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It goes the other way too. I can read and write Chinese far better than I can speak it or listen to it in real time. If I have time to think, I can get grammar

It goes the other way too. I can read and write Chinese far better than I can speak it or listen to it in real time. If I have time to think, I can get grammar mostly correctly but if I have to do it on my feet I make many mistakes with tones and grammar.

protomyth 9y ago
I can read Dakotah ok, but I never could speak the language because I cannot really do the guttural without sounding idiotic. Had a boss who learned the language from her uncles, so she was teased by her aunts for "talking like a man". Reading is safer.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  How so? That's interesting- how is speaking like a man or a woman different in Dakotah? Is it like in Japanese, where different first-person pronouns are used, or? (er, not trying to make some political comment on gender roles etc, just genuinely interested to hear from a speaker. I guess I can just google it :)
  - protomyth 9y ago
    There are some word differences and tone. I'm pretty poor at the difference since I'm not really a speaker (that whole guttural problem). If you look up Lakota, its basically the same difference since they are pretty close language wise. On a side note, it is a pain in the butt to search for Dakota as opposed to Lakota on Google because it keeps giving Lakota pages. What a pain.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
I think in general it's writing and reading that's easier- possibly because speech is a noisy channel, or maybe because when you're taught a language as a foreign language (at school that is) you get taught from texts and they also teach you a kind of "official" version that's not quite the version spoken by native speakers. Like I say above, I had a big problem with that in my first couple of years in the UK. I once spent an hour having a conversation with a man from Glasgow. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't understand a word he was saying, so I just nodded along politely. I might have been agreeing to the need for the extermination of all sentient life or that the Earth is flat, for all I know. I got better at it. I can now understand about 40% of what someone's saying in a Glaswegian accent. I love Scottish accents btw- probably more because I don't understand everything being said.

protomyth 9y ago

I can read Dakotah ok, but I never could speak the language because I cannot really do the guttural without sounding idiotic. Had a boss who learned the language from her uncles, so she was teased by her aunts for "talking like a man". Reading is safer.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
How so? That's interesting- how is speaking like a man or a woman different in Dakotah? Is it like in Japanese, where different first-person pronouns are used, or? (er, not trying to make some political comment on gender roles etc, just genuinely interested to hear from a speaker. I guess I can just google it :)
- protomyth 9y ago
  There are some word differences and tone. I'm pretty poor at the difference since I'm not really a speaker (that whole guttural problem). If you look up Lakota, its basically the same difference since they are pretty close language wise. On a side note, it is a pain in the butt to search for Dakota as opposed to Lakota on Google because it keeps giving Lakota pages. What a pain.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

I think in general it's writing and reading that's easier- possibly because speech is a noisy channel, or maybe because when you're taught a language as a foreign language (at school that is) you get taught from texts and they also teach you a kind of "official" version that's not quite the version spoken by native speakers. Like I say above, I had a big problem with that in my first couple of years in the UK. I once spent an hour having a conversation with a man from Glasgow. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't understand a word he was saying, so I just nodded along politely. I might have been agreeing to the need for the extermination of all sentient life or that the Earth is flat, for all I know. I got better at it. I can now understand about 40% of what someone's saying in a Glaswegian accent. I love Scottish accents btw- probably more because I don't understand everything being said.