Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Ray Brown wrote:
>
> On Friday, July 16, 2004, at 09:26 , Philippe Caquant wrote:
>
> > True, this is losing one's time. If you want to learn
> > Russian, you just buy a f...ing cassette, or a f...ing
> > CD, and you listen to it, and you repeat what you
> > hear. Or you marry a russophone. That's what I did.
> > Let's be pragmatic.
>
> . . . and being rational might help a bit, also.
>
> I fail to see why the casette or CD has to be having sex. I'd have
> thought an ordinary casette or CD would do. Isn't this the most
> common method for those you actually want to speak a language?
ROFL!

> =================================================
> On Friday, July 16, 2004, at 10:02 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> > It is *not* helpful, most of the time, unless, as I said earlier, you
> > *know* what your audience has already been exposed too.
>
> . . . which, in a text book, you are not likely to know.
Indeed. I once looked at a textbook for Croatian. It said that the
Croatian "a" was pronounced like the "a" in English "rather."
That didn't seem right, and it wasn't what I heard from my girl-
friend's family who grew up in Croatia. So I looked at the book's
front matter and discovered that it had been written by an
Englishman and published in England.

--Ph. D.