17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3 Next >>
WANNABEAFREAK
Diglot
Senior Member
Hong Kong
cantonese.hk
Joined 6828 days ago
144 posts - 185 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, Cantonese
Studies: French
| Message 1 of 17 04 January 2011 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
Is this guy full of sh!t? He claims 3 months to get to this fluent in Croatian....
I'm 1/2 Croatian and he sounds like 100% better than me... I feel ashamed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itBJ4ovvQBI
1 person has voted this message useful
| Splog
Diglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
anthonylauder.c
Joined 5670 days ago
1062 posts - 3263 votes
Speaks: English*, Czech
Studies: Mandarin
| Message 2 of 17 04 January 2011 at 3:26pm | IP Logged |
He doesn't claim to be "fluent" (a controversial term), but rather that he has reached
a good beginner's level by using the Teach Yourself book, combined with Moses
McCormack's FLR method of language learning. He certainly is not "full of sh!t" (to use
your own phrase) in that he is not making wild claims, and has also made great progress
in a short time.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5274 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes
Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 3 of 17 04 January 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged |
No, he is not quite there yet. His consonants are generally very good (the c vs. č vs ć is occasionally messed up),
but his vowel accent is not that great. Sometimes he misplaces the position in the word. More often it's a matter
of replacing a short vowel with a long one or vice versa. I don't know if these programs teach the SC pitch
accents, but if they don't want to deal with the entire system (i.e. lònac 'pot' (nominative sg.), lónca (genitive sg.),
lȏnci (nominative pl.), lȍnācā (genitive pl.)), they should at least clarify where the accent falls and if it is long or
short (of course both can change when the word is declined). He does mess up cases at times as well.
But is he intelligible? Yes, absolutely.
1 person has voted this message useful
| WANNABEAFREAK
Diglot
Senior Member
Hong Kong
cantonese.hk
Joined 6828 days ago
144 posts - 185 votes
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, Cantonese
Studies: French
| Message 4 of 17 04 January 2011 at 4:03pm | IP Logged |
Merv wrote:
I don't know if these programs teach the SC pitch
accents, but if they don't want to deal with the entire system (i.e. lònac 'pot' (nominative sg.), lónca (genitive sg.),
lȏnci (nominative pl.), lȍnācā (genitive pl.)), they should at least clarify where the accent falls and if it is long or
short (of course both can change when the word is declined). |
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you make the language sound like its ridiculously impossible.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5274 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes
Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 5 of 17 04 January 2011 at 4:27pm | IP Logged |
WANNABEAFREAK wrote:
Merv wrote:
I don't know if these programs teach the SC pitch
accents, but if they don't want to deal with the entire system (i.e. lònac 'pot' (nominative sg.), lónca (genitive sg.),
lȏnci (nominative pl.), lȍnācā (genitive pl.)), they should at least clarify where the accent falls and if it is long or
short (of course both can change when the word is declined). |
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you make the language sound like its ridiculously impossible. |
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It's not ridiculously impossible, but people should be aware that these things do exist. It is pointless to try to
memorize each word and its declination and how the pitch accent shifts and changes. It's much better to know
that there are 4 of them and try to develop a feel for which one is present when you hear native speakers
speaking.
Pitch accent is usually not important for distinguishing meaning. One classic example of where it is is the word
grad. With a short falling accent it means hail, with a long rising accent it means city.
If you want to be understood, this doesn't matter. If you want to have native-like pronunciation, of course it
matters.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| WANNABEAFREAK
Diglot
Senior Member
Hong Kong
cantonese.hk
Joined 6828 days ago
144 posts - 185 votes
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, Cantonese
Studies: French
| Message 6 of 17 04 January 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged |
Merv wrote:
It's not ridiculously impossible, but people should be aware that these things do exist. It is pointless to try to
memorize each word and its declination and how the pitch accent shifts and changes. It's much better to know
that there are 4 of them and try to develop a feel for which one is present when you hear native speakers
speaking.
Pitch accent is usually not important for distinguishing meaning. One classic example of where it is is the word
grad. With a short falling accent it means hail, with a long rising accent it means city.
If you want to be understood, this doesn't matter. If you want to have native-like pronunciation, of course it
matters. |
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would this be something similar to tones in chinese?
1 person has voted this message useful
| Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5274 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes
Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 7 of 17 04 January 2011 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
WANNABEAFREAK wrote:
Merv wrote:
It's not ridiculously impossible, but people should be aware that these things do exist. It is pointless to try to
memorize each word and its declination and how the pitch accent shifts and changes. It's much better to know
that there are 4 of them and try to develop a feel for which one is present when you hear native speakers
speaking.
Pitch accent is usually not important for distinguishing meaning. One classic example of where it is is the word
grad. With a short falling accent it means hail, with a long rising accent it means city.
If you want to be understood, this doesn't matter. If you want to have native-like pronunciation, of course it
matters. |
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would this be something similar to tones in chinese? |
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Yes, I just saw you speak Cantonese too, which should be a HUGE plus for you to nail a native-like SC accent, at
least for the vowels.
It is not true tone because only the stressed syllable of the words gets the pitch accent, and it is almost never
crucial to get your point across, whereas in tonal languages if you get the tone wrong you will not be able to
convey your meaning.
Pitch accent is not all that common:
Pitch accent
Quote:
Proto-Indo-European accent is usually reconstructed as a free[2] pitch-accent system,[3] preserved in
Ancient Greek, Vedic, and Proto-Balto-Slavic. The Greek and Indic systems were lost: Modern Greek has a pitch
produced stress accent, and it was lost entirely from Indic by the time of the Prākrits. Balto-Slavic retained Proto-
Indo-European pitch accent, reworking it into the opposition of "acute" (rising) and "circumflex" (falling) tone,
and which, following a period of extensive accentual innovations, yielded pitch-accent based system that has
been retained in modern-day Lithuanian and West South Slavic languages (in most dialects). Some other modern
Indo-European languages have pitch accent systems, like Swedish and Norwegian, deriving from a stress-based
system they inherited from Old Norse,[4] and Punjabi, which developed tone distinctions that maintained lexical
distinctions as consonants were conflated. |
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Quote:
Neoštokavian idiom used for the basis of standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian distinguishes four
types of pitch accents: short falling < ̏>, short rising <̀>, long falling < ̑> and long rising <´>. The accent is said
to be relatively free as it can be manifested in any syllable but the last one. The long accents are realized by pitch
change within the long vowel; the short ones are realized by the pitch difference from the subsequent syllable.[7]
. Accent alternations are very frequent in inflectional paradigms, both by quality and placement in the word (the
so-called "mobile paradigms", which were present in the PIE itself but in Proto-Balto-Slavic have become much
more widespread). Different inflected forms of the same lexeme can exhibit all four accents: lònac 'pot'
(nominative sg.), lónca (genitive sg.), lȏnci (nominative pl.), lȍnācā (genitive pl.).
Restrictions on the distribution of the accent depend, beside the position of the syllable, also on its quality, as
not every kind of accent can be manifested in every syllable.
Falling tone generally occurs in monosyllabic words or the first syllable of a word (pȃs 'belt', rȏg 'horn'; bȁba 'old
woman', lȃđa 'river ship'; kȕćica 'small house', Kȃrlovac). The only exception to this rule are the interjections, i.e.
words uttered in the state of excitement (ahȁ, ohȏ)
Rising tone generally occurs in every syllable of a word except the ultimate and never in monosyllabics (vòda
'water', lúka 'harbour'; lìvada 'meadow', lúpānje 'slam'; siròta 'female orphan', počétak 'beginning'; crvotòčina
'wormhole', oslobođénje 'liberation').
Thus, monosyllabics generally have falling tone, whilst polysyllabics generally have falling or rising tone on the
first syllable, and rising in all the other syllables but the last one. The tonal opposition rising ~ falling is hence
generally only possible in the first accented syllable of polysyllabic words, while the opposition by lengths, long
~ short, is possible even in the non-accented syllable as well as in the post-accented syllable (but not in the
pre-accented position).
Proclitics (clitics which latch on to a following word), on the other hand, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a
rising tone) from the following mono- or disyllabic word. This stolen accent is always short, and may end up
being either falling or rising on the proclitic. This phenomenon (accent shift to proclitic) is most frequent in the
spoken idioms of Bosnia, in Serbian it is more limited (normally, with negation proclitic ne), and is almost absent
from Croatian Neoštokavian idioms.[8] Short rising accent resists such shift better than the falling one (as seen in
the example /ʒěliːm/→/ne‿ʒěliːm/) |
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Edited by Merv on 04 January 2011 at 4:44pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7157 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 8 of 17 04 January 2011 at 4:45pm | IP Logged |
WANNABEAFREAK wrote:
Merv wrote:
It's not ridiculously impossible, but people should be aware that these things do exist. It is pointless to try to
memorize each word and its declination and how the pitch accent shifts and changes. It's much better to know
that there are 4 of them and try to develop a feel for which one is present when you hear native speakers
speaking.
Pitch accent is usually not important for distinguishing meaning. One classic example of where it is is the word
grad. With a short falling accent it means hail, with a long rising accent it means city.
If you want to be understood, this doesn't matter. If you want to have native-like pronunciation, of course it
matters. |
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would this be something similar to tones in chinese? |
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Vaguely. Pitch-accents can be thought of as forming a subset in linguistic tone (it's sometimes referred to as a type of restricted tone system).
And I agree with Merv about the relevance of pitch-accent. A good course in BCMS will go over pitch-accent so as to at least familiarize learners with the concept. I know that the "Teach Yourself..." and "Colloquial..." courses for Croatian/Serbian/Serbo-Croatian skip over targeted practice or even any mention of pitch-accent and so the only way you can get a sense for it (if at all) using these courses is to blindly imitate/parrot the recordings.
However it'll take a combination of the accentuation/stress being marked in print (which only happens in some textbooks or special dictionaries) and lots of exposure/practice for a learner to get the hang of it in a more efficient way and so sound reasonably close to an educated native speaker.
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