2 ms·

The unintended mistakes in speaking/writing in another language is like a fingerprint of what country you originate from. I used to play a lot on old roleplayin

by Moru 8y ago

The unintended mistakes in speaking/writing in another language is like a fingerprint of what country you originate from. I used to play a lot on old roleplaying servers and started noticing things that certain nationalities do with words. I'm from Sweden and could pick out germans pretty consistently. Germany has a funny kids program that plays a sample in german and a foreign language while showing videoclips. You are supposed to guess what language it is. Pretty fun to get a feel for the sound-picture of a language :-)

evincarofautumn 8y ago
It’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way. A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their native language. The way a lot of people learn the sounds of a foreign language in the first place is by “transliterating” them to their native language—so they never quite pick up the foreign sounds exactly, just the nearest approximation from their native array of sounds. But even if you can’t hear them, the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of their writing are going to be influenced by their native language as well, in fairly predictable ways. Of course now that I’m trying to think of examples, I can’t recall any. :P
habeebtc 8y ago
Incredibly true! There's a lot of shibboleths, odd turns of phrase, that come from people translating their thoughts literally into another language. Japanese > English for example, you'll hear people say things like, "What are you doing from now?" It's also very common to mix up articles, so I hear a lot of things being inflected very definitely, but they will use the indefinite article. Ex: "That band is great, but the singer is a problem." Grammatically correct, but a shade of meaning to the left of what they were trying to say.

2 ms·

The unintended mistakes in speaking/writing in another language is like a fingerprint of what country you originate from. I used to play a lot on old roleplayin

by Moru 8y ago

evincarofautumn 8y ago
It’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way. A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their native language. The way a lot of people learn the sounds of a foreign language in the first place is by “transliterating” them to their native language—so they never quite pick up the foreign sounds exactly, just the nearest approximation from their native array of sounds. But even if you can’t hear them, the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of their writing are going to be influenced by their native language as well, in fairly predictable ways. Of course now that I’m trying to think of examples, I can’t recall any. :P
habeebtc 8y ago
Incredibly true! There's a lot of shibboleths, odd turns of phrase, that come from people translating their thoughts literally into another language. Japanese > English for example, you'll hear people say things like, "What are you doing from now?" It's also very common to mix up articles, so I hear a lot of things being inflected very definitely, but they will use the indefinite article. Ex: "That band is great, but the singer is a problem." Grammatically correct, but a shade of meaning to the left of what they were trying to say.