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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5071 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 20 28 March 2011 at 3:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone who has studied (and perhaps is fluent in) a number of languages, is the subjective feeling that a learner
has of a particular language being "faster" than another, valid or based purely on lack of knowledge of the language being learned? I was just listening to a Spanish hour-long news report and the speed seems substantially greater to me than either of my two native languages. Is Spanish in reality "faster" than English or does it just appear that way to me? Edited by Merv on 28 March 2011 at 2:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 4984 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 20 28 March 2011 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||
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People who say people are speak another language faster than we speak English have always perplexed me. I've never been able to hear it. So it's probably just a perception based on lack of knowledge of the language.
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| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4972 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 20 28 March 2011 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||
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In my opinion, Spanish sounds faster than what it really is. Right it now, it seems that Germans speak really fast, but that might be because I'm still getting used to it.
I'm curious to see if there is any research on syllables per minute for different languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 4925 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 20 28 March 2011 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I've heard that fluent speakers of languages perceive pauses between words that don't actually exist.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 5 of 20 28 March 2011 at 8:00am | IP Logged | ||
I can attest to that. My grandparents once told me that when they hear people speaking Spanish it sounds to them like one long, endless word until the person stops speaking. I, on the other hand, disagree completely and can clearly hear the breaks between all the words as if it were English. When you think about it, it really is just one long stream of sounds and the pauses we hear between words are because we're familiar enough with these sounds to intuitively divide them into individual lexical entities which appear to stand alone. With that said, Spanish does sound faster to me than any of the other languages I'm familiar with, except maybe Japanese. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5331 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 6 of 20 28 March 2011 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm inclined to think that it has to do more with general national character and personal
expressiveness of any particular speaker rather than languages itself plus general attitude and concerning public speaking. Raw data output per minute is definitely higher for average Spanish speaker than it is for average Estonian speaker as watching daily newscasts reveals. You just don't machine-gun the news in Estonian, it is not considered acceptable. You could, there's nothing in language itself that hinders it, it's just not the norm. The art of public speaking and the art of expressing oneself in general is clearly different between cultures. That being said, I somewhat feel that greater speed also brings about more fluff to fill the gaps that would otherwise occur. Only a small minority of people can pump out sensible, well thought out, logical, coherent speech in high speed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 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 7 of 20 28 March 2011 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have seen a reference to some research that showed that Danes say more words pr. time unit than Swedes - and the result is of course that Danish is more difficult to understand for foreigners. Besides people from a big town like Copenhagen are perceived to speak faster than people from the country side, but this is probably a common phenomenon, and besides the differences are less now with all the fast speakers in the media. Between Danish and Swedish the two languages are so close that the length of single words or grammatical features are irrelevant - it is only a question of degree of slurryness.
The 'pauses' between words may be fictive - if you know where the border between words should then you may hear the potential separations as pauses. But this is not different from being able to read for instance old Latin inscriptions without spaces. Edited by Iversen on 28 March 2011 at 12:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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