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Can we ever fill in all the gaps? | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 25 of 39 30 October 2013 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
If it's any consolation, plenty of English people might have been puzzled as well. It's often just a question of "getting your ear in", and knowing in advance what to expect, but if your concentration goes, or you forget where you are for a moment, you can be lost momentarily. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5558 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 26 of 39 30 October 2013 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Now I'm going to have to get married and have children so I can conduct my own experimnts
and settle this once and for all. Unless anyone's got a spare one they don't need? I think I've forgotten what the original question was now, but getting a little nearer on topic, I got copies of "No country for old men" in English and German a while back, and while I was collecting vocabulary, I realised there was a dozen or so words in the first Chapter that I didn't know in the English version. They were mostly mexicanish-sounding geographical features, which my brain just whizzed over and sort of interpreted from context, but it was still a bit confusing working out exactly what the geography was. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 27 of 39 30 October 2013 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Time to whip out the good ol' saurus... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 28 of 39 30 October 2013 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Average kid? I've been speaking English natively for 42 years but I only know malapropism. I've heard of a funambulist but I'm not sure what he does (tightrope walker come to mind). Braggadocio I've seen in print but I don't know the meaning. I missed started high school just as Latin was being withdrawn. 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 29 of 39 31 October 2013 at 1:24am | IP Logged | |||||
You must have come across "parlay" ... think of that recent Pirate film (you know, "disinclined to acquiesce ..."). legerdemain too, although I've not heard it much since magic shows stopped cropping up on the telly (or maybe it's because I stopped watching telly ...) I think most of the others (except maybe bruit, tricorn, tenebrous, terpsichorean and regnant) are unlikely to crop up in everyday conversation, regardless of whether the speakers are adults or children. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4249 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 30 of 39 31 October 2013 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I continue to learn a lot of words in English myself. As I'm learning my Spanish, much through reading National Geographic articles, I'm running across words that I look up, and realize that I don't understand the English translation to the words... so I have to look it up.
In many cases, there are alternate ways to say something. While everybody has their own standards, if I can get my point across and understand what someone has to say back to me, I'd say that I would be pretty happy with my level... although that doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to improve, which is something that is likely to happen for an entire lifetime, as it does with your native language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7203 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 31 of 39 31 October 2013 at 8:47am | IP Logged | |||||
If the speaker had requestsd "booze" would that be more universally known? I would think most stewardesses would have heard that request before from someone who wants to drink "hard stuff". Are these colloquialisms more common? Another way the speaker could have narrowed the request would be to ask for a more specific type of liquor like "whiskey" or "vodka", depending on what they were looking for. Whether one perceives "gaps" may depend a lot on how much one pushes themselves into new situations, new topics, and new regionalisms. It goes the other way too. Certain words and grammatical constructions were more popular of old. A mundane example is how the word "effective" has largely supplanted "efficacious" in the spoken word, at least where I live. I've heard Professor Arguelles say it and his talks don't strike me as being too stuffy, although he is quite formal in his presentation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 39 31 October 2013 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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For some reason most of the words are af Latin origin (and so is the French language, which is the source of another large group of words) so the crux of the matter is not your age, but whether you have learnt Latin or not. You could in principle construct a list of rare words of purely Anglosaxon origin, and then the Latinists wouldn't have that advantage.
One thing I have noticed when I have assessed my passive vocabulary is that I tend to know all the loanwords in languages like Romanian and Russian, but a far lower percentage of the 'native' words (or loanwords from languages I don't know). I do try to change that, but it is much harder to memorize words you don't already know. Edited by Iversen on 31 October 2013 at 9:32am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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