It's not too bad when the words are in context. The mistake foreigners make with Chinese is they say only one or two words, when the same sound can mean several different things depending on context. But if it's in context, assuming your pronunciation isn't way off, you can work it out. Another thing is, I have a theory that to pronounce something tonally, it might actually physically require different muscles. I've never verified this, but it's just a theory. Because I can say the word "Go" differently - "Go" as in "I go to school" or "Go" as in "pudding/tall" in Cantonese. They're both pronounced "Go", but it sounds different, and I can't explain it other than by the theory that it might be physically different to produce each sound. Breaking off to pause for thought at the wrong moment can also cause confusion. My husband did that once. Instead of saying "Nice to meet you", he ended up saying, "I'm very tall." (the word "pleased" as in "Pleased to meet you" is basically 高興, but 高 by itself simply means "tall". My husband took a pause between the two words hehehe)
高 in Japanese means "tall" or "expensive". Same pronunciation, NE Asian languages are good for puns like that.
I think there's defo something to this. Terminal "O" in Russian (words that end in "o") give the O a sound that isn't present in English. Like the word хорошо (good or well) that last O almost sounds like an -oa, but not exactly. Hard to explain. Took most students forever to get it down. And then there are three related letters: И, Й, and Ы. The first is the long "e" of feed. Notice how you sort of stretch out that word? The second is the short "e" of speedy. Notice how much quicker the vowel sounds are in that word? The last one we learned to call swallowed "e"* and makes a sound that just isn't present in English. That one took students forever to get too. Muscles had to be taught to work together in ways that just don't happen in English. *It's actually called yuri, as in Yuri Gagarin.
What you described there sounds similar to the problem Finnish learners have. Like 99.9 % never get it right and you can hear it years and years after: double vowels and consonants. It sounds simple, but it's surprisingly difficult to pronounce correctly, especially when you need to start learning words like: kaari = a vault kari = a shoal hiipiä = to walk on the balls of your feet hipiä = skin tuuma = an inch tuma = the cell nucleus sukka = a sock suka = a brush Sometimes knowing the difference is detrimental: Wreybies tapaa Katin huomenna = Wreybies meets Kat tomorrow. Wreybies tappaa Katin huomenna = Wreybies kills Kat tomorrow.
I don't know about that, but we form our accent somewhere over the early years. Examples of sounds that I know are: -Spaniards sometimes pronounce words beginning with s like they are preceeded with 'es', e.g. Instead of 'Spain' they say 'Es-pain'. -French rolls their r's in a way that doesn't exist in English. Spanish does similarly with 'rr' -Japanese has no 'uh' sound, when trying to speak words with this sound, or transliterating them, they use a instead. @KaTrian that sounds a lot like a similar thing in Japanese. The most famous/infamous one would be the difference between 'auntie' and 'granny' or 'uncle' and 'granddad'. It's the extension of the second vowel in both cases (obasan/obaasan or ojisan/ojiisan respectively) and if you use the extended sound by mistake the party you're talking to could take a lot of offence to it. Also on the similar vein that @Mckk and I were talking about, my Polish supervisor at work said that 'cuppa', British slang for a cup of tea, sounds close to the Polish word for 'shit', so in a similar vein he sniggers inside when he hears the word.
That's a very good example. I was trying to think of some, but drawing a blank except for ビル and ビール (biru=building, biiru=beer). There are also some doubled consonants, but my brain is in panicked test mode where I can't remember any that matter at the moment.
The French R example isn't an accent issue - the requirements to pronounce a guttural R is decidedly different from a rolled Spanish R, and those two are still different from the English R. Your tongue moves differently for each one. The guttural one, your tongue does not move - only the back of your tongue vibrates. The rolled Spanish R, the tip of your tongue moves as air is blown through a small gap made between the tongue and the roof of the mouth. The English R involves moving the tip of the tongue backwards as air is blown through the mouth, combined with a mouth shape that resembles making the W sound. And still the blasted Czech Ř is a mixture of the Spanish rolled R and the -sh sound, where the mouth shape is decidedly different from the Spanish R but the tip of your tongue vibrates like in the Spanish R. These sounds are produced by physically moving your tongue/mouth a certain way, which requires command of certain muscles. Muscles you may not have command of if you're not trained to use them from a young age. We're really now in the area of Speech Therapy. I guess the whole idea of accent is a really complex one. Then you have how words naturally flow and merge together, natural pauses and rhythm and intonation - none of which has anything to do with the correct pronunciation of things (intonation of words does, actually, but I guess not intonation of whole sentences) - but these contribute towards creating an accent. I guess whenever I think of an "accent", I think of mispronunciation that could be corrected - rather than acquiring a skill to produce sounds one's mouth/throat has never produced before. I have no idea why these two things are separate in my head. Which is probably why I don't think of the Rs example as an issue of accent, even though maybe it is!? Anyway with making tones in a tonal language, I can't really demonstrate this over the internet but there's a subtle difference in the way my tongue feels when I say "Go" as in the English "Go" and "Go" as in the Chinese "Go". I actually came up with this theory after realising my voice is a lot deeper when I speak Cantonese, and that it felt like a lower part of my throat vibrated when I used Cantonese. I guess a quick search on Google would easily verify this but it is ten past midnight and I haven't touched my WIP. So, ciao for now! Wanna squeeze in a hundred words or so before bed
You mean those times when there's a mini "tsu" between the letters? It feels more like a guttural stop/pause.
Yep. Acquiring a good Spanish accent - for example - is all about paying attention to vowels. They have to stay open, clean, constant, and unchanged through their pronunciation. The Anglophone habit of pinching vowels off into another sound drives us nuts. Puerto Rico is pronounced poo-ehr-toh ree-koh, not poo-ehr-toe ree-koe. They should not rhyme with the American pronunciation of dough. The word qué is keh, not kay. My Russian teachers told me I spoke Russian with a Spanish accent, which, for whatever reason, was fine with them. The other students were constantly corrected on their vowels in Russian, which to me were the same as Spanish vowels.
ooooh yeees! totally agree with you! as for me, I'm not fluent in German. But It's my favorite language. My teacher who is a German speaks really gentle. So every time I hear about the rudeness of German language sounds like a joke to me.
I grew up in Japan as we were missionaries there for almost eight years. My family spoke English in the home but we got so used to hearing, speaking, and even thinking in Japanese that sometimes we would speak Japanese to each other because we couldn't remember the English for whatever we wanted to say. We came back to the States in '11 so it has been a while since I had to use it, but I've noticed that if I get really tired, especially when I'm stressed, that I go back to thinking in Japanese some and sometimes my husband has to stop me and ask me to translate what I just said. I have a Bible in Japanese so I can still read it, but I can't speak it fluently anymore.
It depends on a dialect. I don't know many about them, but I've met some people that spoke with Berlin dialect and with Swabian, it was a huge difference. Swabian is really gentle, sweet, sometimes almost remind me of french, and Berlin dialect I cannot stand it. When I spent evening with them, I was thinking why they shout all the time.
When I lived in France (studying abroad), I would have conversations with my host dad (who spoke French and English)... and sometimes I would go back to my room and reflect on what we were talking about and I wouldn't remember which language we were using. I genuinely wouldn't know if the conversation had been in English or French, or even if it was in Franglais. In the moment, it wasn't something I thought about. At the peak of my language abilities, I naturally spoke French without having to translate or pause to think about things too much. I see that people have talked about this already, but I just wanted to add my two cents. I feel like it'd be interesting to look at vowel charts from different languages (English and French, for example) and notice that all langauges pretty much have sounds that don't exist elsewhere. Our mouths aren't used to creating those new sounds if we didn't grow up speaking the language. (And our ears aren't used to hearing them!) Even if we practice a lot, we probably won't sound like native speakers. I feel like tonal langauges have two things going on: Cantonese vowels, for example, aren't always exact matches for their English counterparts; and different tongue placements / lip movements are probably used, even if they differ only slightly.
I am the same as you with French when I am chatting with my parents. No idea if or when I mix or which language i was using on hindsight. I read that studies show multilingual folks are actually continuously processing both languages (or I guess all languages?) in parallel, simultaneously, which is how they explain that multilingualism is good for cognitive skills because it means constant deliberate suppression of the language that isn't in use and choosing the correct language to speak. You are totally right about the vowel sounds. Czechs really struggle with English vowels. Our A sounds like their E, and they don't actually have anything that sounds like the English A. They could barely preceive the difference between butter, better and batter. And likewise, i can never quite do Czech vowels because they don't have the puff of air we express in English vowels (it's why fak sounds like fuck, and why when I say tak it sounds more like t-hak and the Czechs are confused).
I've often wished that English still had a dative case. Or something. Still, English word order is considerably more flexible than German, and... yeah I think about what English could be like about every day and I have to console myself. what if it still had a dual number? (admittedly, that would be taking things back a bit far) what if it still had a case system? what if it still had a system of conjugation worth mentioning? what if it had a system of evidentiality? There's always hope for the future, I suppose, but not in my lifetime.
But these things do still exist in English, albeit in vestigial form. Give that to me. (Indirect object pronoun declined into the dative to indicate recipient or beneficiary of action acted upon the direct object). I ate me a big-ass burger at Burger 21. (Ethical dative indicative again of the beneficiary of the action). Now, as regards the future, no, it won't happen. Indo-European languages, as a whole, and in general, show a tendency to move away from the synthetic (case systems with loose word order) and toward the analytic (reduction or elimination of cases, replaced by strong word order to indicate order of operation).
Why on earth would you wish such monstrosities upon English? But it seems you might love Czech. Plenty of the unnecessary things you mentioned to make life a pain! (Hoping to learn Czech one day) Out of interest, what is a dual number? And i think technically words like she, her and hers; he, him and his; I, me, my, mine; and who and whom are all cases. Somehow they aren't recognised as such though in English grammar, i think? I once tried to argue English even has a few tones in it like Chinese like of and off.
A dual number refers to two of something. So, in a language with a dual number, the word for eyes would be in the dual number, since there are two of them, unless you are referring to more than two eyes.
Czech kinda' sorta' acknowledges a similar concept. Like the way 1 of a thing is nominative; 2, 3, & 4 of a thing is genitive singular, and 5 or more of a thing is genitive plural (unless another grammatical case overrides the flat declensions of simple counting). one man = jeden muž two men = dva muži five men = pět mužů. It's like that in Russian too: One year = oдин год (odin god). Two years = два года (dva goda) Five years = пять лет (pyat' let) Not quite the same as acknowledging just dual (2), but similar. English at one time had pronouns indicative of the dual for the 1st person (we two) and the second person (you two), which were seperate from the 1st and 2nd person plurals. First Person Second Person
@Wreybies and @Friederich Kugelschreiber - you what? Although, yeah I know of the counting system in Czech, though I never quite got my head around it. I only know the plural forms of the noun change according to the numbers 1, 2, and 5 - it changes with the number 4 too? But no. I still don't quite get it... Is it the number that changes or the noun that changes when there's two of it? The only similar thing I can think of is the Chinese 兩 vs 二 二 would be 2, as in 1, 2, 3 etc. One, 二, three. Flat number 2 would be 二號 and 二 would be in your telephone number, for example. Whereas 兩 is for...erm. I'm not sure. But if I were to say "There are two apples," I would have to use 兩, and not 二. Two apples 兩個蘋果 The second apple 第二個蘋果 But in the case for Czechs, as you rightly pointed out, it's the noun that changes: muz, muzi, muzu (sorry too lazy to switch to my Czech keyboard). So a dual number is...? Is the Chinese one a "dual" number then?? It's the only number that changes.
The noun. The grammatical property of marking for how many of the noun there is is called number. So, for example, English marks for the plural number with the suffix -s, as in dog-s, meaning more than one. If English had a dual number (let's assume that the suffix is -u), the word for two dogs would be dogu, or a pair of dogs. "Oh, my gosh! Those earringu are completely au courant." (I actually kind of like that) So, basically, the dual number just means "pair of something."
Ah, thanks for the clarification. In that case, Czech does indeed have a dual number, as well as other numbered numbers... Dogu and earringu sound so cute! They remind me of typical Japanese accents when Japanese people speak English You probably won't like Chinese then. We have no plurals whatsoever. Not even -s
