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When I lived in Latvia I found it impossible to even hear where words started and stopped for the first few months. Was a humbling experience.
by rorykoehler 6y ago
When I lived in Latvia I found it impossible to even hear where words started and stopped for the first few months. Was a humbling experience.
- boojums 6y agoYou may be interested in Minimal Pair Testing [0]. The idea is to train you ear to decipher between similar sounds (for example if you wanted to recognize "lock" vs "rock"). I first encountered the idea in Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair
- 3pt14159 6y agoIs Latvian anything like Russian? I found it impossible to hear the vowels when I was first learning Russian. Even today, И and Ы are difficult for me to differentiate, but I've only been in Russian speaking countries for around three months, so maybe that will come with time.
- gnulinux 6y agoLatvian and Lithuanian are Baltic languages, which is a language family within Indo-European language family. Among Indo-European language family, Baltic and Slavic languages are the closest (aka Balto-Slavic language family).
- philsnow 6y agoIt took me about that amount of time of actual study to be able to "lex" spoken Cantonese into phonemes. It's a weird experience that happened nearly overnight -- it went from "incomprehensible wall of sound" to "stream of sounds, with clear start/stops" very quickly. IIRC the early language acquisition literature supports the idea that exposing a child to the sounds of a language (even without any actual instruction or even requiring the child to pay particular attention to the person speaking) is enough to make it much easier for them to understand and produce that language later in life.
- rorykoehler 6y agoMy wife's family speak Cantonese at home and I could instantly recognise words. Latvian was far more difficult for me.