Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

Some people griped, and I groped:

> > In my opinion, if they actually have been integrated into the language,
> > adopting it into the native pronunciation is acceptable(It would wreck
> > German's regularised spelling, otherwise). Pronouncing names wrong is
> > unacceptable.  My pet hate is pronouncing 'Schröder' as [Sr\@ud@]. My
> > whole German class seems to be under the impression that Umlauts are for
> > ignoring.
>
> Mine as well.  They've had five years, and they still don't understand the
> difference, when our teacher pronounces it, between schon and schön.
> It's horrible.
>
> That and their awful American |r|s.
My French class was horrible. Fourth year French (some people, like me,
actually in their 6th year of studying (the first 3 years was a total of one
year education-wise)), and people still reading French as though it were
English.

What really gets me annoyed are the people in my Japanese class, who read
the romanization as though it were English, even right after they've been
corrected by our sensei! Of course, I blame this on the fact that our book
uses romanization, and that our book uses a really odd romanization ("si"
instead of "shi", and "zi" instead of "ji". Of course, this causes all sorts
of problems). That and people can't seem to understand that our book
sometimes inserts spaces to separate morphemes, even though there's no space
in pronounciation:

"taberu n desu". I pronounce it, emulating my sensei as best I can, as
[tabe4MndEs:] (forgiving my horrible IPAing)
Several people in the class still insist on pronouncing it (after looking in
the book because they can't remember it) [taber\M  en  desM] (again,
forgiving my horrible IPA)

It really makes me wish our book used hiragana, instead of the really bad
romanization.

Why is it that some people seem unable to read things as something other
than their native language?

-Keith

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