dEhiN's Language Log

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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Dormouse559 » 2021-02-02, 9:00

dEhiN wrote:
Dormouse559 wrote:
dEhiN wrote:D'accord et merci pour l'explication. Ça m'aide à mieux comprendre plus mieux* le deuxième cas de « vous ».

De rien !

dEhiN wrote:*Est-ce que la phrase « plus meiux » signifie le superlatif? Si oui, je voulais à dire « comprendre plus ».

Non, « mieux » est le comparatif/superlatif de « bien », alors le mot porte déjà le sens de « plus ». Je crois que « mieux » est un meilleur choix que « plus » dans ce contexte.

Did I really combine le passé composé with l'imparfait?! :doh: Is there a difference between saying mieux comprendre and comprendre mieux? Or can mieux only be used before the noun? I know in Portuguese some adjectives also change the sentence meaning when placed before versus after the noun, but I don't remember now if French has that. (I think it does, but I've just been studying a bunch of Galician, so my brain is kind of fatigued right now!)

There isn't a difference in meaning between the two orders. Mieux just tends to go before an infinitive. There are a few other adverbs that also like to go before an infinitive, like bien and mal.

The adjective order thing is separate from adverbs like mieux. French is like Portuguese in that some adjectives change meaning depending on whether they precede or follow the noun. Ancien, for example, means "former" before the noun and "ancient" after it. This page has a good list of those adjectives.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Osias » 2021-02-03, 2:20

dEhiN wrote:
I would imagine for someone like Osias, his answer to your comparison question would be quite different. .

I'm feeling very tempted to say European Portuguese for me is the most unintelligible language of the world.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-03, 5:57

Osias wrote:I'm feeling very tempted to say European Portuguese for me is the most unintelligible language of the world.

Really?? Is it that difficult for you to listen to? Also, have you tried listening to Galician? If so, what are your thoughts?
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-02-03, 6:30

dEhiN wrote:
Osias wrote:I'm feeling very tempted to say European Portuguese for me is the most unintelligible language of the world.

Really?? Is it that difficult for you to listen to?

European Portuguese is literally what I've been studying, and it's difficult for me to listen to!

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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Osias » 2021-02-03, 12:04

dEhiN wrote:
Osias wrote:I'm feeling very tempted to say European Portuguese for me is the most unintelligible language of the world.

Really?? Is it that difficult for you to listen to? Also, have you tried listening to Galician? If so, what are your thoughts?

Galego is fine. It sounds like a mix of Portuguese and Spanish and the hardest part are the words with no cognates.

This song is supposed to be in EP but sounds like Arabic to me, even when I occasionally understand a word from it:

https://youtu.be/O6Qwkuigwug

Also they totally rip off the Madmen theme song.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2021-02-03, 12:30

Osias wrote:
dEhiN wrote:
I would imagine for someone like Osias, his answer to your comparison question would be quite different. .

I'm feeling very tempted to say European Portuguese for me is the most unintelligible language of the world.


I've heard similar things from many Brazilians. The mutual unintelligibility seems to be mostly asymmetrical as Portuguese people are usually able understand Brazilian Portuguese without any problems. I have a Brazilian colleague who started work in our office about a year ago, I set up a training session with a Portuguese colleague assuming they could conduct it in Portuguese and it would be easier - they nearly had to resort to switching to English to do the training! At one point, the Portuguese guy said to him "If you want, we can just do it in English", but my Brazilian colleague said it was okay to continue in Portuguese, though he said afterward he just didn't want to offend or embarrass the Portuguese guy by asking him to speak English, but that he probably would have had an easier time understanding him in English.
When I speak to my Portuguese colleagues, I do so in Portuguese, but I won't lie, it's much harder to understand them, and I think they're "going easy" on me, because when I hear them talk to each other I sometimes can't even get the gist of what they're saying.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Osias » 2021-02-03, 12:42

These days I was watching this French news youtube live that interviewed some random Portuguese people on the streets talking about something pandemic related and I was glad I was able to understand everything they said...

...because there were French subtitles.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2021-02-03, 13:17

Osias wrote:These days I was watching this French news youtube live that interviewed some random Portuguese people on the streets talking about something pandemic related and I was glad I was able to understand everything they said...

...because there were French subtitles.


:lol: Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU&ab_channel=RandomGuy
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2021-02-03, 15:38

dEhiN wrote: I do recall something about the object pronouns as well (as you mentioned); I believe it's that PT-BR affixes them to the conjugated verb form, usually with a hyphen, while PT-PT positions them more similar to French?


There's an interesting table of examples of the differences in this Wikipedia article, the chart is titled "Clitic placement in Portuguese".
I'm not sure what distinction their trying to draw between "Colloquial Brazilian Portuguese" and "Nonstandard Brazilian Portuguese" - most of the stuff in the the Nonstandard column look like what I hear most, with the "Colloquial" column also mostly fine with some things that seem a bit more formal (e.g. "Ele o aprenderá na escola." doesn't sound colloquial to me, it sounds pretty formal on account of the use of the future tense). I guess they're just trying to show the different grades of formality.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-03, 17:18

Osias wrote:This song is supposed to be in EP but sounds like Arabic to me, even when I occasionally understand a word from it:

https://youtu.be/O6Qwkuigwug

Yeah, it totally does sound like Arabic! But I've had similar experiences with songs in English. Firstly, parsing song is a lot harder than parsing speech, even in one's L1 language. Secondly, the musical style is Middle Eastern, so I can totally understand not hearing it as Portuguese. I've listened to songs in English that, because of perhaps the style of the song, the singer's intonation and even maybe the English dialect of the singer, I thought were in another language until I heard a few words I knew were English and then listened more closely.

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote: :lol: Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7efyRaaTUU&ab_channel=RandomGuy

I've seen that done sometimes on American news stations as well when they're interviewing Australians, New Zealanders, English, Scots and Irish speakers; so, basically any native English speaker who speaks a variety of English other than North American.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby linguoboy » 2021-02-03, 17:24

dEhiN wrote:I've seen that done sometimes on American news stations as well when they're interviewing Australians, New Zealanders, English, Scots and Irish speakers; so, basically any native English speaker who speaks a variety of English other than North American.

I've seen German television dub Swiss Germans, even when they were speaking Swiss Standard German rather than a more basilectal Swiss German variety.

It really is all about exposure. A friend posted yesterday about the "heavy Scottish accents" in Shetland (a BBC mystery detective series), so I went and watched a trailer. At the end of it, I was like, "Where were the 'heavy accents'?" Compared to anything at all from The Comedy Unit, it's practically Estuary.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby Car » 2021-02-03, 17:43

linguoboy wrote:
dEhiN wrote:I've seen that done sometimes on American news stations as well when they're interviewing Australians, New Zealanders, English, Scots and Irish speakers; so, basically any native English speaker who speaks a variety of English other than North American.

I've seen German television dub Swiss Germans, even when they were speaking Swiss Standard German rather than a more basilectal Swiss German variety.

It really is all about exposure. A friend posted yesterday about the "heavy Scottish accents" in Shetland (a BBC mystery detective series), so I went and watched a trailer. At the end of it, I was like, "Where were the 'heavy accents'?" Compared to anything at all from The Comedy Unit, it's practically Estuary.

Considering you had Northern Germans complain en masse to a TV station about "the unintelligible Austrian dialect" when the programme used Standard Austrian German, that really isn't surprising.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-02-03, 18:29

What the discussion of European Portuguese specifically reminded me of was this. (Note that originally, there were even more errors than Luís pointed out in that post).

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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby linguoboy » 2021-02-03, 18:43

Car wrote:Considering you had Northern Germans complain en masse to a TV station about "the unintelligible Austrian dialect" when the programme used Standard Austrian German, that really isn't surprising.

I've probably posted this before, but I once met an East Frisian who told me about going on a school trip in the Black Forest where they were paired with a local school group and they such difficulty understanding each other that each group thought the other was taking the piss.

I sometimes feel like learners have fewer difficulties than natives in some ways because we're much more used to struggling to puzzle out what someone is saying so encountering a new accent maybe doesn't phase us as much.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-03, 19:01

linguoboy wrote:I sometimes feel like learners have fewer difficulties than natives in some ways because we're much more used to struggling to puzzle out what someone is saying so encountering a new accent maybe doesn't phase us as much.

I can totally understand this. I remember when I first got into pursuing my language interests, I started with a site for finding language exchange partners through Skype. One of the first partners I found (and became good friends with over the years) was a half Senegalese, half Guadalupian Parisian guy named Kevyn. He grew up in Paris and is my age. Anyway, he had been learning English for several years already and when we connected, was probably at a B2-ish level. As part of his learning journey, he used American sitcoms, but also a lot of other native English speakers from different English countries as exchange partners. As a result, he was comfortable with understanding both the sounds and even slang of Australians, British, Americans, Canadians, etc.

Of course, this doesn't always happen. For example, in my case, even though I live in Canada, having focused so much on Parisian French, I understand less of Quebecois and Canadian French than I do of Parisian French. Interestingly, I think I actually understand Canadian French speakers more than Quebecois. (By Canadian French in this case, I mean speakers in French communities from Ontario westward, so like Franco-Ontarians, Franco-Manitobans, etc.)
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-03, 23:36

French (fr) French
Le temps de mise à jour:

Depuis quelques jours*, je faisait un peu pour mes études des langues. Comme j'ai déjà écrit, j'ai étudie plus le galicien il y avait deux ou trois jours. Malheureusement, je ne me souviens rien sauf les salutations et spécifiquement:

  • bos días (/bos d̪iɐs/) qui signifie bonjour
  • boas tardes (/boas t̪aɾðes/) qui signifie bonne après-midi
  • boas noites (/boas n̪oit̪es/) qui signifie les deux bonsoir et bonne nuit
Heureusement, mes études ont inclus beaucoup de temps en lisent l'alphabet et la phonologie, alors je peux lire un peu le galicien. J'ai trouvé aussi plusieurs de ressources avec des leçons ou des dictionnaires. Deux exemples je veux partager est celà - une dictionnaire avec la pronunciation et l'API, et celui - un ressource avec 125 leçons.

Aujourd'hui, j'ai pris l'exemple de lingouboy et laisse-moi être pris par mon envie d'apprendre le gallois. J'utilisais Duolingo et j'ai finis le première don jusqu'au niveau un. J'ai appris (ou, en fait, ré-appris):

  • bore da /bɔrɛ daː/ qui signifie bonjour
  • prynhawn da /prɨnhaun daː/ qui signifie bonne après-midi
  • croeso /krɔɨsɔ/ qui signifie bienvenue
  • hwyl /hu:ɨl/ qui signifie au revoir selon Duolingo mais pas selon Wiktionnaire d'anglais
  • dw i /du i/ ou /dwi/ qui signifie je suis
C'était amusant pour moi de commencer ré-apprendre le gallois une autre fois. Mais, j'écoutais le <r> en gallois comme /ɾ/ même si Wiktionnaire utilise /r/. Pour maintenant, je pense que je vais continuer avec le gallois et le galicien quand j'ai besoin d'un pause de mes courses en ligne.

*for the past few days = depuis quelques jours?
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-03, 23:50

Canadian English (en-ca) English
Update time:

So, I haven't really done much by way of language study for the past few days. As I mentioned already, about 2 or 3 days ago, I spent basically the whole evening studying Galician. Unfortunately, I don't really remember much except for some greetings:

  • bos días (/bos d̪iɐs/) which means good morning
  • boas tardes (/boas t̪aɾðes/) which means good afternoon
  • boas noites (/boas n̪oit̪es/) which means both good evening and good night
Fortunately, I spent quite a bit of time reading about the Galician alphabet and its phonology, so I can now read a little in Galician. I also found several good resources with lessons and dictionaries. Two resources I found were this one, which is a dictionary with pronunciation and IPA transcription, and this one, which contains 125 lessons.

Today, I took a page out of linguoboy's playbook and gave into my wanderlust for Welsh. I used Duolingo and finished the first skill to Level 1. I learned (or, more accurately, re-learned):

  • bore da /bɔrɛ daː/ which means good morning
  • prynhawn da /prɨnhaun daː/ which means good afternoon
  • croeso /krɔɨsɔ/ which means welcome
  • hwyl /hu:ɨl/ which means goodbye according to Duolingo but not according to Wiktionary
  • dw i /du i/ or /dwi/ which means I am
It was fun for me to start learning Welsh again. However, I feel like I heard Welsh <r> as /ɾ/ even though Wiktionary transcribes it as /r/. For now, I think I'm going to continue with Welsh and Galician as fun languages - studying them whenever I need a break from my online courses.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby linguoboy » 2021-02-04, 0:00

dEhiN wrote:
  • bore da /bɔrɛ daː/ which means good morning
  • prynhawn da /prɨnhaun daː/ which means good afternoon
  • croeso /krɔɨsɔ/ which means welcome
  • hwyl /hu:ɨl/ which means goodbye according to Duolingo but not according to Wiktionary
  • dw i /du i/ or /dwi/ which means I am

Ambell nodion (a few notes):
  • Prynhawn is often colloquially shortened to pnawn
  • The fuller expression is pob hwyl, but hwyl is a common enough abbreviation
  • In some varieties dw i is used only in the negative form* and the corresponding affirmative is rw i or w i
*And in some areas with rw i or w i as an affirmative form, the negative form is sa i. But that's getting pretty advanced!
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » 2021-02-04, 0:44

linguoboy wrote:Ambell nodion (a few notes):
  • Prynhawn is often colloquially shortened to pnawn
  • The fuller expression is pob hwyl, but hwyl is a common enough abbreviation
  • In some varieties dw i is used only in the negative form* and the corresponding affirmative is rw i or w i
*And in some areas with rw i or w i as an affirmative form, the negative form is sa i. But that's getting pretty advanced!

So what does hwyl mean in the full expression? Based on the definitions Wiktionary gives, I'm going to assume "(positive) mood"? Also, what are your thoughts on <r>? Do you think it's closer to a flap or trill? It could be just the Duolingo pronunciation (which apparently uses a computer voice for the audio), but I'm sure they use a flap in those terms.
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby linguoboy » 2021-02-04, 3:15

dEhiN wrote:So what does hwyl mean in the full expression? Based on the definitions Wiktionary gives, I'm going to assume "(positive) mood"?

The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru gives even more glosses: "healthy physical or mental condition, good form, one’s right senses, wits; tune (opf musical instrument); temper, mood, frame of mind; nature, disposition; degree of success achieved in the execution of a particular task, &c.; fervour (esp. religious), ecstasy, unction, gusto, zest; characteristic musical intonation or sing-song cadence formerly much in vogue in the perorations of the Welsh pulpit; merry-making, hilarity, jollity, mirth, gaiety, amusement, fun, with, humour; fun (in unfavourable sense), derision, mockery." It then goes on to gloss pob hwyl as "equivalent of ‘All the best!’, ‘Have a good time!’".

dEhiN wrote:Also, what are your thoughts on <r>? Do you think it's closer to a flap or trill? It could be just the Duolingo pronunciation (which apparently uses a computer voice for the audio), but I'm sure they use a flap in those terms.

I think in conversation it's mostly a flap. The trill pronunciation I associate with singing, particularly more formal styles (such as religious music).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons


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