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I feel the authors pain of learning a foreign language. I’ve struggled with Japanese just as long as the author has with English and I am no where near being ab
by wodenokoto 5y ago
I feel the authors pain of learning a foreign language. I’ve struggled with Japanese just as long as the author has with English and I am no where near being able to write a blog post like that.
I still think the author misses the target on a few points:
English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling, which I suppose is more difficult than average (being Danish myself, I don’t see it as more difficult than “normal”)
English is a first language across a huge swath of the earth. No wonder British, Indian, American and Australian English ended up so different. But due to politics and the internet, we barely recognize these as dialects.
The author says it’s easy for Italians to understand Sicilian, but I’m sure anyone who learned Italian as a second language from textbooks won’t feel the same.
If you’ve learned Japanese or Chinese from a textbook you’ll have a hard time understanding what people are talking about in Shanghai or Guangdong or Osaka or Kyushu.
Languages are difficult. Difficult to learn, difficult to measure and difficult to categorize.
The biggest myth on the internet is that English is somehow easier or more suited for as a common language. But I disagree that it is worse than others.
- mmarq 5y ago> The author says it’s easy for Italians to understand Sicilian, but I’m sure anyone who learned Italian as a second language from textbooks won’t feel the same. Sicilian is not intelligible to italian speakers. The only dialect that is fully understandable is Roman vernacular. He said that Italians understand each other when speaking Italian.
- johnofthesea 5y ago> English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling, which I suppose is more difficult than average (being Danish myself, I don’t see it as more difficult than “normal”) But Danish is even harder. Written like Norwegian, spoken like Dutch.
- mariusor 5y ago> English phonetics are no worse than any other language- when the author writes phonetics he means spelling I doubt that. I understand Italian at an A2/B1 level, however if I see a sentence or a name in Italian I will pronounce it correctly in 95% of the times even if I never saw it, or heard it before. That's the power of a phonetic language which Italian is for the most part.
- wodenokoto 5y agoThat’s due to a reasonable spelling. Phonetics are the sounds of a language. All spoken languages are phonetic. > Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics
- mariusor 5y agoOK, I guess it's an idiom that differs between romance languages and English. In Italian and my mother tongue a phonetic language is one where one letter corresponds to one sound (or at least that's how my teachers referred to it in school). In English, the corresponding dictionary definition seems to be: a language with a "phonemic orthographic system". TIL.