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Who speaks TL better - Kerry or Gingrich?

 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
39 messages over 5 pages: 13 4 5  Next >>
sillygoose1
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 Message 9 of 39
28 February 2013 at 1:35am | IP Logged 
lingoleng wrote:
chrisphillips71 wrote:
Newt is obviously reading from cue cards. I question whether he even knows what he is
saying (well, I am sure that someone told him what he was saying, but he would not know
otherwise). This is particularly funny because Bilingual America touts him as one of its
students http://bilingualamerica.com/ricardo#.US6NrqLkvho.

I disagree. His pronunciation is not good, but I think one can hear that he understands very well what he says. It is very clear that he does indeed learn Spanish, imo there is no doubt about that.


What makes you think he learns the same language that he calls ghetto? I can see rehearsing those phrases over and over, but I don't think he learned it previously. It didn't seem natural.
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Kartof
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 Message 10 of 39
28 February 2013 at 2:15am | IP Logged 
Sometimes I try to annoy my friends by speaking Spanish with what I think is an extremely strong American accent.
It sounds exactly how Newt spoke it here! I get so disgusted by even my own false accent that I have to stop
myself and go back to my regular style of speech after a couple of sentences.
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Juаn
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 Message 11 of 39
28 February 2013 at 4:02am | IP Logged 
lingoleng wrote:
I disagree. His pronunciation is not good, but I think one can hear that he understands very well what he says. It is very clear that he does indeed learn Spanish, imo there is no doubt about that.


I agree with this. It seems to me too Gingrich fully understands what he is saying. Aside from pronunciation, emphasis and stress of delivery is fully coherent with the content of speech.

Kerry's French is better but not spectacular either. However if I remember correctly, Kerry attended a boarding school either in France or Switzerland, so he holds a huge advantage over Gingrich in that regard. Given Gingrich's intellectual curiosity and voracious appetite for books it wouldn't surprise me if he learnt whatever he knows of Spanish out of his own volition and of his own effort, and I'm much more impressed by that than by someone who has merely had an aristocrat's upbringing.
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newyorkeric
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 Message 12 of 39
28 February 2013 at 5:11am | IP Logged 
From Yahoo news:

The Democratic former senator from Massachusetts learned French while attending a boarding school in Switzerland starting when he was 11. And he spent many childhood summers in the Atlantic coast region of Brittany with French relatives.
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newyorkeric
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 Message 13 of 39
28 February 2013 at 5:14am | IP Logged 
sillygoose1 wrote:
What makes you think he learns the same language that he calls ghetto? I can see rehearsing those phrases over and over, but I don't think he learned it previously. It didn't seem natural.


I agree. He's obviously learned some sentences by rote in order to be able to apologize in Spanish for his comments.
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Ari
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 Message 14 of 39
28 February 2013 at 6:48am | IP Logged 
Kerry's delivery sounds more natural and less eloquent. I suspect maybe he wrote his own cue cards of didn't follow them to the letter? It's hard to make any judgement on Gingrich as he was obviously reading off a prompter or similar, which means I can only judge his accent. An accent tells you very little about a person's competence in a language.
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Serpent
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serpent-849.livejour
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 Message 15 of 39
28 February 2013 at 12:28pm | IP Logged 
Juаn wrote:
It seems to me too Gingrich fully understands what he is saying. Aside from pronunciation, emphasis and stress of delivery is fully coherent with the content of speech.
Given Gingrich's intellectual curiosity and voracious appetite for books it wouldn't surprise me if he learnt whatever he knows of Spanish out of his own volition and of his own effort, and I'm much more impressed by that than by someone who has merely had an aristocrat's upbringing.
I got that impression too. If he's a voracious reader, maybe he's learnt by reading? He certainly didn't watch any telenovelas hehe.

Spot on about an Esperanto course at lernu!!!


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FuroraCeltica
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 Message 16 of 39
28 February 2013 at 8:31pm | IP Logged 
Gingrich sounds like someone speaking Latin


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