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Advanced ESL Team Thread - TAC ’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4630 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 17 of 45 05 January 2014 at 2:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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First of all, regarding the Team name, I actually like the "Advanced ESL". Makes me
feel good for some reason. However if we need something original, how about something like "never enough" or some kind of bad writing for the word "english"(for the fun of it :p) As for the challenges, I'm up for some but considering our level (do I really need to put an "s" here? I guess we're all about the same level) it might be hard to find something really challenging. We could go for some reading of articles in a field we know almost nothing about but I'm not sure it'd be really useful. Or maybe just have a talk between us here trying to use the most precise vocabulary possible (but this might feel unnatural so..) @Dampingwire: Thanks! and btw, I could understand "sinecure" from the context but couldn't put a translation of it in my head so I looked it up and it seems this word exists in French as well.. Maybe I should get in the french TAC team.. :p @Tollpatchig: Well I don't know for the others, but I'm kind of a perfectionist and that's one of the reasons why I joined. My English is rather good but until I can actually pass for a Brit, I won't feel satisfied. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tollpatchig Senior Member United States Joined 4005 days ago 161 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Maltese | Message 18 of 45 05 January 2014 at 3:23am | IP Logged | |||||
NO!! I hate when non-natives lose their accents! I love accented English it adds much needed spice to our boring language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4630 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 19 of 45 05 January 2014 at 3:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh you misunderstood me! I'd like to be able to pass for a Brit, but... on command! I
mean that I'd like to be able to use a British accent if I need to. Anyway, I've already lost my French accent. Nowadays, it happens a lot that people can't tell where I'm from before my accent is a mix of all the ones I've studied! ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 45 05 January 2014 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I remember when I first saw sinecure in some book or other and I remember understanding it because I (somehow) knew it from Italian. Now I know it French too :-) As for challenges, I don't think I have any good suggestions. Read something you find difficult? Would it be too cruel to suggest James Joyce's Ulysses or maybe Milton's Paradise Lost? (I managed to get about 100 pages into the latter on the ferry from Ireland once ... it stopped me getting seasick, but on land I suspect that the effect might be reversed :-)). As for comprehension, something that involves heavily accented speech? The Wire (which I've never seen) is supposed to be somewhat tricky. There's Rab C Nesbitt, assuming you can take his humour. Perhaps Father Ted for some mild Irish accents? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4232 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 21 of 45 05 January 2014 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So good to be an observer, haha! If I were acting, I would choose heavily accented speech. It's just more practical thing to deal with, I guess :)
I imagine a task "write a better transcript" *evil laughter* P.S. I may even provide you with that speech. It's not just heavily accented but also is a speech with speaking defects like swallowing and deafening and whatever else you may notice :D Edited by Via Diva on 05 January 2014 at 1:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 22 of 45 07 January 2014 at 1:27am | IP Logged | |||||
Honestly, I like it too!
Actually I’ve read it and it isn’t so bad – at least compared to The Faerie Queene! But no, I don’t think many of us would be interested in literary classics, at least not in those that date back more than a couple of centuries. I was thinking more on the line of reading fairly contemporary short stories so entrenched in Anglophone culture that we as learners may need to know them in order to get the reference when native speakers casually mention them. Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago, on the Time website I came across this invitation to read James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” upon which the new Ben Stiller movie is based. According to that, “The character’s name and its adjective (Mittyesque) have entered the lexicon as terms used to describe someone prone to daydreams to the detriment of their real life.” To tell the truth, I’d never heard of such an adjective, but if it is a common enough word in English nowadays, then this is the kind of thing into which I may want to delve deeper. Perhaps with some guidance from our godfather or other helpful native speakers, we may find other relevant short stories to read. But I also realize that not everyone has a background in literary studies and a passion for literature and they may legitimately dislike the idea of reading short stories altogether. So I was also thinking that if we end up having challenges as other teams have, at some point we might decide to follow a month’s worth of a university course (say, eight lectures: two each week) on a site like Open Yale Courses, leaving everybody free to choose which course to pick according to one’s tastes and interests. After all, at our level we should be able to attend university in our TL and these courses may offer something to sink our teeth into. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 23 of 45 07 January 2014 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sadly, present company excluded, I'd think that most people know about (for example) "Pride and Prejudice" or "Animal Farm" from films or TV. If you want books that most people have read, then you probably need to turn to the sort of fare that is part of the secondary school curriculum. "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Lord of the Flies", "Of Mice and Men", "White Fang". Usually a Shakespeare play too, but everyone will have worked through a different set (of two or maybe three). I quite liked "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" when I read it recently: it's probably the only book that I can recall that can be read in about the running time of the film!
That's the first time I've across "Mittyesque". I'd guess that it was fashioned after Kafkaesque. Kafkaesque has survived well (the OED cites 1947 as the first usage in print). I'd guess that "Mittyesque" won't survive that long past the sell-by date of the film! So for widespread cultural references you may want to look to the cinema. Or just sit down and watch The Simpsons :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 45 07 January 2014 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Eek. The OED has an entry for Mittyesque:
I need to read more :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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