= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on Learn A New Language! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (74)
Well, making weird sounds on command is one thing, making them in the right place in the middle of a word in a normal sentence speaking at a normal rate is another, at least for me. (The extreme example is tongue-twisters, which can be very hard even if each single sound individually isn't.)
I concur. For instance, as a speaker of Australian English I not only don't pronounce the 'r' at the ends of syllables/words in English, I also speak a non-rhotic version of all my second languages. Living in the US and being constantly mocked and made aware of this difference for a full year has only made me marginally better at producing them on demand.
It so happens to be that I can do most tongue twisters with little effort, and that normal sentences are rarely tongue twisters.
I'm relatively good with tongue-twisters too, but I still mix up sounds which I didn't grow up using regularly if I'm not very careful, e.g. sometimes when speaking English quickly I accidentally use the Italian-style r (which sounds more or less like the English flapped t) instead of the English-style one, leading to misunderstandings like “what is” when I mean “where is” and the like.