This my big Achilles’ heel. My dialect has a voiced uvular thrill (the french one is unvoiced), my girlfriend the prettiest alveolar trill you’ll ever hear. When I try to speak Swiss German with the alveolar trill, I apparently have an Italian or Rumantsch accent; I put to much breath into it and can only do the flap ɾ properly. My deficit is not that obvious when I speak Italian or Rumantsch (I hope), but with Spanish pero and perro I’m lost. My rr sounds more like ʓ.
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Yeah, I hope I can get better at doing it more clearly… mine is so breathy right now, but then I only learn how to do it half a day ago
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I use the French one in Dutch and the Russian one in Japanese.
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I hope you’re only doing a flap instead of a trill in Japanese, otherwise you sound quite like an angry and scary person from Osaka.
Here’s an example of some police trying to arrest a credit card fraud, where they’re rolling their R’s (the title being that they don’t know who is the actual yakuza here; the police or the arrested guy):
I also found this video of a guy explaining in the most calm voice possible how to sound like an angry person from Osaka:
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I lived in Nagoya, and it was not uncommon to hear some rolling/trill r in informal male speech. Also, my Japanese friends at the time (30 years ago) were dropouts from school, so at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder.
But I can do the single flap as well.
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I was watching Sukie Chinese this morning. It’s a light channel of short subtitled Mandarin blogs about food, travelling etc., with less than five minutes / video.
Surprised this apparently hasn’t yet appeared in over 1,600 posts.
I also found this interesting site on the topic in the external links.
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top: man’yogana
middle: sogana
bottom: hiragana
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I’ve been struggling with Japanese for years and it doesn’t come to much.
Come to think of it, lucky that I learned English to a smooth level first. So at least I have proof that I’m capable of learning languages. Otherwise with Japanese I’d probably think I’m mechanically incapable of learning a language by this point.
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I think it’s because English is mainly what people write in and speak on the internet.
If you’re on the internet from a kid on, watching youtube, laughing at memes etc., you’re going to learn English.
Whereas if you replaced 4chan with 2chan, youtube with nico and so on and restarted from that age, you’d have great Japanese but bad English.
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Yeah, I think a major part of it is to really spend as much time of the day as possible surrounded by the language. It’s hard without friends who speak it, and whilst living in a country that doesn’t surround you with it, but with the internet it is easier to get into a community online.
Also, comparing it to learning English (as a second language), consider how many years it took before being able to speak English, and take into account that much of that happened while being a child or teenager, when learning languages goes faster usually (and you probably have less time for learning a language now as well).
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That’s a very English-centric view of the world, haha. As expected of a British person? If you were born a normal child in Russia, you’d realize everyone on the internet speaks Russian. … We watched youtube in Russian, we laughed at the memes in Russian.
Heh, fair enough. Thanks for the reality check.
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Come to think of it, youtube is pretty good at hiding language segments from each other. Rarely I get recommendations in completely foreign languages. And it took some time to convince youtube that it’s ok to show Japanese videos too. And I don’t think it’s yet convinced fully.
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I do hear quite often from foreigners that English is a relatively simple language, and I think there is a strong element of truth in that assessment.
I went over this point in here another time, as well.
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(Semi-)phonetic script. English has perhaps the most irregular and obscure of all Roman alphabetic systems, but at least it is broadly relatable to sound. cf. kanji
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Easy to type. English is one of very few languages to use the bare Roman alphabet without any diacritics (besides the é in the fancy spelling of café, the diaresis in fancy spellings of coöperate etc., and the ones used in transcriptions of foreign words like Honinbō – which again are not always used).
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No grammatical gender. cf. Romance languages. Gender only appears in pronouns.
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No grammatical cases. Again cf. Romance language. Again, the exception is pronouns.
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No tones. cf. Chinese
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Minimal agglutination. cf. German. We don’t push words together a huge amount, and when we do we typically have the courtesy to insert a hyphen.
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Adjectives don’t decline with gender or case (as neither exist).
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Minimal inflection of the verb. There’s no imperative form, for instance.
The most difficult thing about English, I think, are some unusual consonants and consonant clusters, and the schwa sound; as well as the spelling. Some learners struggle with remembering to include articles (a / the), actually.
Hmm, that’s an interesting point. How intuitive is the distinction between I saw a cat and I saw the cat? It reminds me of the Japanese topic marker, telling the listener that what’s being said is the important thing…
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I will not return to cinema. Because its full dub everywhere instead of original. Why its full dub everywhere? Because few really try to learn other language. They unaware how awful full dub is, many didn’t see single movie without dub.
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To be fair few movies are good enough to be worth the effort of paying attention to subtitles.
But sometimes dub is better, with most prominent example of Anakin in Star Wars. At least if you don’t like whiney Anakin.
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It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!
I think many Dutch people around my age learned a lot of English from hearing English in movies and shows while reading subtitles.
Subtitles are still the norm here, but I guess most Dutch children nowadays learn a lot of English from watching YouTube and gaming.
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