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Post by bjd on Sept 3, 2016 15:34:54 GMT
She indeed does not have a very strong Scottish accent. I looked up the university department where he will be working and not many people interviewed were actually Scottish -- it was very international. The person I had the hardest time understanding was Chinese.
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Post by chexbres on Sept 3, 2016 19:00:56 GMT
My mother's family came from a little town near Macon, so perhaps some of my linguistic ability is genetic, but we never spoke French at home unless someone was very angry.
In high school, I had 2 years of Latin - which I failed both times, because I hated the teacher and couldn't understand why we had to learn a language that nobody spoke - even though it was good for one's vocabulary. After that, I passed 2 years of French with flying colors. I wasn't too crazy about the teacher, but she was crazy about me, because "I had an ear for the language". Well, "ear" or not, when I started going to France in the mid-1970's, I couldn't understand anything unless I could read it, could only squeak out very basic sentences, and the responses were unintelligible to me.
I didn't go to college until I was 40 years old, was tested and somehow placed in Senior Level French, but "ear" or not, decided to begin at Sophomore Level, because I knew I didn't know enough grammar, etc. Four years later, I managed to graduate with honors in French. In-between high school and college, I read everything in French that I could get my hands on and saw as many foreign films as possible, which undoubtedly helped a great deal. My college courses did not include conversation classes, though there was one phonetics option, which I took. The rest was literature, and most of the professors stumbled over their pronunciation when they read aloud.
I began going to France about once a year after I got married, and I was the one who was in charge of communicating. In the interim between trips, I watched French movies and read everything in French that I could get my hands on. I confess to being a terrible student, and pick up things most easily by osmosis.
Once I moved by myself to Paris, I figured out pretty quickly that I had better get serious about learning to speak and understand what was being said to me, or I would starve to death. I looked up words and phrases - and practiced them out loud - before I left the house. I kept the television on all the time, hoping that it would somehow get into my head - which it eventually did. I borrowed the newspapers in cafes and read them every day, until a dictionary wasn't necessary. I always spoke French to everyone, even when they spoke English to me. I got used to being corrected, and realized that I didn't have to take it personally. French has changed so much since I learned it that what was "correct" then isn't even understood, now.
It has taken 8 years, and I don't speak French "correctly", but I can converse and understand 93% of what is being said to me - except over the telephone. The rest of the time, my ears feel like they are out on stalks, trying to pick up radar signals. I know the value of tossing in some important words, now and then, to show the person I'm speaking to that I mean business or am sufficiently educated to be taken seriously. The rest of the time, I don't worry too much about speaking correctly or being understood - I think learning to relax helps a lot.
When I arrived here, people thought I was Canadian, then German, then English - but never American. I guess that's progress.
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Post by patricklondon on Sept 4, 2016 13:40:13 GMT
I confess, I did a degree in French and German, and I can manage pretty well, but am often thrown by very fast and idiomatic speech. If I try to watch subtitled (to English) film and TV, I hamper myself a bit by trying to relate what I'm seeing to what I've heard (but I've picked up quite a lot of criminal slang as a result!); one thing I do find useful now is to turn on the "native" language subtitles if they're available, in the country or online. Not that that helped being guided round a folk museum in the Tirol by the farmer who owned it. I got about one word in three. My blog | My photos | My video clips"too literate to be spam"
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Post by whatagain on Sept 4, 2016 14:10:20 GMT
Farmers... I was in Westvlaanderen not so long ago and picked up about 1 word out of 10. They speak their own dialect but even when they try to speak Flemsih, their accent is so accentuated that it is ahrdly better. I quite trying to understand farmers... even in French
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Post by lagatta on Sept 5, 2016 1:12:09 GMT
The young Scottish people I've met at conferences and such spoke about like the girl in the clip. Certainly fully understandable, at least to me, but Canadian English is very influenced by the Celtic fringe.
Some Highlands people seem to have a much softer accent, closer to the Irish than the (old) accents of the major cities to the south. Especially the Gaelic speakers.
Chexbres, perhaps because you did have some contact and practice with French words and names. Even if some anglo-Canadians might not really speak French, they've heard names of hockey players, politicians etc. And I'm sure you are doing fine, not putting up with supercilious bullshit.
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Post by rikita on Sept 27, 2016 6:13:54 GMT
She indeed does not have a very strong Scottish accent. I looked up the university department where he will be working and not many people interviewed were actually Scottish -- it was very international. The person I had the hardest time understanding was Chinese. for some reason, i misread "international" for "intentional" at first, which had me a bit confused ...
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