This Just Sounds Wrong
January 30th, 2009 | 4 Comments
An internet friend of mine once memorably said:
Americans waste their time focusing on verb conjugation. Once you have a feel for how things sound, you’ll know when to use the right form of the verb. I can always tell if someone learned HS spanish or if they learned street spanish because the HS spanish person says things that have not been used since Ferdinand wrote Cristobal Colon a cheque to buy three boats.
I’m up to Lesson 10 of Beginning Chinese Reader and while it’s been fantastic for refreshing me on characters that I once learned and forgot and teaching me new compounds, if you actually used the sentence constructions that appear in some of the readings, you would sound kind of like a Chinese Yoda.
Ma1, Ma2, Ma3, Ma4!
January 28th, 2009 | 5 Comments
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”.
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
E-mail Yvonne
nerissa
celiviel
yvonnekao
Korean-American girl who blogs under a Spanish pseudonym because being culturally confusing is fun. Native speakers say that she has outstanding Spanish (which is a definite compliment) and outstanding German (which is most assuredly not).
Elenita
American-born, Taiwanese guy who took five semesters worth of German and ended up with a major in Linguistics.
Subscribe