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

> > 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.
Don't be too hard on them.  Past a certain age people lose their natural
ability to hear distinctions that don't exist in their native language.
At that point they have to more or less consciously analyze the sounds
at a different level than normal language processing takes place.  They
can get accustomed to this process and internalize it to the point where
it's automatic, and eventually it can even happen at the same level as
native phoneme recognition, but that takes a long time and a lot of
effort.  And in some cases it just can't be done; plenty of examples of
well-educated, linguistically sophisitcated Japenese adults trying very
hard to hear the l/r distinction in English and being completely unable
to do so, no matter how slowly the tape is played or how carefully they
listen.

> > That and their awful American |r|s.
The American 'r' is not awful, just different.  So different that I
teach students of Spanish to pretend that the Spanish 'r' isn't an a
'r' at all, but rather a type of 'd'.   [pEdo] sounds a lot more like
[pEro] than [pE`r\o] does.  Of course, you run the risk of confusion
with "pedo", but since that's properly pronounced [pEDo] it's a low
risk.

> 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's not odd or bad, just phonemic.  The [s] of "sa" and the  [S] of "s(h)i"
are the same phoneme in Japanese, and the same thing goes for z/j and
f/h.  As in English, there are etymological hints at the phonemic level
which can help you figure out what a word means, which are lost in a
completely phonetic Romanization.


> "taberu n desu". I pronounce it, emulating my sensei as best I can, as
> [tabe4MndEs:] (forgiving my horrible IPAing)
More like [tabe4Mn=dEs:]; the n is syllabic.

> Why is it that some people seem unable to read things as something other
> than their native language?
It's more the case that some people have more ability to do so, and that
is largely a function of the degree to which you're exposed to other
languages while growing up.

-Mark

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