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Non-native English speakers: what sounds/tones commonly used in English were difficult for you to learn? What is your native language?
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Jul 17, 2013 00:33
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xcdude24 posted:Non-native English speakers: what sounds/tones commonly used in English were difficult for you to learn? What is your native language? Native: Dutch. I still can't pronounce 'th' accurately. Deaf and death sound the same from my mouth.
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Jul 17, 2013 00:40
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Namarrgon posted:Native: Dutch. I still can't pronounce 'th' accurately. Deaf and death sound the same from my mouth. Deaffffff: Touch your top front teeth to your bottom lip. Deathhhhhh: Lightly touch your tongue to your top front teeth. Your tongue should be between both rows of teeth, and not touching your lips. Let me know if that helps! 
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Jul 17, 2013 01:20
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Amelia Song posted:A bonfire? I felt like leaving  out of my post was a good idea but now I'm not so sure.
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Jul 17, 2013 02:44
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Namarrgon posted:Native: Dutch. I still can't pronounce 'th' accurately. Deaf and death sound the same from my mouth. I'm native German and I'm pretty good with the whole "th" thing by now, thanks to having an American gf for a while and constantly playing games with Americans/Brits on Mumble. The "th" definitely seems to be the biggest hurdle though and loads of people have problems pronouncing it right. Kind of like how no english speaker can get our "ch" sound right without sounding like they're coughing up a hairball.
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Jul 17, 2013 05:30
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abraxas posted:I'm native German and I'm pretty good with the whole "th" thing by now, thanks to having an American gf for a while and constantly playing games with Americans/Brits on Mumble. Here's my question: can Americans hear the difference between the 'ch' in "ich" and "fach?" Can Germans hear the difference the initial sounds in "think," "tinkle," and "zinc?" Because the mechanics of it are easy. If you can make both an S sound and a K sound, you CAN say "ich." The opposite probably isn't true... 'th' sounds are in fact pretty unlike most sounds in German. I can't think of one requires tongue-between-teeth like 'th' does.
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Jul 17, 2013 05:47
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This American (with no German training whatsoever) can't imagine that there would be a pronunciation difference between "ich" and "fach". After all, the letters are the same! Also, since I happen to be living in Japan at the moment, I can say with certainty that pronouncing "l" and "r" as different sounds is very difficult for Japanese people, even ones with a high degree of vocabulary and grammar ability. Same with placing an "r" sound in the middle of a word (the Japanese tend to learn a slightly more British pronunciation, and so elide the "r" and replace it with a longer vowel). Or the word "sea" -- because the Japanese has only a "shi" and not a "si", most Japanese people struggle to put the "s" before an "ee"/"ea"/"i". And yes, anywhere the "th" sounds crops up they'll tend to have trouble. Edit: To be fair, much of the problem Japanese people have with English is because they are taught pronunciation using Japanese orthography, which is missing a lot of sounds present in English. So instead of learning to speak English, they learn English grammar -- and how to pronounce the closest approximation Japanese has to the correct English pronunciation. Grundulum fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 06:07
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abraxas posted:The "th" definitely seems to be the biggest hurdle though and loads of people have problems pronouncing it right. Kind of like how no english speaker can get our "ch" sound right without sounding like they're coughing up a hairball. I was taught that "ch" was the sound of a cat hissing, although now I live in Switzerland and coughing things up is the standard here.
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Jul 17, 2013 06:32
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Mescal posted:Here's my question: can Americans hear the difference between the 'ch' in "ich" and "fach?" Can Germans hear the difference the initial sounds in "think," "tinkle," and "zinc?" Because the mechanics of it are easy. If you can make both an S sound and a K sound, you CAN say "ich." The opposite probably isn't true... 'th' sounds are in fact pretty unlike most sounds in German. I can't think of one requires tongue-between-teeth like 'th' does. I can really only speak for myself here so I have no idea if Americans hear the difference between the 'ch' sound in "ich" and "fach". I'll admit I had to actually say them out loud to myself before realizing what difference you were even talking about  I can make out the difference between the initial sounds of "think", "tinkle" and "zinc" pretty easily, but again, I can only speak for myself. The 'th' sound is completely new to all Germans having to learn English. There's no sound like it in the German language, where you have to put the tongue between your teeth and all that. I remember being taught in school to stick my tongue out, push it up against my incisors and pull it back in, "raking" it against the teeth while trying to make an S sound. Produces a pretty servicable 'th' for me, at least! My biggest problems with pronounciation are easily with 'th' being followed by an s or the other way around. Sometimes it all just kinda gets mixed up in my head and I end up saying an s instead of a th or a th instead of an s. greazeball posted:I was taught that "ch" was the sound of a cat hissing, although now I live in Switzerland and coughing things up is the standard here. I honest to god do not know or understand how Swiss people talk without constantly blowing out their larynx. It hurts my throat just listening to them. The cat hissing comparison is pretty good, though, I think.
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Jul 17, 2013 06:54
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xcdude24 posted:Non-native English speakers: what sounds/tones commonly used in English were difficult for you to learn? What is your native language? Native Russian speaker and I also have had the most problems with th, which doesn't exist at all in Russian. It took a long long long time for "teeth" to stop being "teet" and to say "the" properly instead of "zhe" or "deh" or something. I still have a lot of trouble differentiating w and v though (Russians only have one v), to the point where I can't really even hear the difference between the two most of the time, even though according to others I say stuff like "weterenarian" and "vork". I guess there's some other minor stuff (pray/prey/sleigh?) but it's not so noticeable. On a basic first-learning level though, I was really confused over English vowels. Russian doesn't really have "short" and "long" vowels, they're all long and if there's a "short" version of it it's a separate letter. So there were some WTF moments like how "o" is like the Russian "o" until you put two of them together (oo) and it becomes some bastard cousin of a u. Also figuring out where to say a short "a" versus a long one, etc. Actually it's not even just short and long, I forget what the other one's called but there's stuff like... "cat" versus "hate" versus "far". And silent letters/weird pronunciations. Russian's generally very... say-it-as-you-write-it, and what exceptions there are used to be spoken that way, too, but the accents just changed over time. Kids even learn basic reading with japaneese-like consonant-vowel pairs like "la, lee, loo" etc (except we don't have any issues with stuff not ending on a vowel). If you told a Russian who doesn't know any English except for the Roman alphabet to say... e.g. "The Beatles" (let's pretend they live under a rock), you'd get something like "t-HÉ BEE-aat-l'ess". On the flipside to that and the whole vowels thing, we take our consonants pretty seriously and Americans kind of sound like they're... mushing them? (Compare a rolling r to the way someone from Boston would pronounce it). We even have a symbol that changes any consonant that comes before it into a "soft" version, which... Isn't really something I can transliterate. But like... A "soft" s is the s in "siesta", and a soft t is the very first inkling of a sound you get in "theory". I dunno if you can extrapolate that to all the rest... But all that said, English was a cakewalk for me compared to French, which takes the vowels to even more weirdass nasally extremes, throws most of the consonants out (but occasionally attaches them to places where they're not written at all), and just overall has this extremely counter-intuitive pronunciation. I still remember opening up something like Rosetta stone, seeing the sentence "les hommes mangent", hearing what sounded to my ears as "lesomoj" and thinking "What the gently caress is this?!" ...Hell, I've lived in Quebec for years and can generally speak French, but still can't tell apart "plaisant" and "Place d'Armes" (though to be fair I think Quebecois is a lot less enunciated than European French). Culinary Bears fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 07:27
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abraxas posted:I honest to god do not know or understand how Swiss people talk without constantly blowing out their larynx. It hurts my throat just listening to them. The cat hissing comparison is pretty good, though, I think. I find it's more in the family of "coughing and spitting" languages like Hebrew and Arabic. quote:I can really only speak for myself here so I have no idea if Americans hear the difference between the 'ch' sound in "ich" and "fach". I'll admit I had to actually say them out loud to myself before realizing what difference you were even talking about It's surprisingly common (I'm an EFL teacher) to hear students say "thumb-sing" instead of "something" and I've noticed it from both French and German speakers. It seems to be caused by anticipating the "th" and some kind of anxiety around it and the only way I've figured out how to help students with it is by getting them to practice the tongue twister "Some things think and some things sink." Maybe I'm just a dick. xcdude24 posted:Non-native English speakers: what sounds/tones commonly used in English were difficult for you to learn? What is your native language? Learner English by Swan and Smith is a book about exactly this topic (and can be found as a pdf by searching that exact phrase). In my experience, "th" is the universally foreign sound for all learners but the book goes into a lot of detail about the particular problems for a number of different language groups and even highlights common grammatical forms which are carried over from the speaker's first language into English.
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Jul 17, 2013 08:16
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Okay, here's the one that completely stumps me. Once a German told me that "In this willage, Gottlieb Daimler inwented the motor wehicle." You can say willst du, in wenigen Tagen, and wieder, but you can't say village, invented, or vehicle?
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Jul 17, 2013 08:59
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greazeball posted:It's surprisingly common (I'm an EFL teacher) to hear students say "thumb-sing" instead of "something" and I've noticed it from both French and German speakers. It seems to be caused by anticipating the "th" and some kind of anxiety around it and the only way I've figured out how to help students with it is by getting them to practice the tongue twister "Some things think and some things sink." Maybe I'm just a dick. Man, maybe *I* should start practicing that tongue twister. I think the problem is less anxiety around it and more that people have to make a conscious effort to make that sound that they never grew up with/never use in everyday life. So you have to concentrate on it and anticipate it because it's not just ingrained in your brain from growing up with it. I'm sure that, as a teacher, you more often than not come across people taking the easy way out and just using an s sound instead of a th sound. When you're suddenly faced with the fact that there's an ACTUAL s sound in close proximity to a th sound, your brain goes all  and that's when you end up with "thumb-sing" and all that fun stuff.Mescal posted:Okay, here's the one that completely stumps me. Once a German told me that "In this willage, Gottlieb Daimler inwented the motor wehicle." You can say willst du, in wenigen Tagen, and wieder, but you can't say village, invented, or vehicle? This might come down to regional dialect. I'm from Nürnberg which is the most wonderful city in Franconia (don't anyone dare say anything else  ) and basically when we speak we make no distinction between "P" and "B" or between "T" and "D". It's all a bit slurred and stuff like that. This leads to funny things like my dad writing a note trying to say "The Bofrost guy was here" (Bofrost delivers frozen foods to your door) but actually writing down "Pofrost", which translates to Buttfrost
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Jul 17, 2013 09:10
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What would be the best way to sell a lock of Napoleons hair, if I didn't have a receipt or any kind of proof of ownership?
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Jul 17, 2013 09:34
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Grundulum posted:Also, since I happen to be living in Japan at the moment, I can say with certainty that pronouncing "l" and "r" as different sounds is very difficult for Japanese people, even ones with a high degree of vocabulary and grammar ability. The main reason this is an issue is because many, many Japanese teachers of English teach the mechanics of it improperly. They explain that "l" is made by flapping the tongue back-to-front on the roof of the mouth -- fine. Then many of them say that "r" is doing that BACKWARDS. I've met TONS of Japanese people who are surprised that I don't flick my tongue at all for "r" sounds.
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Jul 17, 2013 09:50
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tarepanda posted:The main reason this is an issue is because many, many Japanese teachers of English teach the mechanics of it improperly. They explain that "l" is made by flapping the tongue back-to-front on the roof of the mouth -- fine. Then many of them say that "r" is doing that BACKWARDS. I've met TONS of Japanese people who are surprised that I don't flick my tongue at all for "r" sounds. Are they teaching English or Spanish to these people? Who the hell flaps/trills an "r" in English?
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Jul 17, 2013 09:57
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hookerbot 5000 posted:What would be the best way to sell a lock of Napoleons hair, if I didn't have a receipt or any kind of proof of ownership? I'd guess Sotheby's. They could arrange to have it verified with DNA testing. Do you really have one?
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Jul 17, 2013 10:47
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Schweinhund posted:I'd guess Sotheby's. They could arrange to have it verified with DNA testing. Do you really have one? My father in law does, he found it in a skip about 20 years ago(where he gets all of his stuff). It's in a presentation box and he's never had it verified but I've seen other similar ones going up for auction so it seems pretty plausible. He did call on of the big fancy auctioneers but they said if he doesn't have proof of ownership they can't sell it in case he nicked it or something. He'd told them he bought it in a box of random crap in a car boot sale. I was thinking that we could put it up on eBay for a ridiculously high price, him 'buy' it off us and then there would be a receipt from eBay confirming that he bought it off some random people online - would that work do you think? I've got some pictures I could post if anyone is interested.
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Jul 17, 2013 11:02
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abraxas posted:The "th" definitely seems to be the biggest hurdle though and loads of people have problems pronouncing it right. Kind of like how no english speaker can get our "ch" sound right without sounding like they're coughing up a hairball. I've heard adult native English speakers who say f instead of th. I have no idea how they've gotten through life without being constantly laughed at and corrected. If you've got a German accent and you say it wrong, everyone just thinks "Well, it's your second language, understandable." but if you've got an Australian accent then no one is cutting you that slack.
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Jul 17, 2013 11:05
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Generally people stop mocking speech impediments after like, secondary school.
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Jul 17, 2013 11:08
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Mr. Squishy posted:Generally people stop mocking speech impediments after like, secondary school. Hehe, hehe, hehe, I wish. 
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Jul 17, 2013 12:33
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Mescal posted:Okay, here's the one that completely stumps me. Once a German told me that "In this willage, Gottlieb Daimler inwented the motor wehicle." You can say willst du, in wenigen Tagen, and wieder, but you can't say village, invented, or vehicle? This happens because there is no /w/ sound in German and the /w/ will often sound like [v] to Germans, so when Germans are speaking English they are kind of hyper-aware of the sound and might over-do it. It's like when an American goes to speak German and makes things way more guttural than it really is because those sounds stick out more to Americans. Native English speakers don't really struggle with the 'ich' and 'fach' distinction because the soft /ch/ follows front-vowels while the hard /ch/ follows back vowels. That's also why you have 'Buch' as a hard /ch/ and 'Bücher' as a soft /ch/, because you are switching from a back-vowel to a front-vowel. Basically you use the sound that comes easiest with the vowel. Native English speakers usually just can't make the soft /ch/ sound because it is too similar to the English /sh/ in 'she'.
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Jul 17, 2013 14:11
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I'm a native Swedish speaker, and the most difficult sounds for a Swede is the sounds that don't exist in our language. The 'th' in 'this' and the 'dth' in 'width' often come out as a 'd'. The letter W is only used in proper names and loan words, so for someone with a thick Swedish accent it comes out as 'v'. If you want to hear what it sounds like and which sounds are difficult, look at any video featuring celebrity chef Markus Samuelsson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MbaVTRkGlo
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Jul 17, 2013 15:45
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Has Senior Woodchuck been involved in some spy stuff and had his cover blown, or something? Almost all his previous posts have been permissioned out.
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Jul 17, 2013 15:51
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axolotl farmer posted:If you want to hear what it sounds like and which sounds are difficult, look at any video featuring celebrity chef Markus Samuelsson. Genuinely sad this doesn't like to the Muppet Swedish Chef. chemosh6969 posted:Has Senior Woodchuck been involved in some spy stuff and had his cover blown, or something? Almost all his previous posts have been permissioned out. You know you don't have permission to see the secret mod forum right?
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Jul 17, 2013 15:54
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Mr. Squishy posted:You know you don't have permission to see the secret mod forum right? Ah, I didn't even think of that.
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Jul 17, 2013 16:49
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I remember being a kid and when I had a VHS tape I wanted to clear so I'd have a 'blank' one, I'd just set my VCR to record channel 01 overnight, as it just was static. Why (at least in American TV broadcasts) is there no channel 1? Even going back to the oldest TV I can recall, a squat 7in model from the 70's, the dial to select a channel didn't have an option for 01. It just started at 02 and went up from there (and of course a separate dial for UHF).
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Jul 17, 2013 19:35
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CzarChasm posted:I remember being a kid and when I had a VHS tape I wanted to clear so I'd have a 'blank' one, I'd just set my VCR to record channel 01 overnight, as it just was static. Channel 1 was removed from the US bandplan in the 1950s or 1940s to have the frequency given to amateur radio. It had poor characteristics for TV broadcast at the time and very few TV stations had been licensed to use it to begin with, making it easy to remove while 2 had already been in wide use and the stations didn't want to have to change their numbers. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 19:42
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hookerbot 5000 posted:I was thinking that we could put it up on eBay for a ridiculously high price, him 'buy' it off us and then there would be a receipt from eBay confirming that he bought it off some random people online - would that work do you think? You would have to pay fees on that ridiculously high price to eBay. It would also look like money laundering to an outsider.
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Jul 17, 2013 21:20
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Cakefool posted:You would have to pay fees on that ridiculously high price to eBay. It would also look like money laundering to an outsider. oh yeah Forgot about fees
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Jul 17, 2013 21:27
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CzarChasm posted:I remember being a kid and when I had a VHS tape I wanted to clear so I'd have a 'blank' one, I'd just set my VCR to record channel 01 overnight, as it just was static. Why did you want to clear it? Why not just record the new thing right over the old thing. That's what I always did.
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Jul 17, 2013 22:47
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What's the best way to block websites on Firefox, Chrome and IE? I'm running Windows 7, if that matters.
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Jul 18, 2013 00:08
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Giant Squid posted:What's the best way to block websites on Firefox, Chrome and IE? I'm running Windows 7, if that matters. http://www.overclock.net/t/44143/how-to-use-the-hosts-file-to-block-websites-in-windows
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Jul 18, 2013 00:13
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Schweinhund posted:http://www.overclock.net/t/44143/how-to-use-the-hosts-file-to-block-websites-in-windows When I try to save the changes to the hosts file, it tells me that I need administrator permission to save the file. I'm not sure what that means because this is a home computer and I'm on the admin account. Is there a way to give myself admin privileges to change this file? Giant Squid fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 01:04
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Try right clicking on notepad (the icon for it) and choosing "run as administrator" then open and save the file with that. You might have to switch "text documents (.txt)" to "all files" to see the host file in the explorer.
Schweinhund fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 01:10
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Schweinhund posted:Try right clicking on notepad (the icon for it) and choosing "run as administrator" then open and save the file with that. You might have to switch "text documents (.txt)" to "all files" to see the host file in the explorer. That worked! Thanks!
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Jul 18, 2013 01:16
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Is there a "right click and host on imgur" script for Chrome?
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Jul 18, 2013 03:36
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the posted:Is there a "right click and host on imgur" script for Chrome? You can use this extension.
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Jul 18, 2013 03:50
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So about that mysterious rock, I just told my friend it was probably anthracite coal and he seemed okay with that explanation. I've got one more picture that I didn't post if anyone wants to see it!
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Jul 18, 2013 04:49
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I was flying from the UK to Latvia recently and after check in but just before security control this woman stopped me and asked if I could deliver some letters to her sister or something (post them when I got there I guess). The letters looked like they were unsealed but I quickly refused and walked away since it smelled like a money laundering thing or some other scam. Now I'm just curious whether this is a regular act at airports or was I just overly cautious?
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Jul 18, 2013 17:50
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