I’ve met two Dutch people who i was sure were pulling my leg when they said they were Dutch. One sounded more German to my ears, which is true. It’s the Dutch “e” as in [Amer. English] “rest” that is exactly the same.
Can you give me a link to BBC learning videos for Spanish? Thanks.
My instructors at DLI told me that French Canadian was closer to 18th century French than modern French. Many post-18th century words were completely different. Char and voiture spring to mind. The first means ‘car’ in Canada but ‘tank’ in France.
A friend who teaches English to non-native speakers, says that in addition to vocabulary and phonetics - the rhythm of a language is critical to sounding like a native speaker.
I’ve been told that Americans who study Chinese tend to speak it in a relatively tone-deaf manner, a bit more dependent on context than native Mandarin speakers would. I know that a lot of the folks in our class also tended to import idoms from English that were totally meaningless in Chinese (“Ni Muqin hen xihuan zuo wode feiji!” Actually, that one’s pretty close to meaningless in English too.)
Well, “voiture” also means car in Canada, and “char” can mean tank (especially when used in the expression “char d’assaut”). You’re right that “char” is used in informal speech to mean car. But that’s the thing, no language has only one register. When you get to the most formal registers, Canadian French and France French are nearly identical, in terms of vocabulary at least. The differences mostly occur in more informal situations.
And as JKellyMap said, “colonial” varieties of a language retain features that have disappeared in the “metropolitan” language (which sometimes makes them sound conservative), but for the same reason they may also have seen variation in features that haven’t changed in the “metropolitan” language. So I don’t think we can objectively call them more conservative, only that it’s what they’re perceived to be by “Metropolitans”. Are Canadian dialects of French closer to 18th century France dialects than 21st century France dialects? I’d need a serious cite to believe that, though I’ll readily agree that some properties of 18th century France dialects are found in modern Canadian dialects.
Here you go. That’s the entry-level one - they have others, and some for other languages too, plus loads of other learning resources. I like this one because it’s an adventure story that’s quite interesting to watch, and it has exercises to do with each video. Best to watch it in order, since it’s a story.
Beyond some antiquated vocabulary, modern Quebec French also features significant differences brought about by the proximity of Quebec French speakers with English speakers - be it Frenchified English words* or simply English expressions, idioms and even grammatical forms that have crossed the border but do not exist in metropolitan French**.
Amusingly, even when both Frenchs borrow English words for the same purpose (and for the same reasons) they’re often not the same ones: in France, a tuxedo is “un smoking”, in Quebec it’s “un tuxedo”. In France a drug dealer is “un dealer”, in Quebec he could also be “un pusher”.
And then of course there’s the unmistakeable accent. Even if they were speaking perfect France French, the way Quebecois pronounce words and the peculiar rhythm of their sentences or which syllables they accentuate would be as dead a giveaway to where they’re from as, I don’t know, a Cockney accent in Texas.
- for example, “fucké” is an adjective in Quebec French, or people go to le mall instead of au supermarché/centre commercial
** for example, “maudit” is commonly used as an intensifier in Q. French in the exact same way “damn/ed” is in English. In France, it just sounds weird. Here, the word is only used in its original meaning “cursed”, i.e. having real bad luck.
Interestingly, in Quebec, it’s the French who have a reputation of sprinkling English words into their language. Both dialects of French certainly do it, of course.
Some people are good at aping foreign accents. I’ve tried making a French accent before and I’ve been told that it sounds sort of Parisian, but it’s hard and I can’t do it for a long time. Perhaps with an accent coach, or after living in Paris for a few years.
No we don’t, or in any case I’ve never heard this and I’d personally associate it more with France French than anything else. (Maybe Montrealers say this? What say our posters from Montreal?) For a grocery store, we tend to use “épicerie” (probably refers more of a small grocery store in France, yes?), while for a shopping centre I usually hear “centre d’achats”, which is definitely a canadianism.
I can say “j’étais fâché en maudit”, which means that I was really angry, but would English speakers really say “I was damned angry”? It sounds incorrect somehow.
Whelp, my buddy’s girlf… no, wait, his wife now has been living with us for five years or so and she still sounds like she’s fresh off the latest plane from Montréal :p.
But yes, of course you’re right and if you really work at it you can polish off any accent given time and local immersion. I was thinking more of, well, people fresh off the plane.
Yes, an *épicerie *in France is most definitely a mom-and-pop store.
I don’t know if native English speakers say it, but I would :o. “Damned angry” yields 9 million Google hits, “damn angry” 55 million so I think it’s safe to say both of them are firmly colloquial.
A Frenchman would probably say the less charming “j’étais putain de fâché” or “la putain d’sa mère comme j’étais fâché”, which itself is suspiciously similar to the ubiquitous Spain Spanish “de puta madre”.
I think “vachement” is our own though, I don’t believe any other European language intensifies with cows :p.
I wonder what I would think if I heard her speak. I was talking with a Breton girl who’s been studying for years now at my university. To my ears her accent is French, but I can definitely detect elements of a Quebec accent as well. I asked her if her family point that out when she visits, and sure enough they do.
I asked a woman I knew about this, she was born and raised in Chicago, but both her parents were from Mexico and she spoke Spanish.
She said when she goes to Mexico everyone knows from her accent she’s not Mexican but American.
Funny thing about accents after awhile you get used to them. My father was from Yugoslavia as was my mum. But my mum learned English here and my father came to the USA via Great Britain, so he spoke English with an accent. But when I remember him, I don’t remember it like that
I had a Chinese teacher who learned English in China, via British teachers. As a result, she spoke what she called “Proper British English” as opposed to our “Loosey Goosey American English”. In effect, she was speaking with what I’d call a Sino-Anglo accent.
And if she was better at speaking English than we were, she was playing that hand really close to the chest.
What on earth are you talking about? By peninsulares do you mean Spaniards? No Spaniard I ever met ever pronounced an “l” in “ll.” Like Baltisar says, there may be some regional variation that makes the Spanish “ll” sound a bit like the English “j,” but certainly never like an English “l.”
I disagree. That was how I was taught to say ll in Castilian Spanish, with hint of l before the y sound.
I took a Spanish class when I was going to college in Texas (learned a little bit from my family, and took classes all through high school), and the first semester, the teacher was a gorgeous Castillian woman who insisted that we pronounce the “ll” sound properly (so a soft “j” sound). She also insisted that we learn and use the Vosotros form, and it’s my understanding that neither are very common outside of Castille.
In any case, the next semester, our teacher is from the Hill Country of Texas, and he said he could always tell which students had that particular Profesora the semester before, because our pronunciation went all over the place on the “ll” (For much of the semester, it was even odds between me pronouncing it as a “hard y” or a “soft j”, seemingly at random).
EDIT: Oh, and there is a sort of heavily Texan-accented form of Spanish (usually called “Spanglish”, as opposed to “Tex Mex” which is a good bit less drawled and gringo about it). Picture a cowboy saying “Moo-chose Grassy-ass, Señor-eetah” and you’ve pretty much nailed it.
For kicks and giggles, when I was studying Chinese, I’d sometimes try to speak it with a heavy Texas drawl. The results were bizzare, and completely unintelligible to Chinese people, due to the tones getting kicked roundly in the groin and left in a gutter by this particular accent.
I guess I grew up watching too much (old series) Doctor Who. Hearing it bothers me not in the least, and now I’m going to have to try to catch myself to determine whether I use it or now. I’d not have figured it for a Briticism, much as I miss many things that my contemporaries regard as a Canadianism (having grown up in such close proximity to Ontario).
I’m at the very, very beginning stages of studying Mandarin (I’m going to live in China for three years). And I speak in a tone-deaf manner. I’ll explain why. I’ll also point out that I tend to speak Spanish in a tone-deaf manner, too, and the reasons are the same.
I feel ridiculous. I feel like I’m mocking the language. I know intellectually that I’m not mocking the language, but there’s this deep-rooted feeling that I shouldn’t be making fun of other languages, and speaking with the correct tones (I don’t just mean official Mandarin tones) is as if I were mocking.
I’ll limit my examples to Spanish which I am more familiar with, and which I assume more Americans are familiar with. In northern Mexico, the “Speedy Gonzalez” accent is quite common (luckily I speak a central Mexico accent!). If I wanted to try to fit in, I could easily fake a Speedy Gonzalez accent; I’d been doing it my whole life. But to do it in Spanish, and talking to a northern-Mexican, I’d feel like a real ass-hole. And probably not for good reason; it’d probably be accepted. Instead I do it alone with my wife or with friends (also from central Mexico), and they laugh, and tell me that I actually sound more Mexican that way (except, northern Mexican, not central Mexican).
So in my limited Mandarin (very, very limited at this point!), my ni hao ma’s sound flat. I think that if I “sing” it, it sounds pretty damned good. Also if I yell it, it sounds pretty good (everyone in Nanjing either sings or yells all the time, it seems).
In effect, I don’t think it’s lack of knowledge; it’s lack of not wanting to make fun of a language, even though it’s not really making fun of the language, but rather the feeling that one is making fun of the language.
(FWIW, when I speak German, I have a decent accent, and I don’t feel like I’m making fun of anything.)
Well, Nava is a Spaniard and I lived in Spain, and we both disagree with you. By your pronunciation, castellano would be cas-tel-ya-no, which is just wrong.
That’s exactly how I feel about Italian. The pronunciation is very close to Spanish, but you have to put on this silly sing-song accent. Every time I spoke Italian, I felt like I was embarrassing myself with this spicy meata-balla inflection, but that’s how they talk!
Okay, really sorry for three posts in a row, but I think I have the definitive answer on the Castilian “ll.”
See post #24 on this page, which quotes the linguistic text by Hualde (2005). Apparently the Castilian “ll” used to be a “palatal lateral,” which is distinct from an English “y.” However, in the past 50 years, pronunciation has shifted so that nearly all Castilian speakers pronounce “ll” as indistinguishable from “y” except in a few isolated areas.
Please note, the palatal lateral formerly used in “ll” is not the same as an English “ly” sound like in “million.” It is a distinctive sound. Wikipedia has examples of both the old and new pronunciation.