sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4395 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin
| 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. |
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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. |
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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 Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4825 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| 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 Senior Member Colombia Joined 5104 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| 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. |
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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 Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6138 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| 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 Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6138 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| 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. |
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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 Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6341 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| 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 Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6356 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| 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. |
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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 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6624 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 16 of 39 28 February 2013 at 8:31pm | IP Logged |
Gingrich sounds like someone speaking Latin
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