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Aspects learners know better than natives | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cmmah Diglot Groupie Ireland Joined 4534 days ago 52 posts - 110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Irish | Message 1 of 41 15 March 2013 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reading through YouTube comments, I've noticed that French speakers (well, the Youtube French speakers) tend to
mix up verb endings, that sound the same in speech, but are written differently e.g "J'adores cette chanson", "Ce film sors quand?". These are things that most learners of French would have no problem with. I also notice that English speakers often mix up homophonic words in writing, e.g "your/you're", "their/there/they're". English learners tend to have a better grasp of this. Any more examples of this? Edit: Woops, I mixed up "synonymous" and "homophonic" - maybe I should fix my own mistakes before pointing out others'! Edited by cmmah on 15 March 2013 at 11:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6662 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 2 of 41 15 March 2013 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Both of your examples are things that often are distinct in people's native languages and once was in the target
language but since some time back has collapsed with other features. In Swedish they and them sound the same in spoken language /dom/ but in written language we write them separately as de and dem – this is something that I do not thing foreigners will have problems with, not even English natives!, since most of the people who learn Swedish has a native tongue that distinguish between the plural third person subject and object. Funny thing: I hear and I think their, they're and there differently and sometimes I think I pronounce them differently although I know I do not. I think about they're and their as an /ei/-diphthong albeit it's an /æ/-sound that exits my mouth. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 41 15 March 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it happens at least sometimes that learners are more consistent about not mixing up homophones in writing, perhaps just because they tend to focus more closely on the spelling of each word and take more time to write things out. I too have seen French people mixing up verb endings somewhat frequently, though their errors pale in comparison to the messes I make with the language. :-)
I'm not so sure this is about "knowing better", though. I bet if you asked an educated native Francophone to write out all the verb endings, he would get them right. But when you're not paying as much attention, it's pretty easy to let a homophone slip through. Edited by tastyonions on 15 March 2013 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 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 4 of 41 15 March 2013 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||
The reason here is quite simply because different spellings correspond to the same pronunciation, and as babies we hear before we read. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7159 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 41 15 March 2013 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of my Polish friends has made a similar comment about spelling while correcting my homework. I suspect that it comes down to native speakers relying more on representing sounds in print using their recollections of other native speakers voices/utterances compared to us outsiders who rely proportionately more on what some book indicates or what a teacher hammered on during class.
E.g. - *Wogule / *Wogóle "in general" (vs. codified W ogóle even though I can see readily how one could represent the pronunciation of the codified/"correct" spelling using the non-standard/uncodified/"wrong" ones) - *...wpółdo trzeciej / *w pół do trzeciej "half past two" (vs. codified wpół do. Again I can see readily how the non-standard/uncodified/"wrong" spellings come about when reading aloud all of them) - *przyjerzdżać, *tesz "to arrive (by vehicle), "also, too" (vs. codified przyjeżdżać and też respectively. The first one involves rz and ż with both being pronounced identically as a voiced retroflex sibilant (i.e. something similar to s in "pleasure"). Despite the audio identity, the spelling betrays the fact that the rz is a reflex of an older palatalized r while that of ż is of an older g). The second mispelling arises from Polish's tendency for devoicing of certain final consonants. In this example, też indeed sounds like something written using the Polish alphabet as tesz (it'd sound like the English slang word tesh) I'm not sure about whether foreign learners "knowing better" than natives, but I think that it's plausible for the native speaker on average to be less fascinated by various characteristics of his/her native language than learner who's an outsider. It's something about the novelty for that learner, probably. One example is Medulin who despite having learned Portuguese and English as foreign languages seems very informed about the intradistinctions of the variants of Portuguese and English. Vlad made a comment about me in this thread after giving off that I seemed to know a lot more about the target language than the average native speaker of that target language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4660 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 41 15 March 2013 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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It used to be that a non-native had a better grasp on spelling than the average native. I don't mean writing correctly - the grammar remained a problem - but spelling of single words.
The reason was that the "average" learner, whoever it might be, did see the word first, read it several times before the sound got connected with it. With current audio only methods, conversational courses and language exchanges, the written form is less important. Currently, it is again down to math. Among the language learners, you will meet higher number of people better educated in the technicalities of grammar and orthography than among the natives. I did meet quite a few native speaker of German, whose grasp on German grammar was worse than mine. The simple reason is that I am working mainly with the language and in technical field as second, and they are working above all in technical field, and the language (even their own) is ... not cultivated consciously. These are educated people. Their education and work is simply in different field. The problems nowadays are more visible. Internet, e-mail, sms, twitter - this all brought immense opportunities to communicate. But we have lost the quality in exchange for speed. I can still remember getting a polite rebuke because of typo in e-mail, and the practice of leaving drafts of e-mail messages wait for few hours before proofreading them. What do you think will happen now, unless the message is full of typos? For me, in English, there is quite a solid distinction between it's and its, their and they're etc. However, I can understand why natives have problems - they hear the words for years before they discover that there are differences... 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ling Diglot Groupie Taiwan Joined 4589 days ago 61 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Indonesian, Thai | Message 7 of 41 16 March 2013 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||
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的, 地 and 得 (all pronounced the same: de in Pinyin) are common grammatical
particles in Chinese with distinct functions. But native speakers often write "的" when they are supposed to write 地 or 得. Learners rarely make this mistake. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 41 16 March 2013 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
Especially Cantonese speakers rarely make this mistake when writing Mandarin ("Standard Chinese"), since the three characters are pronounced differently in Canto (dik1, dei6 and dak1, respectively). Speaking of Cantonese, most grammars are guidebooks on how to properly write it will say that there's a difference between 噉 (gam2, "in this manner") and 咁 (gam3, "to this degree"). Natives will differentiate between them in pronunciation, but will usually write 咁 for both of them, whereas most learners I've talked to (though they are few) will use different characters. Of course, one could argue here that the learners and grammars are wrong, since they don't agree with popular usage. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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