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From: Tobias Brox on 19 Dec 2005 01:32 [blmblm(a)myrealbox.com] > At least one > person I know whose native language is Chinese has trouble with > singular/plural, and he claims it's because Chinese doesn't really > make that distinction. (You'll be able to confirm whether I'm > remembering this right.) I think he also has trouble with verb > tenses, which you mention later. I think I read about another weird case in New Scientist as well: There are some ingenious people in South America who are unable to count! Their language offers "one, two, many" and they have great difficulties with any number higher than three, like, they had big problems copying the string 'IIIII' correctly, or spot the difference between drawings of five and six equal items. -- This signature has been virus scanned, and is probably safe to read Tobias Brox, 69?42'N, 18?57'E
From: Tobias Brox on 19 Dec 2005 01:56 [Lee Sau Dan] > Another common German-made > mistake is saying "I am big/small" instead of "I am tall/short". > Again, this mistake spreads among them like a plague, because their > fellows feel it's 100% OK to say it that way. I once had a German living at my home - I think he totally stayed for a year, and he brought with him some funny English that I'm sure is incorrect; the funny thing was that I also got quite influenced, and my wife too - we started copying his "mistakes". For one thing, to voice his opinion he usually said that 'In my mind, we should construct this using iron, not wood'. I think the correct thing to say would be 'I think we should construct this in iron, not wood' (he wad both blacksmith and carpenter skills, by the way). I'm pretty sure that's a silly thing to say, but still today I'm sometimes saying stuff like 'In my mind, Java is not a good programming language'. -- This signature has been virus scanned, and is probably safe to read Tobias Brox, 69?42'N, 18?57'E
From: ynotssor on 19 Dec 2005 02:02 "Tobias Brox" <tobias(a)stud.cs.uit.no> wrote in message news:do5k68$boa$4(a)news.uit.no > There are some ingenious people in South America who are unable to > count! Their language offers "one, two, many" and they have great > difficulties with any number higher than three, like, they had big > problems copying the string 'IIIII' correctly, or spot the difference > between drawings of five and six equal items. They are not so different from "civilized" folk in the rest of the world, who can only recognize 3 infinite numbers (according to George Cantor, the creator of "the arithmetics of infinity"): the number of all integer and fractional numbers < the number of all geometrical points on a line, in a square or in a cube < the number of all geometrical curves. Any number of infinity beyond those we can can only describe as "many." Human intelligence also has fractal characteristics.
From: Tobias Brox on 19 Dec 2005 02:17 >> blmblm> This all matches my recollections of things I've read >> blmblm> about language acquisition in children. I'm especially >> blmblm> intrigued by the claims that if you don't learn as a child >> blmblm> to hear a distinction between two sounds, it may not be >> blmblm> possible to correct this later. >> >>That's claim is certainly wrong. And it is exploited by those adults >>who are too lazy to learn a new language. > Could be, but my recollection is that this claim was from a > report in the popular press of research done by -- linguists? > psychologists? some variety of academics anyway. Others in this > thread have mentioned similar things, so I think I'm remembering > more or less correctly. Of course the reports in the popular press > could have been inaccurate, or the research could simply be wrong. I don't think I claimed it to be 'impossible', my claim is just that such things are very easily learned by babies, while adults sometimes have great difficulties. Also, clearly languages comes easy for some adults and difficult for others. I'm not good at learning languages. I remember a 20 minutes train trip in Spain, and a Spanish girl trying to teach me to count (to ten and beyond) in Spanish. I think I was around 20 back then, and I had great difficulties remembering the words, remembering the order, and to pronounce them. She got pretty annoyed, and to prove how easy it was, I had to teach her the same in Norwegian - I think I said the numbers only once, but they stuck, she had no problems with it. Clearly, some adults (myself included) really do have a hard time learning new languages, and you cannot attribute a "lack of skill" to lazyness. (Certainly, my wife thinks I'm lazy not to learn Russian). -- This signature has been virus scanned, and is probably safe to read Tobias Brox, 69?42'N, 18?57'E
From: Peter T. Breuer on 19 Dec 2005 06:20
In comp.os.linux.misc Tobias Brox <tobias(a)stud.cs.uit.no> wrote: > [Peter T. Breuer] >> In madrid it would be about as much of a problem as it would be finding >> people who speak spanish in england. > Oh, are there much people speaking Spanish in England? Yes and no. Presumably many schoolchildren learn spanish - or french (but not many actually speak it). >> You have no chance in any shop I can think of, EXCEPT at the big >> department store chain (there is only one). > El Corte Ingles? Yes. Peter |