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I actually read this whole thread as the topic interests me. Y'all slid off the topic on this page (6), but it seemed to be closing down a bit, anyway. I thought I'd add a few of my "sense" (more than two):
1. Adults can, and do, learn another language to (near) native fluency. I did.
2. "Accent" is mostly unimportant in communication, but no one would be considered fluent without a good one. A poor one can hinder native listeners from focusing on the message.
3. There is a "gear" in the brain's ear for listening to a language. If you are expecting one language, but the person starts speaking another (that you know), you may be momentarily lost because you need to shift to a different language "gear". Has anyone else experienced this and knows what I mean? It might sound a bit crazy if you've never had it happen!
4. Although I've never sought information about this, I know for a fact that having an ear for music uses the same neural connections as having an ear for language.
5. Perfect pitch can be a true curse! I don't have it, and I'm glad! When our choir director told us we would sing the Benediction response in the key of the final hymn, some choir members went nuts, especially those with perfect pitch. I couldn't have cared less. I have them all memorized, anyway, but I can sing anything in any key; just give me a pitch; I don't care what it's called!
6. The brain is still one of the most mysterious things on earth. Our postulations about its capacities have changed every year for many years. I suspect that the body of what we don't know know will continue to be larger than that of what we do know for a long time to come.
7. Zed's post made me smile, and remember a few of the Star Trek aliens' descriptions of humans, such as "carbon-based units", and, my personal favorite, "ugly bags of mostly water"... ;0)
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Carpal Tunnel
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I actually read this whole thread as the topic interests me. Y'all slid off the topic on this page (6), but it seemed to be closing down a bit, anyway. I thought I'd add a few of my "sense" (more than two):
1. Adults can, and do, learn another language to (near) native fluency. I did. This is probably a good example of the fallacy that says that if I can do it anyone can. I call this the Golden Rule Fallacy for reasons we need not get into here. I would suggest that of the large number of people who are fully fluent in more than one language, the vast majority learned both in their first few years.
2. "Accent" is mostly unimportant in communication, but no one would be considered fluent without a good one. A poor one can hinder native listeners from focusing on the message.
I would prefer the term "fully fluent" for this condition, just for purposes of discussion. See my comment on the next point.
3. There is a "gear" in the brain's ear for listening to a language. If you are expecting one language, but the person starts speaking another (that you know), you may be momentarily lost because you need to shift to a different language "gear". Has anyone else experienced this and knows what I mean? It might sound a bit crazy if you've never had it happen!
I have a friend who is fluent in German; I can't say about her accent, I haven't heard her speaking German in any great amount. She is almost worthless for translation. She can't just drop back and forth quickly enough to translate. She can work over a piece of German and work out a translation, but it doesn't come trippingly off her tongue. On the other hand, there are some who can translate as fast as the source language is given to them. Some of them work for the UN. On the othest hand, there are those who can drop back and forth between two languages several times during a sentence. The phenomenon is known as code-switching.
4. Although I've never sought information about this, I know for a fact that having an ear for music uses the same neural connections as having an ear for language.
5. Perfect pitch can be a true curse! I don't have it, and I'm glad! When our choir director told us we would sing the Benediction response in the key of the final hymn, some choir members went nuts, especially those with perfect pitch. I couldn't have cared less. I have them all memorized, anyway, but I can sing anything in any key; just give me a pitch; I don't care what it's called!
Back in my first time in college I knew two people who had perfect pitch. For one it was a curse; he would listen to music on the radio and wince if the station's turntable was off-speed. The other one came to the library listening room while I was in there. He put a record on the turntable and started playing it. While it was playing he removed the cover to get into the guts of the turntable, put his finger on the belt, and varied the speed of the turntable just to hear it wobble all over the place. He was blind.
6. The brain is still one of the most mysterious things on earth. Our postulations about its capacities have changed every year for many years. I suspect that the body of what we don't know know will continue to be larger than that of what we do know for a long time to come.
One of the saints of atheist mysticism said, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it...Wait a minute! We are too simple to understand it." Just personally I believe that the body of things we don't know that we don't know, the unknown unknowns is vastly larger than the body of known unknowns. And probably the body of unknown knowns is even larger still.
7. Zed's post made me smile, and remember a few of the Star Trek aliens' descriptions of humans, such as "carbon-based units", and, my personal favorite, "ugly bags of mostly water"... ;0)
"Sentient meat?! You're trying to tell me that they are sentient meat?! Poppycock!!"
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>This is probably a good example of the fallacy that says that if I can do it anyone can.
It is unfair to accuse twosleepy of a fallacy, because it rather depends on what twosleepy was trying to prove. Any unconditional postulation, such as, "It is impossible for an adult to A" is falsified by a single exception. twosleepy does not claim that, "It is easy because I did it"; but simply, "It can be done because I did it." I don't see any fallacy here. (I can't comment on the "Golden Rule Fallacy" however, because you waggishly choose not to define it).
twosleepy, tell us: What language did you master and when did you start learning it?
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>This is probably a good example of the fallacy that says that if I can do it anyone can.
It is unfair to accuse twosleepy of a fallacy, because it rather depends on what twosleepy was trying to prove. Any unconditional postulation, such as, "It is impossible for an adult to A" is falsified by a single exception. twosleepy does not claim that, "It is easy because I did it"; but simply, "It can be done because I did it." I don't see any fallacy here. (I can't comment on the "Golden Rule Fallacy" however, because you waggishly choose not to define it).
twosleepy, tell us: What language did you master and when did you start learning it?
I can see that what twosleepy said was not that anyone can do it and I apologize for suggesting that she had committed a fallacy here. I took it a little more generally than that and I see that I was wrong. There was a little of the generic to her "Adults can, and do, learn another language to (near) native fluency. I did." As for the Golden Rule Fallacy, the Golden Rule states that one should do to others what one would want done to oneself. The problem here is that the others may not want done to them what you would want done to you. The assumption is that the others are like you. In some cases it will be true, but certainly not always. Edit: Oh, and the original claim was not that no adult can become fluent in a second language, merely that it is rare; one counter-example would not disprove it.
Last edited by Faldage; 03/10/08 11:22 PM.
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I apologize for suggesting that she had committed a fallacy here. Can one 'commit' a fallacy? As for the Golden Rule Fallacy, the Golden Rule states that one should do to others what one would want done to oneself. The problem here is that the others may not want done to them what you would want done to you. The assumption is that the others are like you. In some cases it will be true, but certainly not always. The problem here is that you are not taking into account the genre of the Golden Rule. As an aphorism it is similar to proverbs in that it represents a generalisation, the plain meaning of which is clear in broad terms even though you may be able to press it to an absurd conclusion by being overly specific about the particulars of its application. It is dependent upon social context and common sense for its right interpretation and application. In the same way, there are proverbs that are seemingly contradictory when taken out of the social context in which they separately apply. For example, "Look before you leap" v. "He who hesitates is lost". In a general sense, the Golden Rule is simply saying treat others as well as you naturally treat yourself. The Author of the Golden Rule also said "Love your neighbour like you love yourself" and that is another way of expressing the meaning of it.
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I do understand the concept of switching gears. I studied Spanish before my vacation there. Unfortunately all of my teachers were S.American so the accent was quite different; I couldn't understand anything said to me. The group I was with were, instead of the international mix I had expected, all from Madrid but very nice about translating for me. On the third morning I suddenly tuned in and understood whole conversations although I naturally missed a lot of detail. It certainly surprised the fellow who started to translate for me "But, but yesterday you didn't speak Spanish."
He was more careful what "compliments" he paid me after that.
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I do understand the concept of switching gears. I studied Spanish before my vacation there. Unfortunately all of my teachers were S.American so the accent was quite different; I couldn't understand anything said to me. The group I was with were, instead of the international mix I had expected, all from Madrid but very nice about translating for me. On the third morning I suddenly tuned in and understood whole conversations although I naturally missed a lot of detail. It certainly surprised the fellow who started to translate for me "But, but yesterday you didn't speak Spanish."
He was more careful what "compliments" he paid me after that. Sudamericano is much easier than the various European Spanish dialects. It's grammatically simpler and the accent is more logical. One reason for the accent difference is that the Spanish colonies were founded before that King (was it Philip?) with a lisp made the silly rule that everyone had to speak like him and pronounce Barcelona as 'Barthelona'. So in that sense it's actually an older, purer form of Spanish than that spoken in Spain. In other ways Sudamericano is more modernised and egalitarian than Castilliano - they have practically done away with the formal/polite forms of address/pronouns/cases etc, especially in the plural.
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Well, I see the knights in shining armor have been out for a spin... ;0)
I was taken aback just a tad, because, as Hydra correctly noted, I was simply saying it can be done. I don't consider myself terribly "exceptional" amongst this crowd, but then, we really don't know much about each other at all.
To answer your query, Hydra, I followed the standard US route to learning a "language other than English", beginning in (brace yourselves for a major dating of myself...) Junior High (7th grade), taking Spanish 2 or 3 days a week. I don't know if it became daily in 8th, or in High School, 9th. I took it through 11th, and my senior year I was an exchange student to Chile for a year. I really would like to write a book about that when I have the time... I found that the schooling I'd received was inadequate, but I don't blame the schooling. I don't think it's possible to become totally comfortable speaking a 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) language with native speakers without being immersed in some fashion at some point. After about 3 months I was quite conversant, but working still on my accent and rolling my "r"s (I spent hours physically dragging the sensation from the back of my throat up across the palate to right behind my teeth. Most people would not bother, but I really wanted to be able to do it correctly!) After about 6 months I was mistaken for a local. I have a great story about that, if anyone is interested.
Pook, I have to bust ya! The lisping king story is just another "urban legend". You can easily see that it makes no sense when you understand that the "ceceo", as it's called, only occurs with the following phonemes: ce, ci, za, ze, zi, zo, zu. It does not occur with the letter "s", which a person with a lisp would do. What's funny is that in Chile, they never referred to themselves as speaking "espanol", but rather, "castellano", yet they did not have the "ceceo" in their speech.
Zed: Did you ever experience a situation where one of your friendly translators began to speak in heavily accented English, but you were expecting Spanish, and you didn't get it at all? Or the other way around, where s/he said something in Spanish but you were expecting English? That's what I was referring to for myself. I occasionally overhear people speaking Spanish in public, and if I attend, then the person switches suddenly to English, I am momentarily lost until my brain figures it out...
Thank you for the apology, Faldage. I wasn't trying to prove anything. And believe me, I'll hold off on that activity in these forums for quite a while... he he he :0)
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>>>On the othest hand, there are those who can drop back and forth between two languages several times during a sentence. The phenomenon is known as code-switching.
That's exactly what happens at our family suppers where we'll switch from French to English and back again, depending upon who we're facing when discussing something.
My Dad and all of my siblings are perfectly bilingual speaking both English and French fluently. My Mom is more at ease speaking French but understand English very well. One sis-in-law is unilingually French, while the other sis-in-law is unilingually English, my bro-in-law is French with a smattering of English knowledge.
Any new person to the table can find our interactions quite confusing as a sentence can start in one language, switch to another when we face a different person, and finish off in the first; all without skipping a beat.
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Yes I know it doesn't apply to the 's' but that doesn't mean the story has no basis in fact. I think it is true that it became fashionable to speak that way because the king did. I don't believe it is just a myth. It is certainly true that it is something that developed in Spain since the colonisation of South America and the South American pronunciation is the older. Is there a better or well documented explanation for how this came about?
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