Re: Uusisuom's influences

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Daniel44
> >Uusisuom is no where near as complicated as Finnish. It is a genuinely easy
> >language to study, learn and use.
> >
> >I think there is a HUGE difference between 'y' and 'u' and indeed between
> >the 'oo' in 'boot' and 'foot'. It's a question of pronouncing these words
> >correctly.
>
> I'm not a native speaker of English, and I happily admit that my
> pronunciation isn't perfect. But what's a "huge" difference varies from
> person to person a bit. You think the vowels in "boot" and "foot" are very
> different - I find them very similar. Then I've met native English-speakers
> that couldn't tell the difference between [i:] and [y:], which to my ears is
> huge. IME most people who's mother-tongue doesn't have this distinction find
> them difficult to tell apart.
<nod>  I remember running into [i] vs. [y] when I started French and
hearing *a* difference, but at the time I couldn't tell you what it was,
and I couldn't produce it.  I ended up mangling [y] into something like
[ju] or [iu], and I had a friend whose [y] ended up as [u].

It wasn't until *German* (which I took some years after I had had French)
that I could produce [y] quasi-reliably.  I am sometimes of the opinion
that the U.S. should require people to take some of *two* foreign
languages, not one.  I found that *after* French, there was a sense in
which trying to learn other languages was "easier," because I had learned
that there are languages that *don't work like English.*  That was the
biggest hurdle for me.  Once I got past that, yes, Japanese doesn't look
anything like French or English, and German had "harder" grammar for me
than French did overall, but I had a sort of conceptual way to deal with
them.

YHL