Taiwan Number 1

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Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Barudak posted:

The Beijing accent is a crime against language.

It took me forever to figure out why people hated how Chinese sounded so much and it finally clicked when I started encountering large groups of 強國人 in Bangkok. The Taiwanese accent is quite nice and for me very easy to listen to and understand, but then those northerners start ar-aring and I can't follow a goddamn thing.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:26

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# ? May 15, 2024 02:34

McGavin: Sep 18, 2012

A similar problem that I've noticed is when Americans write "turrent" when they mean "turret". There isn't a loving N in turret. :argh:

What I'm trying to say here is the unnamed country is also as bad.

McGavin fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Nov 22, 2016

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:26

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

The extraneous post-vowel R sounds when speaking English seems to be universal, I haven't met a native Mandarin speaker who doesn't do that (except a couple who have learned perfect American accents). It's different than the hard constant arrs from up north.

Mandarin to me is sshhhrrrr sshhrrrr shsssshhshhrrr sh shrrr shshshshshshr shr shrr *long loogie hawk, spit*

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Nov 22, 2016

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:28

Pham Nuwen: Oct 30, 2010

Let us English posted:

Katakana mistake. スモーク. ー often indicates an R sound. アフター、バター、バッター、ピッチャー. I think they're just overgeneralizing the pattern.

I'm not sure it's so much that ー indicates an 'r' sound; rather:

Grand Fromage posted:

It makes the preceding vowel a long one, if I learned correctly.

Not in the English sense of long and short vowels but in a literal "say aa instead of a" sense. To put in an 'r' sound, you'd have to use 'ra', 'ri', 'ru', 're', or 'ro', which can make things clunky given how often English has r followed by another consonant. So given then choice between "Hanbarugaru" (ハンバルガル) and "Hanbaagaa" (ハンバーガー), well, "Hanbaagaa" ends up sounding closer to "hamburger" and imo looks better written out.

(I took 2 years of Japanese in high school, and while I feel like I had the use of kana down pretty well, that was over 10 years ago so I may be off on some of this)

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:30

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Grand Fromage posted:

The extraneous post-vowel R sounds when speaking English seems to be universal, I haven't met a native Mandarin speaker who doesn't do that (except a couple who have learned perfect American accents). It's different than the hard constant arrs from up north.

I think in Taiwan the only one that ever really stood out to me was how they said "breakfarst" instead of breakfast. Other than that their issues with English pronunciation were on differentiating "oo" like in food and good and on the "th" and "v" sounds. The Taiwanese-Mandarin accent is quite different and lacks most retroflexing so that's probably why they don't force R's into English.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:31

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

I've been learning kana for like three weeks to read menus on vacation and Let us English is a fluent Japanese speaker so I'd listen to him over me.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:31

Captain Yossarian: Feb 24, 2011; All new" Rings of Fire"

McGavin posted:

A similar problem that I've noticed is when Americans write "turrent" when they mean "turret". There isn't a loving N in turret.

What I'm trying to say here is the unnamed country is also as bad.

I have literally never seen this in my whole long life and now I will be looking for it like a hawk

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:32

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Grand Fromage posted:

Mandarin to me is sshhhrrrr sshhrrrr shsssshhshhrrr sh shrrr shshshshshshr shr shrr *long loogie hawk, spit*

In Taiwan it's si si si si si si *blank stare* *offers bubble tea*

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:33

Pham Nuwen: Oct 30, 2010

Grand Fromage posted:

I've been learning kana for like three weeks to read menus on vacation and Let us English is a fluent Japanese speaker so I'd listen to him over me.

Well, what you said about ー lengthening a vowel matches what I was taught. Reading Let Us English's post again, we may have been saying the same thing: use ー to lengthen a vowel in place of trying to get an 'r' in there.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:34

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Atlas Hugged posted:

I think in Taiwan the only one that ever really stood out to me was how they said "breakfarst" instead of breakfast. Other than that their issues with English pronunciation were on differentiating "oo" like in food and good and on the "th" and "v" sounds. The Taiwanese-Mandarin accent is quite different and lacks most retroflexing so that's probably why they don't force R's into English.

Breakfurst is a good one. The big problems with Sichuan people's Mandarin is that Mandarin only has like four vowels compared to the 20 in English so they have horrible trouble distinguishing them. Beer/bear, sit/set, food/good etc. They also suck at th but that's like everyone who learns English. The other one that comes to mind is initial w, for example instead of saying wood they say ooh-duh.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:34

C-SPAN Caller: Apr 21, 2010

Barudak posted:

The Beijing accent is a crime against language.

Why do you hate Chinese pirate accents

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:35

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Grand Fromage posted:

ooh-duh.

Oh this is huge in Taiwan and was always frustrating because Taiwanese Mandarin has an initial w for every vowel accept their "u' sound. So 五 sounds like "oo" instead of "woo" and then they carry that over to wood and would.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:37

beep-beep car is go: Apr 11, 2005; I can just eyeball this, right?

Grand Fromage posted:

They also suck at th but that's like everyone who learns English.

Th is an English only thing?

# ? Nov 22, 2016 16:54

cnut: May 3, 2016

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

I think Laos has the th sound.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:06

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

I think it comes out of Scandinavian languages since modern Icelandic still uses a letter for it that old English dropped with the advent of the printing press.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:12

Let us English: Feb 21, 2004; Actual photo of Let Us English, probably seen here waking his wife up in the morning talking about chemical formulae when all she wants is a hot cup of shhhhh

Pham Nuwen posted:

I'm not sure it's so much that ー indicates an 'r' sound; rather:

Not in the English sense of long and short vowels but in a literal "say aa instead of a" sense. To put in an 'r' sound, you'd have to use 'ra', 'ri', 'ru', 're', or 'ro', which can make things clunky given how often English has r followed by another consonant. So given then choice between "Hanbarugaru" (ハンバルガル) and "Hanbaagaa" (ハンバーガー), well, "Hanbaagaa" ends up sounding closer to "hamburger" and imo looks better written out.

(I took 2 years of Japanese in high school, and while I feel like I had the use of kana down pretty well, that was over 10 years ago so I may be off on some of this)

Read the example words, then read smoke.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:18

raton: Jul 28, 2003; by FactsAreUseless

LentThem posted:

Yo Indian demonetization nearly ruined my vacation and on a couple of days forced me to wait for hours in bank queues so I could break down enough invalid cash to buy food, since I was in an area that didn't use credit cards and didn't have internet or 3G.

A few days ago there were reports of old people dying from exhaustion waiting in bank queues, and back on Nov 9 I was witness to a riot at a toll road out of Delhi where nobody could get through because their cash wasn't accepted. I eventually got through when my taxi driver flashed my passport at them and made up some story forcing them to accept a 1000 note.

India, everyone smells like armpits and gutka

Looks like a certain newspaper owner had a little black money he couldn't get laundered lol

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:25

raton: Jul 28, 2003; by FactsAreUseless

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

I'm pretty sure Dutch has it as well at least. Latin doesn't have it (as evidenced by our alphabet not having a letter for it).

For strange consonant clusters I think Khmer and Basque probably hold trumps.

English does have a large number of frequently used vowel sounds, probably secondary to its vocab set being Northern Europe's rape baby.

raton fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Nov 22, 2016

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:27

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Sheep-Goats posted:

Latin doesn't have it (as evidenced by our alphabet not having a letter for it).

This is actually where the y in Ye Olde English comes from. It was one of the shorthand ways of representing the th sound and modern readers totally misinterpreted it and thought people used to say those words with a y.

But like I said, English did used to incorporate the thorn character (Þ, þ) but it was dropped with the printing press which lacked that letter and hence y was introduced as one of the abbreviations for it.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:40

Phlegmish: Jul 2, 2011

Sheep-Goats posted:

I'm pretty sure Dutch has it as well at least. Latin doesn't have it (as evidenced by our alphabet not having a letter for it).

Dutch definitely does not have it.

Peninsular Spanish and apparently Arabic do.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:52

Darkest Auer: Dec 30, 2006; They're silly; Ramrod XTreme

Grand Fromage posted:

sshhhrrrr sshhrrrr shsssshhshhrrr sh shrrr shshshshshshr shr shrr *long loogie hawk, spit*

I'm not going to pay 15 kuai for a ride to my xiaoqu, rear end in a top hat

# ? Nov 22, 2016 17:57

F4rt5: May 20, 2006

Atlas Hugged posted:

I think it comes out of Scandinavian languages since modern Icelandic still uses a letter for it that old English dropped with the advent of the printing press.

Yes, there are two variants (correct me if I'm wrong, Icelanders) from old Norse - soft and hard "th" like "the" (ð) and "Theodore" (þ).

It's not been retained in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, though.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:03

Bonster: Mar 3, 2007; Keep rolling, rolling

Atlas Hugged posted:

This is actually where the y in Ye Olde English comes from. It was one of the shorthand ways of representing the th sound and modern readers totally misinterpreted it and thought people used to say those words with a y.

But like I said, English did used to incorporate the thorn character (Þ, þ) but it was dropped with the printing press which lacked that letter and hence y was introduced as one of the abbreviations for it.

That's thorn, which is a voiced dental frictive 'th' like in the or this.

There was also eth which is a voiceless dental frictive 'th', like thought or thing.

Both died out after the printing press really standardized letters, eth gradually losing out to thorn even before them.

Edit: like the person above me just said.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:04

the heat goes wrong: Dec 31, 2005; I´m watching you...

Grand Fromage posted:

I've been learning kana for like three weeks to read menus on vacation and Let us English is a fluent Japanese speaker so I'd listen to him over me.

Learning kana for three weeks? Don�t brute force memorization. Just get one of the Heisigs kana books. Thanks to mnemonics instead of memorizing, it took me under five hours to perfectly remember both hiraga and katakana.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:13

Mameluke: Aug 2, 2013; by Fluffdaddy

Phlegmish posted:

Peninsular Spanish and apparently Arabic do.

The consonant so nice, they used it twice! ذ and ظ both represent versions of the th- sound.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:31

raton: Jul 28, 2003; by FactsAreUseless

Mameluke posted:

The consonant so nice, they used it twice! ذ and ظ both represent versions of the th- sound.

What is the letter for the English sound "bringing a lougie into the firing bay" in Arabic?

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:39

ninjoatse.cx: Apr 9, 2005; Fun Shoe

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

There's also the variance of this and theater. I think the later is more rare, but I'm going off what someone told me years ago, and they may have been talking out of their butt!

# ? Nov 22, 2016 18:58

ninjoatse.cx: Apr 9, 2005; Fun Shoe

the heat goes wrong posted:

Learning kana for three weeks? Don�t brute force memorization. Just get one of the Heisigs kana books. Thanks to mnemonics instead of memorizing, it took me under five hours to perfectly remember both hiraga and katakana.

This sounds like a sales pitch :colbert:

Flash cards were what we used in my day! :bahgawd:

# ? Nov 22, 2016 19:09

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

His 繁體 books a fantastic too.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 19:17

Osama Dozen-Dongs: Nov 29, 2014

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

Lol no

# ? Nov 22, 2016 21:00

Maneki Neko: Oct 27, 2000

Does this have some amazing other meaning in Chinese?

"THE AMAZON ECHO is remarkably useful. Alexa, the digital personal assistant within the cylindrical black gadget, plays music, helps with recipes, and orders stuff online. One thing it cannot do, however, is speak Chinese.

The LingLong DingDong can."

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/behold-chinas-answer-amazon-echo-linglong-dingdong/

# ? Nov 22, 2016 21:06

McGavin: Sep 18, 2012

Maneki Neko posted:

LingLong DingDong

Wow, racist.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 21:14

Khorne: May 1, 2002

Let us English posted:

Katakana mistake. スモーク. ー often indicates an R sound. アフター、バター、バッター、ピッチャー. I think they're just overgeneralizing the pattern.

That makes sense. I was confused because it didn't make sense looking at it in isolation. I also don't know Japanese.

Khorne fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Nov 22, 2016

# ? Nov 22, 2016 21:55

Deceitful Penguin: Feb 16, 2011

JazzmasterCurious posted:

Yes, there are two variants (correct me if I'm wrong, Icelanders) from old Norse - soft and hard "th" like "the" (ð) and "Theodore" (þ).

It's not been retained in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, though.

Nope you got it covered and they don't have them, not even Icelandaboo New-Norwegian~

Man, managed to miss kana-chat and Th sounds lol

Deceitful Penguin fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 22, 2016

# ? Nov 22, 2016 22:11

Lollerich: Mar 25, 2004; The little doctors are back,
they want to play with you!

beep-beep car is go posted:

Th is an English only thing?

Greek has it too

# ? Nov 22, 2016 22:25

Riptor: Apr 13, 2003; here's to feelin' good all the time

Writing "sauce" as "source" is a fairly common mistake on menus in Japan too

# ? Nov 22, 2016 22:30

Outrail: Jan 4, 2009; www.sapphicrobotica.com

Deceitful Penguin posted:

Nope you got it covered and they don't have them, not even Icelandaboo New-Norwegian~

Man, managed to miss kana-chat and Th sounds lol

MRA PUA meets 90's pop feminism.

# ? Nov 22, 2016 22:44

mojo1701a: Oct 9, 2008; Oh, yeah. Loud and clear. Emphasis on LOUD!
~ David Lee Roth

Lollerich posted:

Greek has it too

Friend of mine had an English/Polish phrasebook, where it would list the Polish phrase, then the English phrase, then the phonetic Polish pronunciation.

Ja chciałbym... - I would like... - Aj wud lajk...

Since "th" doesn't exist in Polish, they had to use an actual theta.

Gdzie jest poczta? - Where is the mail? - Łer is θe mejil?

# ? Nov 22, 2016 23:01

Xerxes17: Feb 17, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ebvI-Fz5I

# ? Nov 22, 2016 23:09

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# ? May 15, 2024 02:34

ladron: Sep 15, 2007; eso es lo que es

Xerxes17 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ebvI-Fz5I

speaking of putting "R" at the ends of words for no reason...

# ? Nov 22, 2016 23:58

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