Re: sound changes (was Conlangea Dreaming)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> >
> > I've found from my German & French Education that it really doesn't - I
> > may know the Vocab & the Grammar, but when it comes out of Someone's
> > Mouth, I just get lost. It's not as perfectly structured as the
> > Sound-Bites we're fed in School, and Real Germans and Real Frenchmen
> > speak far too fast for me to understand them.
>
> <sigh>  I'm much better at reading/writing than conversational anyway,
> but somehow you think that all this practical stuff about rent and
> getting a job and what to wear and so on would actually be useful if you
> evr went to country X...and it sometimes really seems not.  My IBH French
> class actually had two native French speakers in it, one from Paris and
> one from somewhere else.  I could actually sometimes understand the
> Parisienne because she wasn't as fast, but trying to figure out what
> Clémence said....
I tend to think it won't help, all the practical stuff, or at least not
much.

It puts a lot in perspective, tho, as to how much of a language you have
to know to be able to communicate with L1 speakers of that language -
only after I tried to speak German to Real Germans did I realize how
hard it must have been for my foreign-born friends to understand English
when they first came to Canada - most of them didn't speak *any* English
when they came.

> They were both great people, mind, and stuck in the class because of
> their own IB requirements.  (I'm sure they found it quite, quite
> redundant!)  But when the teacher and the two L1 French speakers were
> conversing merrily in French the rest of us felt rather depressed.
I'd imagine it would be somewhat depressing. Redundant as it may be, I
would kill for a course as easy to me as that French course would have
been to them.

> I'm afraid the only languages I have any hope of becoming
> conversationally fluent in are English and Korean.  <sigh>
Well, you're better off than me - I'm only fluent in English, and I'm
making little progress in any other languages. Maybe one day I might
have something vaguely approaching fluency in German, but not any time
soon.

--
Robert