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Language speed | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5072 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 9 of 20 28 March 2011 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Okay, now I feel much better. I caught maybe 75% of the words of that 1 hr Spanish newscast, but because of the unknown words and breakneck speed over words that I know, I didn't piece everything together. Listening comprehension is still weak for me because I haven't really practiced it so far, mostly focusing on reading and writing. Spanish certainly seems to be on the faster end of things from my perspective. Alongside Italian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, and Japanese. English, German, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, French, and Portuguese seem to be on the slower end of the spectrum. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5810 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 20 28 March 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One element of the perceived speed of languages is how the language is timed. Broadly speaking, languages can be classified as "syllable-timed" or "stress-timed".
In a syllable-timed language, the underlying rhythm of the language is a steady beat, syllable after syllable. Languages like French and Spanish are syllable timed, hence the idea of "machine-gun" Spanish speech. In a stress-timed language, the rhythm is the gap between stressed syllables. Unstressed syllables are then squeezed in between. To a speaker of a stress-timed language, a syllable-timed language will seem faster than a stress-timed language, because the basic beat is faster. Stress-timed languages have a slower beat, but when you have a lot of long words in a sentence, you have a lot of syllables and very few stresses, and the number of syllables per minute rises. So stress-timed languages are both faster and slower than syllable timed languages, depending on what you're saying.... 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5180 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 20 28 March 2011 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Besides wrong perceptions, and besides the fact that assessing speed between languages would have to rely on varying definitions of what a word is, I do think you could evaluate the same language over different territories and notice a difference in speed. For instance, French in Africa is probably not spoken as fast as in France, and you're likely to find variations within those territories.
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5133 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 20 28 March 2011 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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After I learned to speak Andalusian Spanish at their regular speed, my speed when I spoke Norwegian increased with aproximately 30%. A guy I once met told me that "The first time I heard you speak, I thought you were incredibly nervous, because you spoke so fast. And then I realized that that was your normal speed".
So yes, I would say that Spanish is spoken a lot faster than most other languages I know, and on the news they speak really fast, so don't feel bad if there were things you did not catch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4921 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 13 of 20 29 March 2011 at 3:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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It seems to me that people from mainland China and especially Beijing speak impossibly slow. That's not meant
to be an insult by the way, I don't think speaking speed really matters. But it feels like they say only 4 words a second. And I've heard from them that people from Taiwan speak quite quickly. Maybe the fact that the Mandarin of Taiwan has been spoken by native Taiwanese speakers for so many years has something to do with it. I've noticed that I speak much faster in Mandarin than in English, it's like 8 words a second, but there are many times that I stretch out the vowel of a word and it delays the rhythm for a second, so maybe that evens it out? It seems this way to me with a lot of other Taiwanese people. And I heard this theory... Well not really a theory, it's just a baseless assumption really. But anyways, apparently people in hotter and more humid climates speak faster than people in colder and dryer climates? I don't know... I don't really believe that :P Edited by CheeseInsider on 29 March 2011 at 3:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6051 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 14 of 20 29 March 2011 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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When I first got to Chile there were certain people I just didn't understand very well. As time went by, that number got smaller and smaller but there was this one lady who I just never could understand as well as the others. I moved to other parts of Chile and didn't see her for over a year. Before I left the country, I went to see her one last time. Interestingly enough, she sounded normal to me.
Different Spanish speakers speak at different rates. I don't necessarily think that Spanish is spoken any faster than English, as rule. I think our unfamiliarity with a language or variation of the language is often what gets in the way of understanding a native speakers. Edited by portunhol on 29 March 2011 at 5:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5617 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 15 of 20 29 March 2011 at 7:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have found something about this in the past.
Spanish Speaking Speed Read the 2nd part of the article for some useful info on it (Addendum). Recently I've been trying to imitate my speaking in the same way that I've been hearing Spanish in movies/dramas. It does sometimes sound like a continual stream of words until the end (especially news broadcasters, I swear they get paid per word). The longer I try to keep the 'flow', the more natural my Spanish seems to sound though. I think this might be a question of prosody though. According to some non-native speakers, English prosody tends to be quite jumpy (imagine like a continual mountain range or a bunch of waves) whereas some languages (like Korean for the most part of the sentence) can sound quite flat until they hit a key part of the sentence (Korean in the verb ending). Does anyone have any information on Spanish prosody? I'd be most interested in finding out some details about it. Edited by crafedog on 29 March 2011 at 7:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 4991 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 16 of 20 30 March 2011 at 7:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've tried to research this before and not been able to find any substantive studies about the relative speed at which various languages are spoken. Perhaps revealingly there used to be a wiki article on the subject but it was taken down due to lack of authoritative citations.
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