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How many languages do Europeans speak | ||
Tags: Europe | Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 65 of 66 30 October 2014 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Someone recently said this, and I don't know where - good teachers are often
surprisingly close to good speech therapists. To learn to pronounce certain sounds, speech therapy is actually a much more helpful method. For example, I never quite could pronounce the alveolar tap/trill until my mother showed me how to when I was 22. Now, the difference between s and z is much easier in principle to distinguish (voicing your throat while speaking), but certain sound combinations are hard. By the way, in many Germanic languages z is often conspiciously absent. In Dutch, z is a phoneme but many people merge it with "s" (which is not the English s but the apico- alveolar one I think, making it sound a bit thicker like a "sh" almost. The "sh" of English ship is simply an allophone of a palatalised s sound and people don't distinguish the two at all (a nightmare if you're trying to learn Russian). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4520 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 66 of 66 30 October 2014 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
Depends. Transferring from plosives to fricatives might not work, at least if you speak a language that doesn't utilize negative voice onset time (ie. actually using the vocal folds for plosive voicing). And if all your voiced fricatives are actually approximants, weird things might happen too when you try to transfer this difference to another sound ;) Anyway, being aware of the difference is obviously already a step in the right direction. Many don't even hear the difference, except for noticing a different accent. It's easier for us who have at least some kind of phonetic understanding. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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