Chipanglish » Speaking

Retroactive Interference in Action

Yvonne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:41:24 +0000

So I finally busted out some Spanish in the comments of my previous post.

I’ve been volunteering at the Children’s Museum of Houston where maybe half of the visitors speak Spanish. I’d like to get to the point where I’m confident enough in my Spanish to at least mix it in with English in teaching these kids, especially since some of them don’t speak English yet.

My brain is not cooperating. I can switch off easily between English and Chinese as I’ve been doing that my whole life. However, my brain has grouped Spanish and Japanese together in a category apparently named “Languages I Speak Brokenly.”

We were doing a slime demonstration at the museum last week. One of the kids started to eat the slime. I racked my brain for “Don’t eat!” in Spanish and this is what happened.

English-speaking brain: I need “Don’t eat!” in Spanish!
Broken languages brain: “No tabetes!”
English-speaking brain: That…makes no sense in any language!
Broken languages brain: @#$#%^$!!!
English-speaking brain: You’re taking too long! I give up! “DON’T EAT THAT!”

食べる (taberu) is Japanese for “to eat”. “No tabetes” is apparently wrongly-conjugated Japanish. Classic retroactive interference.

After the slime-eating danger had passed, my broken languages brain finally came up with “¡No come!” Which I’m pretty sure is right, but the actual Spanish speakers in the audience will have to weigh in on that.

Place and Manner (of Articulation)

Peter — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:12:01 +0000

In the teachers’ lounge the other day, a kindergarten teacher was sharing stories about her students. One child had proudly gone to the teacher and said, “Ms. ____, Guess what? I can say ‘Hello’ in Chinese!” She expected the child to say: 你好, ni3 hao3. Imagine her surprise when the child uttered the phrase, “Herro!”

Looking at an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart, the terms on the top are given to each sound based on where the sound is produced, starting from the lips and ending at the glottis. The terms on the left indicate how the sound is created.

Nasal: air is pushed into the nasal cavity where it resonates
Plosive: air is fully stopped and released
Fricative: air is mostly stopped, but some passes through
Approximant: air is blocked by the tongue, but is able to escape around it (/r/* and /l/* sounds)
Trill: the tongue rapidly flaps (think Spanish rolled Rs)
Flap: the tongue flaps once (ie. “butter” pronounced as “budder”)

The stereotypical Asian “accent”, with the mixing of the letters r and l, comes from the phonemic inventory on these languages. (Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language.) In English, we have two approximants, an /r/ and an /l/. In Chinese, there is only one. Hence the stereotypical accent in which food service workers ask if you’ve ordered “Polk flied lice.”

*Linguistic convention writes phonemes as such. So the b sound in “baby” would be written as /b/.

Ma1, Ma2, Ma3, Ma4!

Yvonne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:24:26 +0000

KathyMarie asked:

what do the numbers mean after the words in italics? “ri4″ and “dien4″ for example.

Glad you asked! Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the way you say the word is integral to the meaning.

If an English speaker asks, “…ma?” or yells, “MA!”, the “ma” in both cases is the speaker’s mother.

But in Chinese, a word that sounds like “…ma?” means “numbness/pins and needles” while “MA!” means “to scold or yell at”.

This YouTube video does a pretty good job of explaining it:

More examples here:

In the videos above they indicate tone with markings above the vowel. I’ve been doing it with numbers after the pinyin.

ma1 = mā
ma2 = má
ma3 = mǎ
ma4 = mà

Ma3 is just a bit easier to type than mǎ to make the special character appear.

If you want to practice tone recognition, you can do it with the BBC Chinese Games.

Chipanglish » Speaking

Retroactive Interference in Action

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