Good tunes you don't understand a word of

Discussion in 'Entertainment' started by AVCortez, May 10, 2013.

  1. AVCortez

    AVCortez Active Member

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    This is the case for everyone. It is the same for Spanish speakers, Italians, if you heard someone speak Finish with a heavy, foreign accent you would struggle to understand them. It's not a problem, it's very normal.

    A lot of people couldn't understand me when I spoke. Australians speak a slightly peculiar, and very fast dialect of English. I felt like I was talking to children while I was over-seas, I was talking in half-time. Relative to most Australians, I actually annunciate very well.

    They subtitle the guys on "Swamp People" they are speaking English, but their accent is so heavy it's difficult to understand.

    We are programmed to hear words in a certain way, when people break that it takes some time to adjust.
     
  2. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    Uh, I know that. We're talking about a slightly different thing, I think. My reference was to the observation of my sister-in-law; she was in an international community and these people were apparently too polite to say anything or understood her better, but when she didn't talk to the locals the way the locals talked, they apparently had a harder time to understand what she was saying.

    I think Finnish is as a language so different, it and English can't be compared here, at least not in the sense I'm seeing this matter -- especially because English has more variations, and it's the lingua franca; its speakers often here more of its variants; they recognize how the Indians talk, or Jamaicans. Btw, there are never subtitles on TV when a Finn who doesn't speak the standard Southern dialect talks. I think it's mostly because the phonetics don't change that drastically, it's more the vocabulary.

    Maybe my ears are trained differently, but I understood right away what Sterling Archer's voice actor said in Finnish in one episode, and it was actually a very complicated sentence, and the open vowels and rhotic 'r's are a nightmare to many non-Finns. He did pronounce it very badly. But that's just one example, and I'm sure there are Finns who struggle understanding non-Finns talking Finnish. Though usually the reaction is "oh my god that was amazing!" because people don't usually expect a foreigner be able to say anything in Finnish.

    An interesting verb choice, "programmed."
    However, what baffled me a bit about the post I commented on was that one doesn't understand a word of English sung in a heavy Swedish accent? That's what struck me odd, and I instantly thought about what my sister-in-law told me, how the locals couldn't get the hang of her speech (there were some other instances I can't remember. The toothpaste stuck to me) while the people she worked with, some non-native English speakers, apparently understood her just fine. I know it doesn't generate a pattern, it was just something that occurred to me at that point.

    (I shouldn't use myself as an example, but I've never struggled to understand what the Hives or Scar Symmetry sing about. Maybe I've gotten used to the Swedish-English accent... somehow... even though I hear it very, very rarely in speech...)
     
  3. AVCortez

    AVCortez Active Member

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    Everything you just said here is pretty much irrelevant: If Finish can be taught to someone other than a Finn, then that person will have an accent. Because, from a young age, they learnt to shape sounds differently to a finish person, their pronunciation will be imperfect, and thus, could be confusing. I'd be shocked if you'd have even met a native anything-else speaker, who has learnt finnish as a second language.

    Your ears may very well be trained differently. Jon Benjamin may have practised the line in Finnish again, and again, and again, and again until he got it to as close to right as possible - which is just as likely.

    I have been coding PHP, JavaScript, Html and CSS for more than 12 hours a day, for the past 5... All I can think of is programming. But it's not so strange, programmed/taught, it's same the premise. I would actually say that a a child learning to differentiate between faces, speech and words is actually more akin to a computer updating, than sentient learning.

    Until this thread, I didn't even know the Hives were Swedish, and I bought one of the their albums about six years ago. So that not a brilliant example. I don't know many people who sing in English with an accent.... In fact, I can't think of any, perhaps gypsy kings. Listen to a live album by Blind Guardian, and you'll see what I mean. Kursch sounds like he can barely wrap his mouth around the the simplest of words, then he sings and he has one of the clearest English singing voices I can think of.
     
  4. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    My point, suffocated under an avalanche of words, was something like EFL speakers (or people who spend loads of time in such surroundings that they are exposed to different variations of English) may have more trained ears to understand and grasp different accents than native speakers because they hear imperfect English more often. I have no idea, I was merely wondering, and I suppose it doesn't really even matter, but a human brain is weirdly wired that way, sometimes it poses odd questions.

    Yeah, I said interesting, not strange per se. I mean, it's fascinating how a human brain can sometimes behave like a computer. Maybe it makes sense cos thanks to our brains, we have computers and programmes. Dunno.

    I'm trying to find music by Finnish immigrants who sing in Finnish to experience the reverse of this, but so far no joy...
     
  5. ChaosReigns

    ChaosReigns Ov The Left Hand Path Contributor

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    be careful with that, as Canadian French is vastly different from the French spoken in France, CF is more 17th Century whereas FF is modern and has been influenced (like english) by some other languages

    like a few others here Rammstein
    and Miyavi, he sings mostly in Japanese and i cant understand that
     
  6. AVCortez

    AVCortez Active Member

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    I'd say it is the case. When I first started hanging around with Norwegians their language sounded like wordless dribble, but after a few months their language slowed down. Now, after four or five years, I can differentiate between words. It's pretty cool. When we were hunting I was listening to my friend's uncle tell a story in norwegian. I can barely string a sentence together but I quite easily worked out that the story was about an old man, who had some sort of small animal in his house (I assumed a raccoon, but that's probably because I'd been watching swamp people), it attacked him, then he chased it with a gun, fired at it a number of times, but it escaped.

    I was pretty much spot on, except that it wasn't a small animal; it was his wife.

    Just kidding, it wasn't his wife

    It's exactly the same with the native language. I hung around with the norwegians so much that I actually forgot they had an accent. They just sounded a little different to me, and yet strangers would often get lost if they spoke to quickly.

    It would be a good test, if you guys are anything like the rest of the norde you probably have a big Turkish and Pakistani population. No idea how you'd track down such a specific group of people though - they probably sing in their native tongue.

    I met a Montrealian(???) in Paris and he said the Parisians were wankers. France's adherance to keeping French French was a great source of pain to him. CF apparently incorporates a lot of english words. The example he used was band aid. He said in Canada you could say Bandaid, or plastic (is sounded like plastic at least), but in France you had to say something different or they'd scowl at you.

    France has a whole board of scholars whose sole purpose is to make up new french words for things, and define nouns as male or female. Their love for their language is admirable, if not a little pretentious. Personally I think that every country that teaches English in schools; Germany, Scandinavia, Netherlands, Finland, should have a trust that works in this way... If they don't already. Give it a couple of hundred years, when they're teaching Hindi or Mandarin as standard in western schools, we might even need it.
     
  7. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    What does it say about me (or my experiences with Norwegians) that I actually thought you were serious...


    We don't really have immigrants, so my search has yielded zilch so far.

    Oh, I listened to some obscure Estonian gangsta rap a while ago, 42GO or something (yeah, gangsters in Estonia... if there are any, they'd look like Russian guys in fur coats rather than 50 Cent). It was total crap, but friggin' hilarious at the same time, so I'm not sure if it was actually "a good tune." Something about new tires to the rapper's BMW. Estonian is pretty close to Finnish, but often the familiar-sounding words have a totally diff meaning.
     
  8. ECKS

    ECKS New Member

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    Well, I've since looked them up, but the first time I heard this?! No way.


    Lyrics begin around 1:20.
    On a side note this is one of my favorite all time songs with 300+ listens in WMP.
     

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