4 ms·

I think one quote from the article shows how even though the author has a pretty good understanding of English already, he doesn't understand the depth to which

I think one quote from the article shows how even though the author has a pretty good understanding of English already, he doesn't understand the depth to which your mother tongue permeates your thinking system. "Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton. Italian is phonetically one of the simplest languages on the earth, and is full of redundancy." Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today. The same can be said about Mandarin Chinese, and to a lesser degree French, German, etc. This kind of undermines his central thesis, which is that English is broken because native speakers don't speak the language that's taught to foreigners. In reality, what's broken is that languages are taught an idealised version of a language that's technically correct, but don't then supplement that with actual language as it's spoken by real people. I had this same problem with Mandarin Chinese - I'd listen to the example dialogues from the textbook and understand almost nothing. I'd then read the text in Chinese (characters not pinyin), and understand it completely. And those audio dialogues aren't even real speech. To actually get myself able to comprehend conversations, I had to start watching hours and hours of TV dramas so that my brain started to get used to the language that's actually used, not the language that's taught. The author does kind of end on this point, the necessity of listening early, but it seems almost like an afterthought on his premise that English is somehow broken.

ralferoo 5y ago
Oh, and an afterthought... It's much easier to understand a dialect of your native language because you already have a very comprehensive vocabulary and understanding of typical language use in your country. It's fair easier to fill in missing words from context, because there's only so many possible words it could be, and some completely new words can be inferred from context without ambiguity. For example, "can you pass me the oojamaflip?" or slightly easier "can you pass me the whatsit". No native English speaker would even question those, even though they're very dialectal even within the UK, because it's clear it's just a stand-in word for something else. But if a foreigner heard that, they might have a chance with the second one, but the first one would leave them puzzled as to whether the oojamaflip was a specific term for something that they've not come across, or just a nonsense dialect word. If you actually stop to analyze the phonemes in spoken English, you'll realise that it bears almost no resemblance to written English, and unfortunately most learners of English practice on the written forms and make their own models of how the language should sound from that. For instance "are we going out tonight?" is actually the phonemes "we gan aa t' nii?" (in my local area at least) Personally, I think it's better to think of spoken and written forms of language as two entirely different things, but of course knowing one helps with proficiency in the other, as the underlying meaning, vocabulary and word order is usually the same, even if the abstract representation of it is different.
piaste 5y ago
> Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today. In the paragraph you quote, antirez was speaking about standardised Italian, not about dialects (he refers to them in the preceding paragraph). There are still differences in standardised Italian as spoken in different geographical regions, but they're minor ones and don't really impact intelligibility - the most noticeable ones are that Southerners use the simple past whereas Northerners stick to the present perfect; some vowels are stressed differently, and Italian Switzerland has a bunch of calques from French and German. Oh, and in the North we use the definite article with women in the third person, for some reason. On paper it doesn't look too far from the differences between American and British English, but the phonetic difference is minuscule by comparison. No Sicilian is going to have such a strong accent while speaking standard Italian that an Aostan has trouble understanding him.

ralferoo 5y ago

Oh, and an afterthought... It's much easier to understand a dialect of your native language because you already have a very comprehensive vocabulary and understanding of typical language use in your country. It's fair easier to fill in missing words from context, because there's only so many possible words it could be, and some completely new words can be inferred from context without ambiguity. For example, "can you pass me the oojamaflip?" or slightly easier "can you pass me the whatsit". No native English speaker would even question those, even though they're very dialectal even within the UK, because it's clear it's just a stand-in word for something else. But if a foreigner heard that, they might have a chance with the second one, but the first one would leave them puzzled as to whether the oojamaflip was a specific term for something that they've not come across, or just a nonsense dialect word. If you actually stop to analyze the phonemes in spoken English, you'll realise that it bears almost no resemblance to written English, and unfortunately most learners of English practice on the written forms and make their own models of how the language should sound from that. For instance "are we going out tonight?" is actually the phonemes "we gan aa t' nii?" (in my local area at least) Personally, I think it's better to think of spoken and written forms of language as two entirely different things, but of course knowing one helps with proficiency in the other, as the underlying meaning, vocabulary and word order is usually the same, even if the abstract representation of it is different.

piaste 5y ago

> Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today. In the paragraph you quote, antirez was speaking about standardised Italian, not about dialects (he refers to them in the preceding paragraph). There are still differences in standardised Italian as spoken in different geographical regions, but they're minor ones and don't really impact intelligibility - the most noticeable ones are that Southerners use the simple past whereas Northerners stick to the present perfect; some vowels are stressed differently, and Italian Switzerland has a bunch of calques from French and German. Oh, and in the North we use the definite article with women in the third person, for some reason. On paper it doesn't look too far from the differences between American and British English, but the phonetic difference is minuscule by comparison. No Sicilian is going to have such a strong accent while speaking standard Italian that an Aostan has trouble understanding him.