find a young person with > 'academical look', and the chances for a positive reply to "excuse > me, do you speak English?" are pretty high. "Young person" is obviously indicated as a bayesian selector with good success rate. But don't try it in the more deprived suburbs, and not if the young person in question has a skinhead cut and a nose ring. Same as in england. >> There are a whole load of russian sounds I can't even hear the >> difference between, let alone speak (that "shsh", "shch", "chch" set of >> consonants). > Yes, I also have difficulties. Russians in Norway also have problems > with our "kj"-sound. Does that start a word? Can only imagine it followed by a vowel! > Also, in Norwegian it's a quite distinct > difference between 'y' and 'i', but most Russians have problems > hearing that. I believe this, plus grammatical logics, plus certain > concepts are much easier to learn for a young child than an adult. I Certainly one needs to have the aural circuits trained to spot the phonetic units. That is why chinese seems so much easier for me - I can simply read the symbols without having to detour the processing through auditory circuits. > believe I have read about scientific studies on this in New Scientist, > though I can't back this up with references at the moment. Peter
From: Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz on 16 Dec 2005 09:14 In <40dfsgF1a097eU1(a)individual.net>, on 12/15/2005 at 03:19 PM, blmblm(a)myrealbox.com said: >Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but you sound a bit defensive here, so -- >I don't mean this as a put-down of non-native speakers. It's just >that in my experience there's a class of "mistakes" -- >call them "unidiomatic usage" -- that are commonly made by people who >learn a language as adults, but rarely if ever made by people who >learn the same language as children. My experience is that those whose first language is Hebrew and later learned English have trouble knowing when to use a gerund and when to use an infinitive. That doesn't seem to be a problem for native Anglophones. In other areas foreign speakers of English often have better grammar than native Anglophones. I believe that regardless of the languages, people have trouble with idioms when going from on e language to another. I know that I've had trouble translating things that I wrote into English, even though it is my native tongue. >And there were plenty of other things I couldn't get my head around >in trying to learn Spanish. For example, the names of the verb >tenses seemed to mostly be like those of English verb tenses, but >when to use them was not exactly the same. That's also an issue in programming languages; superficial similarities can trigger habits that are inappropriate. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+news to contact me. Do not reply to spamtrap(a)library.lspace.org
From: Enrique Perez-Terron on 16 Dec 2005 22:48 On Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:03:50 +0100, Peter T. Breuer <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote: >> Yes, I also have difficulties. Russians in Norway also have problems >> with our "kj"-sound. > > Does that start a word? Can only imagine it followed by a vowel! Try to whisper a 'j' sound, like "jam". It's voice-less, slightly sharper (make the air passage narrower, requiring more pressure to drive the air through). Tip of tonge more down. (Typical pronunciations of "sh" has the tip of the tongue quite high. With "kj", the air restriction is quite near the middle of the tonge surface, against the hard palate well behind the teeth.) Yes, it frequently occurs at the begining of words, and I am not aware of any case where the next sound is not a wowel. -Enrique
From: Enrique Perez-Terron on 16 Dec 2005 23:04 On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 08:00:01 +0100, <blmblm(a)myrealbox.com> wrote: > Or maybe it's just that most people are lazy and not very smart. I have never heard of children not learing their first language "because they are lazy". I once read a statement that children's brains are very rich in cross connections, and much of their learing happens by severing connections, while grown-ups learn by making new connections. I also have read about children being sensitive to the full range of language sounds, while grown-ups loose sensibility to shades of sound that do not carry information in the language. I have been told that this is what happens to japaneese having difficulties keeping 'r' and 'l' straight. Their language has a sound whose natural variability spans the range between what we would consider a clear 'r' to a clear 'l'. I had myself a tri-lingual upbringing, and still feel very intrigued by everything that has to do with languages. I regret not having the same ability to learn as I believe I had. Unfortunately I also have a congenital hearing defect, which makes it hard to learn to understand spoken language. I can read French and German, and to some degree speak them, but I have to stay in the country for a longer period before I again begin to understand what I hear. I almost never understand what I hear on radio or tv, even in Norwegian, my primary language. Yet I am trying to learn some Arabic; this began as a curiosity to see just how different would a non-indo-european language be. -Enrique
From: Peter T. Breuer on 17 Dec 2005 03:55
In comp.os.linux.misc Enrique Perez-Terron <enrio(a)online.no> wrote: > On Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:03:50 +0100, Peter T. Breuer <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote: >>> Yes, I also have difficulties. Russians in Norway also have problems >>> with our "kj"-sound. >> >> Does that start a word? Can only imagine it followed by a vowel! > Try to whisper a 'j' sound, like "jam". It's voice-less, slightly sharper > (make the air passage narrower, requiring more pressure to drive the air > through). Tip of tonge more down. (Typical pronunciations of "sh" has the > tip of the tongue quite high. With "kj", the air restriction is quite Oh, I see, it is a sort of "zsj". Maybe like "zsa zsa" (but a bit more punch to it) in "zsa zsa gabor". > near the middle of the tonge surface, against the hard palate well > behind the teeth.) > Yes, it frequently occurs at the begining of words, and I am not aware > of any case where the next sound is not a wowel. OK. Peter |