The mistakes you've made

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civman2000
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Post by civman2000 »

con quesa wrote:
Plus our textbook does mention the allophones and such.
We don't go over allophones in my class (by the way, could someone explain what the deal is with "b" and "v"? I think "b" is /b/ and "v" is /B/, but I'm not sure about that). I am in Spanish 1 though, so perhaps we learn that later.
do people just say [edad] for 'edad'
Yep. Like I said, we don't learn about the allophones. In fact, I just discovered that sometimes <d> is /D/ earlier today, by reading ahead in my Spanish book.

One of the mistakes I frequently make is screwing up accents over the letter a (?). In Spanish, an accent over a vowel means the syllable is stressed (and therefore the a isn't made into a schwa" So "est?" /Esta/ is different from "esta" /Est@/. However, in my conlang Saimiar, ? represents a schwa! So when I hear "esta", I think the final "a" should be ? because it's a schwa sound.
<b> and <v> are both /b/, which becomes intervocalically.

And I've never heard schwas in spanish; the stress changes but the vowel quality does not.

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Post by pharazon »

It's interesting that in the dialect of Spanish around here, only /d/ seems to fricativize (actually, the allophones are approximants). Also, ll and y are always /j/, not /j\/.

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Post by con quesa »

And I've never heard schwas in spanish; the stress changes but the vowel quality does not.
I suppose I could just be hearing the unstressed a's as schwas (damn you for f***ing up my ability to understand other langauge's sounds, English!).The point is, I think they're schwas, and therefore screw up the accent.
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Post by Olorix »

For some weird reason I just can't get my Mandarin accent right, and according to my Spanish teacher my Spanish is awfully accented though I can't really tell myself whether she is just joking :P .

Just before I was watching a game at the of Rugby Sevens between Argentina and Australia. The commentator was British (even though it's being hosted in Wellington, New Zealand) and was pronouncing the players' names in a Spanish Spanish way, i.e. some guy Gomez he pronounced Gomezth, even though it isn't pronounced like that in Latin America where Gomez came from. (ARGENTINA WON, BTW, Y SON LOS GANADORES, VIVEN LAS PUMAS ! :D )
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Re: Linguistic ventriloquism

Post by Shm Jay »

Delthayre wrote:アルバイト

I think he originally saw it as a sequence of symbols and numbers (which is what it displays as in my post), but it somehow corrected to display the kana when he quoted.
That?s what happened to me too. I don't have Japanese installed on this computer, so I figured that's why I didn't see it, but then it corrected itself.

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Post by Allie »

con quesa wrote:
And I've never heard schwas in spanish; the stress changes but the vowel quality does not.
I suppose I could just be hearing the unstressed a's as schwas (damn you for f***ing up my ability to understand other langauge's sounds, English!).The point is, I think they're schwas, and therefore screw up the accent.
I often hear final o's in Spanish as schwas, and it's taken me ages to get a half-decent pronunciation of them.

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Re: The mistakes you've made

Post by NakedCelt »

zompist wrote:
linguoboy wrote:For instance, my brother complained that when he began learning Spanish, German would pop into his head at the oddest times. I had the same trouble taking German. I'd try to recall some new vocabulary and the Spanish word would pop into my head. It's like your mind starts out with two settings, "Native language" and "Foreign language", and it takes it a while to subdivide the latter into "Foreign Language A," "Foreign language B", and so forth.
I think that's quite common... at least, I've heard similar complaints from many people.
Once, in a Māori class, I realized that I had mentally composed the sentence: "Tha mi trop fucking sgíth pour tēnei." Broken down, that's

Scots Gaelic: tha mi &#151; "I am"
French: trop &#151; "too"
English: fucking &#151; "fucking"
Scots Gaelic: sgíth &#151; "tired"
French: pour &#151; "for"
M&#257:ori: t&#275nei &#151; "this"

and I'm sure you'll agree I was.
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Post by NakedCelt »

(And, speaking of mistakes, that should be sgìth, not sgíth.)
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Post by CountJordan »

I'm learning Old English Gothic and Old Norse at the same time. The other day at school I was walking down the hallway and talking to myself but then I started speaking a mix of the three langs. I didn't even know it either until somebody said, "Dude what are you talking about?"



It was strange.
CountJordan,
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Post by Lleu »

I was in Spanish class, a while ago, and we were talking about directions, including left and right. Well, sitting in the back of class, my mind had drifted off to Welsh, and when my teacher asked me how to pronounce "derecha", I mistakenly said /dereXa/. I have also been known to answer "hai" instead of "sí".

Another confusion between Welsh and Spanish:

calle /caje/=street, Spanish
caeau /cajE/ (according to an older Welsh book I have, which mixed up the Interrogative and Affirmative Present forms)=fields, Welsh

So when we talked about directions, people would say "el calle de ____", and immediately into my head would pop "____'s fields".
agus tha mo chluasan eòlach air a’ mhac-talla fhathast / às dèidh dhomh dùsgadh
(mona nicleòid wagner, “fo shneachd”)

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Post by Ancenande »

fadethecat wrote:Despite years of Spanish, I always had the bad habit of forming the future tense as "Voy a X" instead of properly using the conjugation I should have. It wasn't actually incorrect (at least by the dialect I was learning), but it sounded a bit...juvenile. "I'm gonna do X, I'm gonna do Y" isn't the most appropriate way to express these things.
It doesn't sound juvenile. In certain areas of Latin America that's how everybody speaks (like me). Maybe in Spain it's different, but you will be understood.

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Post by LaughingMan »

I always screw up where to put the pronouns in Spanish. The fact that I use subject pronouns at all shows how retarded at Spanish I am, but the others are the ones that really screw me up.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.

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Post by Gremlins »

The other day in Chinese class, I said "you're a good horse" instead of "how are you?" (ni3 hao3 ma3 vs ni3 hao3 ma1).

I also tend to get er3 and er4 mixed up (ear and two).
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Post by linguoboy »

gremlins wrote:The other day in Chinese class, I said "you're a good horse" instead of "how are you?" (ni3 hao3 ma3 vs ni3 hao3 ma1).
Ni3 hao3 ma5, actually. (I've also seen the transcription "ma0".) It's not first tone, but neutral tone, which means its pronunciation is conditioned by the syllable before it. After third tone, it usually ends up as upper-mid level [44], which is close enough to first tone [55] that you might not notice the difference.

For some reason, I've been having trouble lately distinguishing bai3 "hundred" and bai2 "white", which can lead to some humourous misunderstandings.

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Post by Lleu »

The other day, my mind wandered, and I discovered I had constructed a sentence including words from Japanese, Spanish, and Gothic. But I can't remember what it was that I actually said, which almost bothers me even more...:evil:
agus tha mo chluasan eòlach air a’ mhac-talla fhathast / às dèidh dhomh dùsgadh
(mona nicleòid wagner, “fo shneachd”)

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Post by Delthayre »

Wow, I hadn't even noticed that this had been marked for preservation.

Truth be told, I'm actually a little embarassed by the sheer silly amateurishness of my German in all of my posts.

But I do now recall something from my collegiate study of German (which went only a little better than my high school attempt).

It wasn't a mistake I made, remarkably, but I noticed that the dative gives new learners absolute fits. Any sentence in involving indirect objects tended to have zu jammed in before the indirect object. Which isn't unexpected given the parallel construction in English, but I remember finding it suprising that while I still occasionally gaffed with the accusative, I seldom had problems with the dative.

I am also reminded of a strange little error I once made in Japanese class. I don't remember what the context was, but in the course of a dialogue with a partner, for some reason I pronounced hon 'book' as [hA~] instead of /hOn=/ (which probably isn't correct either, but it's what I usually said).

I had also developed an occasional strange habit of using ga almost as if it were a copula.
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Post by Tengado »

linguoboy wrote:
gremlins wrote:The other day in Chinese class, I said "you're a good horse" instead of "how are you?" (ni3 hao3 ma3 vs ni3 hao3 ma1).
Ni3 hao3 ma5, actually.
Ni2 hao3 ma5, actually actually. The usually third tone ni changes to second tone when followed by another third tone.
(I've also seen the transcription "ma0".)
In Hanyu pinyin, "ma" is the standard transcription. Toneless syllables are unmarked when diacritics are used - adding a diacritic when using the numbers just seems redundant
It's not first tone, but neutral tone, which means its pronunciation is conditioned by the syllable before it. After third tone, it usually ends up as upper-mid level [44], which is close enough to first tone [55] that you might not notice the difference.
Not exactly. The pitch is conditioned by the preceding syllable, true, but calling it [44] and saying it sounds close enough to [55] to be confused with the first tone masks the defining characteristic of the light (or toneless) tone: it is much shorter than the 4 proper tones. It has no real length and no contour like the others do. It can't really be confused with the first tone if pronounced properly because it is so much shorter - it sounds like an english unstressed syllable [except for the shwa-ing, although many chinese speakers do that]. If you're going to give it a number value, I would recommend doing it in the same way as the cantonese short tones and writing it as 4 rather than 44, which erroneously implies ithas length [to begin and end on 4, when really it just hits it momentarily].

@gremlins - further to the tone change thing, "you're a good horse" would be pronounced as Ni3 hao2 ma3 (or ni2 hao2 ma3) because of the way the third tones change. It sounds confusing, but there are catually only a tiny number of tone change rules to worry about, and most of them happen naturally when you speak without you having to force them much. If you're interested, PM me. Two of the rules - about tone change of bu4 "not" and yi1 "one" - are outlined in this thread where it was [falsely] claimed that Mandarin had no allomorphy. The only other rule really is the third tone one.

Personally my biggest problem with Chinese is remembering to stress the second syllable of words, not the first as is my habit in English.
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Post by Andrea »

It's only recently that I've started speaking Italian-free French, and French-free German. The whole mixing languages thing is a big problem for me when I speak. For example, the other day I was speaking French and required the word "far". Though I have known the word "loin" since kindergarten, for some reason the word that entered my mind was the German "entfernt", but since I was speaking in French, I pronounced it enfer, meaning hell. (And yes, I realize that's not how it would be pronounced in French, but I am a severly confused individual). I probably mess up my German more than anything. The worse sin I've committed as a language geek, was when I meant to ask my 6yr old charge "Warum bist du so traurig?" (Why are you so sad ?), but accidently substituted "hasslich" (ugly) for sad. She looked a lot sadder after that, and answered "Ich weiss es nicht" (I don't know) :(. It took me about 20 min. to realize my mistake. I spent a lot of time making it up to her. I've also had pronunciation troubles with German. I was working as an au pair in Berlin, and I never understood why the little girl would always giggle when I said "Goodnight". Eventually my host mother took pity on me, and went over the difference between "Nacht" (Night) and "Nackt" (Naked). :mrgreen:

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Post by AudiblySilenced »

Our spanish teachers and books utterly failed to tell us that <b> and <v> are both /b/ , with the exception of telling us that <veinte> is [beInti], which is likely wrong anyway. They also made no mention of <d> [D]. Or the various pronunciations of <c>, <ll>, and <y> (which I determined, from listening to native Spanish speakers, to be /k s (T)/, /j/, and /j\/, respectively).

EDIT: Eep, sorry, forgot to turn off HTML.
Last edited by AudiblySilenced on Sun May 07, 2006 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tsmoss »

Yeah, there's a ton of variation in how Spanish speakers pronounce <y>--most neutrally it would be [j\]. And <ll> is pronounced the same in most dialects--the exceptions are areas that are bilingual with a language that does have /L/, and a few other scattered dialects.

And that textbook really is crap.

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Post by Debegduk ing Debegduked »

Before moving to Korea in 1997, I was learning the language, and became a bit paranoid about inadvertantly insulting people by mixing up the honorific and plain forms of the verbs. I decided that I'd learn only the honorific forms, and use them at all times, figuring that it would be better to be too polite than too casual.

My first week in Korea, I walked into a grocer's to buy some vegetables. Not seeing any cabbage, I approached the grocer and in my most formal Korean, said /sillje hagessɨbnida, sɔnsɛŋnim/ - roughly, "Please have the goodness to excuse me, Honoured Sir!" The grocer beamed: he'd probably never been addressed that way before. I was heartened; my approach was obviously working. I continued, /jɔgi bɛtʃu ga gjesibnigga/? meaning to say "Is there any cabbage here?" However, the form of the verb that I used indicates respect not toward the listener, but rather toward the subject of the sentence - so what I said translated as something like "Is Mr. Cabbage in residence?"

I thought the grocer was going to have a heart attack, he laughed so hard.
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Post by valkotukka »

Debegduk ing Debegduked wrote:Before moving to Korea in 1997, I was learning the language, and became a bit paranoid about inadvertantly insulting people by mixing up the honorific and plain forms of the verbs. I decided that I'd learn only the honorific forms, and use them at all times, figuring that it would be better to be too polite than too casual.

My first week in Korea, I walked into a grocer's to buy some vegetables. Not seeing any cabbage, I approached the grocer and in my most formal Korean, said /sillje hagessɨbnida, sɔnsɛŋnim/ - roughly, "Please have the goodness to excuse me, Honoured Sir!" The grocer beamed: he'd probably never been addressed that way before. I was heartened; my approach was obviously working. I continued, /jɔgi bɛtʃu ga gjesibnigga/? meaning to say "Is there any cabbage here?" However, the form of the verb that I used indicates respect not toward the listener, but rather toward the subject of the sentence - so what I said translated as something like "Is Mr. Cabbage in residence?"

I thought the grocer was going to have a heart attack, he laughed so hard.
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Post by Zhen Lin »

Debegduk ing Debegduked wrote:However, the form of the verb that I used indicates respect not toward the listener, but rather toward the subject of the sentence - so what I said translated as something like "Is Mr. Cabbage in residence?"
Ah yes, the ever amusing confusion between respect-to-audience and respect-to-subject forms. Politeness has multiple axes!
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Post by schwhatever »

I've been taking French for the past 4 years, and only just started German, so naturally I've started to slap French into German. Just a few days ago, I (incorrectly) attempted to say I want to work as "Ich wolle arbeiter." It took me a good, long minute to realize that I had added the French -er to Arbeit, leaving me with Freutsch. Joy.
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Post by Lleu »

I keep wanting to use Japanese particles out of context. For example, I found myself the other day wanting to say put the object of poner in Spanish before the verb and link to it with (w)o.
agus tha mo chluasan eòlach air a’ mhac-talla fhathast / às dèidh dhomh dùsgadh
(mona nicleòid wagner, “fo shneachd”)

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