Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.
ZeKat:
Quote from: Tsarina on 2009 July 02, 15:37:46
Quote from: ZeKat on 2009 July 02, 15:19:08
I even have to correct my teacher sometimes, despite the fact that he lived in London for 6 years.
The fact that people are taught a foreign language and then expected to teach it to others, is, when you think about it, slightly pathetic.
Indeed, I would love a native English teacher. Also, well done to your mother for managing to learn Danish, it's so ridiculously complicated and inconsistent that we can't even speak it properly, I think half the Danish population still calls it "et hamster", when it is actually "en hamster". (Similar to the difference between a and an except we have NO RULE to identify when to use which. You just have to remember for each and every possible combination...)
Liz:
I've been trying to learn Cantonese for 2 years now, an effort made more difficult by some of the local population. Certainly there are plenty of people, native Cantonese speakers, who encourage my efforts, but strangely it's often seen as something of a novelty that I would bother trying to learn to speak the predominant language where I live. This attitude puzzles me.
Regardless of what language I use to address someone here, many people will insist on responding in English. This is usually done in an attempt to be helpful, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it's hard to practice the local language when half the locals I meet are "too helpful" to speak to me in Cantonese. Others who reply in English appear to be doing much the same thing I am, taking the opportunity to practice a non-native tongue. In a third scenario, the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.
Tsarina:
Quote from: ZeKat on 2009 July 02, 16:17:09
Also, well done to your mother for managing to learn Danish, it's so ridiculously complicated and inconsistent that we can't even speak it properly, I think half the Danish population still calls it "et hamster", when it is actually "en hamster". (Similar to the difference between a and an except we have NO RULE to identify when to use which. You just have to remember for each and every possible combination...)
Actually, she has described Danish grammar as "castrated German", so that's not the problem ;)
It's mainly because Russian does not differentiate between, say, the plate and a plate, and Danish does.
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 16:36:31
Regardless of what language I use to address someone here, many people will insist on responding in English. This is usually done in an attempt to be helpful, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it's hard to practice the local language when half the locals I meet are "too helpful" to speak to me in Cantonese.
Both parties speaking the other's language is in many cases more foolproof, as it ensures no-one speaks in a too complicated manner. If I recall correctly, this was done on a Russian-American space project - the Russians spoke English, the Americans Russian. So if the locals hadn't been so busy complimenting you, maybe it'd be more efficient...
Still annoying, though.
Lorelei:
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 16:36:31
the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.
So I suppose Amy Tan got the speech patterns exactly right! :P
Liz:
Quote from: Lorelei on 2009 July 02, 19:04:17
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 16:36:31
the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.
So I suppose Amy Tan got the speech patterns exactly right! :P
I've never read any of her books, but I just perused a few excerpts. Sure enough, the patterns I saw are very much like what I hear around me every day. For instance, someone might say, "You very lucky have money." That's not very good English, but it is a direct and accurate translation of the Cantonese sentence into English words. There was a weird learning curve I had for months where I would get frustrated because I couldn't figure out quite how to say, "I want to go to the diner to eat dumplings." I mean, I could say, "I want go diner eat dumpling," but I couldn't figure out the rest. Finally I got it through my head that there really is no "rest", that all the "to the" and other such phrases just aren't needed. Conversely, I imagine it must be incredibly frustrating for a native Cantonese speaker to be translating every single word perfectly but still be considered awkward and incorrect in her English speech.
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