DON'T make this MISTAKE learning a new language
2023 ж. 18 Жел.
54 705 Рет қаралды
They don't talk too fast. You're listening wrong, and it's not your fault. Let's talk about how to fix it.
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#languagelearning #listeningskills #polyglot #linguistics #french #français #francais
I'm from the US and am a native American English speaker. I was at a conference in Italy and was speaking English with a German woman. At one point she said to me "you speak very good English." It took a bit to figure out what she meant. When I'm speaking with a non-native speaker of English I tend to slow down, enunciate, and try to avoid slang. Basically, I was speaking "text book" English.
Can I have your number?
as a German speaker, her words make little sense to me.. but i have decidedly un-German sensibilities so maybe that's why
you were being polite
What part of "you speak very good English." did you not understand?
@@Samuel-sg2iv Who taught you punctuation?
Thanks for pointing this out, I think it's something that a lot of language learners don't realize. What's in your book is formal "nerd" speech, which often is quite different from how people actually speak. I make sure to double check overly formal sounding phrases with native speakers to see if people actually talk like that, and what I can say instead if they don't.
I would be more careful about your "nerd speech". Books don't teach those forms to get an easy laugh out of your effort.
I'm very glad that my French professors actually taught us some of this stuff. I had no idea it wasn't standard.
My french professor at uni was a very nice, sweet older french woman and for all intents and purposes a good instructor but she was so "old-school" in her approach to that she never (EVER) veered from the text book/set lesson plan. No music, movies, real world conversations or slang (although she did cover verlan slang but again only because it was in the book). If it wasn't in the textbook it was effectively off limits. I remember even asking several times if I could pull up some french songs/videos for the class on the overhead projector that I found helpful but I was always shot down. At the end of the semester she pulled me to the side to tell me that I was by far her best and the most proficient student and that she'd love for me to take her higher level courses but I had to turn her down. You were very lucky to say the least lol.
My dream is speaking english and french. But first, I have to focus on my English after I going to focus on french. This year, I will learn english and next year I’ll learn french
I learned "book friench" in highschool and college, when I took a French phonetics class it was like starting over from scratch lol. "Chepa" kinda blew my mind. And now I can actually make the "tr" sound 😂
Excellent demonstration for "dû être", as a French speaker I wasn't even aware of that. It goes to show how much meaning we map from sometimes remarkably short segments. That said the woman in the sequence definitely shows she's an actress who learned a text because she articulates /r/ that very often drops in informal speech so in fact "dû être" can simply reduce further to [dyt] or even [dyn] because of the nasal consonant following. Fascinating stuff.
I suspected that r was liable to disappear too!
As an English schoolkid learning French (and being poorly able to reproduce any kind of French 'r' anyway), I think I intuitively recognised a kind of common "être" in connected speech that my brain processed as being a "t" with a tiny little "ch" on the end, but as soon as you started moving into the "ch" sound, you cut it off dead.
I think realizing « dû être » as « dute/dune » is a regional pronunciation. I’m curious in which context you’ve heard/used this pronunciation. Dropping the r in « être » is extremely common but dropping both the ê and the r sound weird to me.
@@zak3744that’s a German ‘ch’ not an English ‘ch’ as in ‘chocolate’.
I noticed early on that the joined up rapid speech of native speakers would require ear training. However, my plan was to get quite advanced in listening to learner content and then jump into native content later. Are you saying it’s more beneficial to make that switch earlier? Like from upper beginner or intermediate- it would speed up the total time to acquire the lang so I’m open to it if it’s beneficial. I always thought if I get really good at learner content, I will go back to Netflix and comprehend maybe 50% rather than almost 0% despite not being a beginner!
Thank you for the way you did the sponsorship. Being fair about the pros and cons is the best way to do it.
Thank you! I recognize that the letters behind my name mean my endorsements carry more weight. I turn down a LOT, and it’s important to me that for the ones I do take, I can be fully honest.
This was really interesting! As a French native speaker, that last extract sounded normal to me, and I was wondering what kind of thing you were gonna be able to find in it that wasn't textbook standard. Clearly I was wrong, it just goes to show how the brain works to translate what you hear
I love the "textbooks are wrong listen to me" philosophy, liberally interspersed with praise for your sponsor.
Wow, having studied French in high school, the detailed break downs really blew me away. I would love more detailed explanations!
I'm gonna do my duty and ask for more detailed explanation of how words reduce in casual speech! that's super interesting!
Yep, from personal experience living in a Spanish speaking country, what's in the book and what people say are very different things. One bonus of Spanish is that the 5 main vowel sounds are usually fairly consistent, so you can usually write a word correctly if you hear it correctly, and you can usually pronounce words correctly even if you've never heard them before, just be following the fairly strict pronunciation rules in Spanish.
And guess what Even Spanish Speakers struggle understanding each other because each country has their own slang, dialect and accent
@@SMCwasTaken That is sometimes true. Depends on which country and how fast the person is speaking.
Above and beyond consistent pronunciation, simply *having* and sticking to a 5-vowel system is a big plus.
@@SMCwasTaken We do understand each other pretty well, I'm from Argentina but i know some words from Chile, Venezuela, México and Spain. everyone has a their own accent but the language is exactly the same, the only difference being vocabulary
The French sound reductions are so cool and make perfect sense to me. It's like how the English "I don't know" reduces to /ajdənəw/, then /ajəõ/, then eventually you can just vaguely mumble in the same intonation and it's still perfectly understandable.
As long as you pronounce the stressed sylable (very often the dyphtong), clearly, you can just mumble the rest of the sentence. xD
I don't often leave comments but I have to say thank you - this video has finally put into precise words the struggle I'm experiencing! Looking forward to more videos
I met some Scandinavian business associates and they said they learned English the easiest by listening to American country music songs. The singing was slower paced and the lyrics were clear and not blocked by heavy music. Thank you for explaining why my high school French left me completely unwilling to try and speak French in Paris after my first two trips there years ago. I wonder if language translator apps have become acceptable or just the latest crutch for "ugly American" tourists abroad?
hands down one of the best channels on the field. Thanks for that.
ive been listening to loads of casual speech in japanese and i don't have the impression that most people speak particularly fast, so i feel appropriately smug about that, but wow the french stuff blew my mind, i had to study french in high school and obviously i knew i didn't learn much but this really puts into perspective how little chance i had at understanding any sentence of actual spoken french based on that ^^;; there's something wild about memorizing all the conjugations of être without ever knowing how any of them sound when spoken.
really? i feel that if japanese _want_ to speak fast, they speak perversely fast. on the other hand the way they speak in like interviews or in yt videos and such is almost like they naturally adopt a textbook language speech style.
@@fariesz6786 i mean i'm sure i might have trouble if someone was deliberately trying to talk faster than normal or was like really excited but i think most of the time when people are talking casually and i know all the words they're using it's not difficult to understand? (assuming they're talking mostly standard japanese or MAYBE a kansai dialect) once you get the patterns of how sentences go in your head you can kind of anticipate where it's going a bit. one of my main listening practice sources is a vtuber who's known for speaking somewhat quickly, so that probably helps
I learned Japanese and French. In many ways I find conversational French harder, especially listening. I find the French speak very, very quickly and they drop a lot of syllables. It becomes a blur, where it seems there aren't any consonants! I find watching documentaries or formal French easier to follow. People say Japanese is a hard language, but funnily I got that to a higher level much faster than French. I lived for many years in both countries, but I would definitely recommend homestays. It was a big reason I got good at Japanese relatively quickly. Having said that I would not say Japanese is harder than French, it is just that the problems are different. Also written Japanese is not as insurmountable as many people say.
Yeah I been studying Japanese for about 8 months seriously. And only in the last month can I make anything out in native speech. I just started listening to podcasts and watching anime without subtitles regardless of whether or not I could really understand what was being said and wouldn’t you have it… those little bits of being able to understand one word start building up and I can actually make out full sentences.
Thank you for making this video! It's an incredibly important aspect of language learning that is often misunderstood. I actively studied the phonology of Greek, which has effectively made me understand how people actually say things and how some grammatical aspects work (like you pointed out for Hebrew in the last livestream!). I am now studying Turkish and the future verb forms are pretty much universally pronounced completely different to the written form, much like "Je suis". I'm obviously biased because I like Linguistics, but I think everybody should study the phonology of the language they're learning as in depth as they can if they're to properly make out what is being said in the language.
There’s a lot you can learn about a language’s pronunciation by paying attention to how people (often purposely) misspell words. In my native language French peut-être becomes ptet, vas-y becomes azy etc… most interestingly people confuse the verb endings ai and ais indicating that the difference between /e/ and /ɛ/ has been lost in many regions.
I studied French throughout high school and was very "into" it; I spent a lot of time outside class listening to French music, reading in french, and using similar tools to the one you promoted today. That interest in language learning started spreading to other languages like Chinese and Ukrainian, but I lost interest in all of it after high school. Now, 8 years later, I ended up subscribing to your channel solely out of an interest in linguistics on it's own and have been studying things like generative grammar and psychology of language instead for the past few years. But details like the ones you included today and other tidbits that have popped up before in your videos have inspired me recently to get back into language learning as well. Just last night I was replaying segments of videos from French speakers over and over, trying to catch the minutia of more casual language use and pronunciation for the first time in years. Please, do not stop!
This is great, as I am refreshing my secondary school French right now. I love your content
It will be very helpful if you do more of this!
The biggest thing I’ve noticed in Spanish is when people say, you don’t need to specify a verb conjugation, like yo tengo, tú tienes, etc. you can just say tengo, tienes, and it’s understood who you’re talking to. But you’re so right. Native Spanish speakers will ALL say the same thing, but the more I’m actively listening(they’re native speakers so just don’t realize it) I realize I hear a lot of them specify A LOT the “yo tengo” And maybe that’s thinking, but it also teaches you like you say, to just get out there in addition or even in replacement of some of your academic stuff lol
SUCH an important point, great video!!
This is a super helpful video! Please do make more!
Chsui français et ske vous dites et tellement vrai. J’ai trop dmal à expliquer aux gens que personne parle comme dans les livres, c’est quasiment deux langues différentes.
It’s even worse when you’re assigned « La chute » par Camus et on pense que tout le monde parle comme son personnage ki utilise l’imparfait du subjonctif eksetera. They really try to tell us we need that before we can even make small talk!
@@languagejones6784Mind you, there are people who actually use the Imparfait du subjonctif, and it's a defining class feature. The bourgeoisie does distinguish themselves in this way (and many others) by speaking "proper French" (le bon français). I recommend this very short video on the subject kzhead.info/sun/n5WFh9SfomeJmpE/bejne.html . Si tu ne connais pas « Les inconnus », je recommande vivement que tu les regardes, c'est de l'humour bien français :D
"Leave me a comment if you want more detailed descriptions like this" hell yeah baby. For any language of course, but as someone who took 5 years of high school french (not that US public school language classes are particularly renowned), this is the kind of thing that they indeed never did go over. The clitic tidbit was also interesting. I also love that kind of "formal vs casual" analysis for English. My favorite example, half-covered in this vid, is how knowing "I am going to" can shorten to "I'm gonna" or "Imma" is a fun observation, but people know about those since both are written so much. Realizing that "imana/imunuh/[whatever]" is also common, possibly more than the others (at least personally), was a wild realization, because that one never gets written out and thus hardly ever consciously realized.
I'm going to say it only once... but your accent when speaking French amuses me quite a bit. It's an interesting blend of European French and American English whereas I'm Canadian and most of the content I watch in English is British or Australian. I should try joining vocal chats with people from around the world, I bet my accent would make other people smile too! In Québec we often simplify "je suis" into "chu" and "tu es" into "té", and we might even drop the vowel sound entirely. When that creates a phrase so short it's inaudible, we'll throw in an adverb before the verb. So the line "je suis pauvre" in a script might be pronounced "ch'trop pôv" by an actor with a thick Québécois accent. Some of our shortcuts are so creative we don't even know where they came from. When you combine this with our tendency to write interrogative sentences with a subject pronoun both before AND after the verb (instead of just performing subject-verb inversion), we get phrases like: "Es-tu allé à l'épicerie" > "Té-tu all'à l'épsrie?" (Did you go to the grocery store?) "Veux-tu que je m'en occupe? Je vais te régler ça vitement." > "Veux-tu j'm'en occupe? M'a't'régler ça vite." (Do you want me to take care of it? I'll fix that for you quickly.)
Except the "tu" in your examples is not a pronoun but more like a question tag, c'est-tu clair? 😉
M'a t'arranger ça
I'm curious about register in relation to this topic. There are so many ways to use language and it's often forgotten that language books and apps are just teaching you the formal language. It's always going to be a bit different when conversing, making a speech, presenting educational material, texting a friend, writing an email, or even talking to a boss or professor. I'd love a deeper dive into register and how it changes language. Excellent video!
Brilliant, amazing, valuable video. Instant subscriber!!!
As a person who tends to notice the differences between spoken, taught and written language, I find this an excellent analysis of those differences in French. This gives a systematic approach to identifying the differences for faster comprehension. I've said for years, probably after in-depth kiosk forum discussions with LJ here, that we don't teach language how people naturally learn, and then we express surprise or disappointment when people don't learn the language. Approaches like these are what are necessary to level up learning 10x.
Definitely more like this! Thank you.
Love the detailed explanations. Interesting stuff.
Need more of this! ❤
I find this kind advice to be something that needs to be repeated as many times as possible. For those who know it's pretty obvious, but a surprising amount of people underestimate the importance of listening and analyzing speech patterns and sound reduction in their target language for better understanding and faster speech. This is also why many people have very noticeable accents despite living in the country and being surrounded by native speakers. Nothing wrong with having an accent, but some people do want to get closer to a native-like pronunciation. I also warn my students though, and this is something my professor during my master strongly adviced, that they should have a good command of proper pronunciation before starting to go for more natual speech. It's easier to just learn what to drop or modify once you can speak properly than to have to undo bad speaking habits caused by not listening to target language properly. Native speakers will always understand if you speak with a slow and clean pronunciation even if it sounds "too perfect" and unnatural, but they might struggle to understand if you drop the wrong sounds or pronounce something wrong in an effort to speak more quickly and sound more natural. Some interference is bound to happen from your native language, especially if it's very phonetically different from your target language too, and knowing the underlying ideal sounds can help prevent learning things wrong. I basically all boils down to awareness and knowing what to listen for.
Fantastic comment Arnulfo.
Also, something that probably never gets talked about is how native speakers clarify what they said. Sometimes it's just a matter of more context. Other times, we need to articulate/enunciate, or rephrase.
I love the detailed breakdown. Thanks
Thanks for this. I have been wanting to start watching shows in Italian to get used to how people actually speak, but I hadn't heard of Lingo Pie. I will check it out.
Dr Geoff Lindsey has a lot of videos talking about various ways which English dialects and speakers don't conform to the literary language or prior expectations of English, such as on his weak forms video. To give a more unknown example of what you describe: in Albanian words which end with schwa (represented by the letter ë) mostly being indefinite feminine nouns such as vajzë (girl) and ujë (water), the schwa at the end is dropped and is not pronounced, at least in dialects close Standard Albanian. Schwa dropping does not occur in some other dialects.
I've been learning Brazilian Portuguese and I struggle so much with listening, and I'm sure this is a major reason why. Although it tends to be a slower language, they not only drop the pronouns but there are a ton of contractions and shortened words in informal speech. Eu estou ➡️ tô Você está ➡️ tá Não é ➡️ né
great video. a few years ago, my reading comprehension in english was great and i could read relatively fast but i struggled really hard to understand any native speakers but i watched a video explaining how native speakers connect words and it was like magic. once i knew what to look out for, listening was a walk in the park to me. none of my teachers has ever explained that to us unfortunately:(
My Ukrainian classes had a lot of "this is technically how it is said but people usually say it like this" or "This is the Ukrainian word but in Kyiv a lot of people might replace it with the russian word in casual speech" and that helped out tremendously.
That's good that you got this kind of instruction that helps with actual listening. (However, they might be in the process of replacing that Russian word with the Ukrainian word again...)
@@Rationalific Not really because it's not like it was a conscious decision on their part. That's just the way some people speak. Then there's Surzhyk which is without its own set of defined rules but is a combination of Ukrainian and elements of other languages (mostly associated with Russian but it can be Polish too if you are in the western part of the country). It's more that many people who mostly spoke russian in their day to day lives are now switching to Ukrainian. It's something that's been happening since 2014 but it accelerated rapidly once the invasion started.
@@thewhoaj8245 I see. Interesting.
Excellent video. I have no "productive comment" except saying that your stuff is amazing. And FOR SURE I'd want more examples, if possible in excrutiating detail hehehe. Congrats!
Everybody speaks differently, which means we have to adjust our ear to understand them. That's a lot harder when it's not your native language and the speaker is speaking very differently. The funny thing is the person speaking will think that you don't understand the language if you don't understand their way of speaking it. Continuing to watch your video, that could help with my understanding Spanish languages where they drop sounds. I don't get to listening to them much, but when I do, I can barely make out what they're saying.
More detailed descriptions like this, yes, please! 😊
You got it!
I'm a Spanish and English teacher, and if I had a dollar for every time I've heard the "native speakers talk SO fast" line (especially with my Spanish students), I'd have enough money to retire in a mansion in Malibu. Like you said, it's no one's fault, it's just a lack of practice and not practicing correctly. Most of my students just haven't spent the hours listening to native speech that are necessary, I had to learn Spanish through tons of KZhead videos and just getting my ear used to it. There aren't any shortcuts. You can learn some of the things like you described in this video, the ways that sounds are pronounced colloquially so you know what to look for, but you also just need exposure and experience. The remedy is to get into native content as quickly as possible, it helps listening comprehension and also you learn vocab and grammar quicker when you see it in context. A combination of textbook study and exposure to real native content like Netflix shows and KZhead videos is how you learn quickly. Fantastic video, you've encapsulated how I think really well here.
I'm a biochemist and I speak 5 languages...so you could say this scientist has a bit of a passion for language learning too! I love your videos so much - the solid linguistics prospective is exactly what I always felt was missing with a lot of the popular language learning content out there. I will check Lingopie out to do my own little experiment, and I can't wait for more videos from you. Thank you!
Re what native speakers think 2:38. I remember when I was learning Spanish I came across the rule that if a word ends in an 's' and the next word begins with an 'r' the -s will be lost. So Los Ríos is pronounced 'lorríos'. I told my Spanish friend Ana about this and she told me it was not true and I swear to God she actually said to me 'No, eso e-rridículo'. But native speakers trying to make you speak 'properly' is a curse. The Glossika Polish, for example, has three speakers making the final -ę of words always nasal resulting in a very odd, rarified pronunciation that will mark you out as a foreigner immediately. No doubt they were thinking they had speak 'properly' for foreign learners.
I was taught that dropping _s_ before _r_ was an important rule to follow. It sounds absurdly non-native to pronounce the _s._ It’s just not a consonant cluster that exists in Spanish. Even _Israel_ is pronounced _Irrael._
Native speakers may be great performers but they're atrocious at understanding what they're doing. Their idea of their own pronunciation is often riddled with myths and received wisdoms that have nothing in common with the actual phonetical reality. If you want somebody to teach you pronunciation you better find yourself somebody who's trained in phonetics. I also find it funny how the native speakers often have this idea of the 'correct' pronunciation of the word (the dictionary pronunciation). They may say Irrael in regular speech without even noticing it but if they feel like they should speak properly (like if you ask them to pronounce the word) they will suddenly get self-conscious and try to pronounce the word in the way they believe it should be pronounced (Israel). > speakers making the final -ę of words always nasal I remember hearing native speakers pronouncing it like that as a joke (as in 'look at how ridiculously I enunciate').
Hey thanks for the curated new content. I know you started streaming more, but I usually don’t catch the streams, so I was hoping you wouldn’t stop making this style of content. You’re my favorite linguistics channel around!
Also, first. 😉
Thank you so much! I’ve been experimenting with streams, but I’ll definitely be continuing with regular KZhead videos. I just took time off for an edutuber accelerator, and I’m finally back to being able to make content - hopefully it’s a little snappier and more engaging, and better packaged, but I’ve got a lot of videos in this niche that I want to make that don’t lend themselves to live streaming. And live streams aren’t everybody’s cup of tea anyway
Yes, please. May we have some more?
I downloaded Praat a while back and I found it a little difficult to figure out how to use it, so I never ended up using it. This just reminded me I should probably look up a tutorial on it.
With Chinese this is very important as well as learning the different accents. The most famous is Beijing accent wich often turns ending ns into rs (yi dian -> yi diar in Beijing dialect). When I started watching content from central and south China I noticed that a lot of times the x sound is pronounced closer to an s. A lot of this is just immersing yourself in native content. It takes a lot of time. One thing Ive noticed is after listening to native content in a language it will sound slower (even if I still cant understand what theyre saying)
😢 I'm crying, but I'm still interested in further breakdowns, esp in Mandarin or Spanish
My husband is a native French speaker. It wasn't until I was around him 24/7 that it dawned on me that spoken French and written French are not the same thing, because duh, lol, of course they aren't, lol. Anyways, I asked him once to slow down what he was saying so that I coukd hear succinctly what he was saying, but he only enunciated in "correct" French what he had said, and I said "no, you did not say it like that, now repeat again fast", and he did it fast, and it was obvious it was different, and I told him so, and I said "act like a record player and just slow down EXACTLY how you said that", it took me 5 tries of explaining what I meant and giving examples of what I meant in English before it dawned on him then he did it, 😂😂😂😂😂 did wonders to help me, lol, I also turn the speed down on youtube for the same reason too, lol
so cool more breakdowns please! moree languages!
Excellent video.
I love the explanation of why the words get squished together!
French exchange students taught me a lot of colloquial pronunciations my freshman year and after that all of my classmates said I spoke too fast
These kinds of things are super interesting to me! Can you make a video about other language's common shortcuts? I'm learning Korean, Persian, Italian, and Turkish as a hobby (here and there) at the moment.
Always more detailed explanations please!
This was an excellent explanation of the "Real spoken" French compared to textbook French. I would love to hear more of these examples as it confuses me quite a bit sometimes....thanks.
Yeah, I worked with a Polish kid who studied English before he came to the UK. To make things worse, central England, where we were, has a specific accent and dialect. He said he had to "learn English" all over again.
I love the explanations.
Um, I for one want more nerdy explanations. I don't think I could've/would've caught the du etre contracting to [dyt(R)] but little things like that are sooo helpful in comprehension!
Absolutely more breakdowns of native speaker reductions please 🤓💯 in French or English or whatever strikes your fancy!
You just fried my poor brain. I would struggle to understand your shortened version of 'I am going to' and it's my first language. The idea of trying to understand shortened versions in other languages now horrifies me.
Yeah... "I'm gonna" is one thing; seems natural enough. Then there's this i'mggn!'a monstrosity. I'mggn!'a is a fucking beast of a word that uses sounds we don't even usually think about existing in English or... really any language I can think of outside Africa.
@@IthirahadAbsolutely love this 'mggn!'a point. It's so true.
"Chui"? Come to Québec, we only say "Chu" over here. OK, there's a lot of things we say differently over here. Anyway, very nice video!
The thing with most languages is the vast amount of dialects and slang. No textbook and no teacher can keep up with this. Just a few examples that come to mind from my native language: Standard German says that the translation for "I" is "ich", with the 'ch' being a voiceless palatal fricative [ç]. But in the south, people tend to say just "i" (just like the English 'e'). In Berlin, people say "ik" or "ikke". In the north, it's sometimes shortened to just "ch" at the beginning of a sentence. I really don't see how a textbook or a teacher can always give all the possible pronunciations for all the words. And sometimes words are just used in a certain region. I doubt people from the south will understand me if I call them "Dösbaddel" or ask why they are "mucksch", or complain that I have too much "Tüddelkram" in my kitchen. Again, it's really hard for teachers/textbooks to go into that much detail. Instead, they will point out that "Dummkopf" is an insult, use "being offended = beleidigt sein" instead of "mucksch" and will say "many small things = Kleinkram", instead of "Tüddelkram".
Yiddish also shortens 'ich' to just 'ch' at the beginning of sentences.
This is why I love Chinese's use of logograms. Each logogram has a defined pronunciation for each regional dialect of Chinese
@@frafraplanner9277 Can't all dialects of Chinese be technically written the same way but have words pronounced differently? 🤔
@@heinrich.hitzinger"Can't all dialects of Chinese be technically written the same way but have words pronounced differently?" Sort of yes... but no, not really. Here's the thing. For many Chinese dialects, the written form of Chinese does not match the spoken form, and I don't simply mean that the characters are pronounced differently. I mean different words are used and there may even be some different grammar depending on the dialect. Chinese dialects can potentially be that different from one another - as different as say English and Spanish are for example. The standard way Chinese is written today matches spoken Mandarin Chinese. That means that if you speak a dialect that is very different from Mandarin, then you're practically learning two languages as you're growing up in China: your home language and Mandarin. Or alternatively, if maybe you grew up in a place like Hong Kong before it was returned to Chinese administration (a time and place when spoken Mandarin wasn't as common and maybe wasn't emphasized in schools), then you grew up speaking Cantonese at home and at school, but you learned to write in standard written Chinese which happens to match spoken Mandarin even though you pronounced the characters using Cantonese pronunciation. Again, practically two different languages. Common words might be different and there might be some grammar differences as well between the spoken Cantonese and standard written Chinese (which, again, matches the words and grammar used in Mandarin). I kind of imagine that it might be a little bit like how it was in the distant past in Europe where educated Europeans wrote in Latin even if Latin wasn't what they spoke in their home and communities. So, a Cantonese speaker could read a passage of written Chinese aloud using Cantonese pronunciation for each character, but it still may not match how that sentence would be constructed if it were actually in Cantonese. Only Mandarin speakers (and speakers of dialects closely related to Mandarin) have the luxury of writing in the same way they speak. Addendum: Even though I described it as "practically two different languages," I think probably in the native Chinese speaker's mind, I'm guessing they probably don't think of it as two different languages. They probably think of it as the same language: Chinese. But for any given sentence, they probably think: This (A) is how I would speak it in a conversation, and this (B) is how I would write it. And A and B would be different.
As an English teacher, I actually got given a very hard time by a manager when I moved to a new school when one student complained that I 'spoke too fast'. I pointed out that that student was due to do an international exam very soon, speaking to a native speaker who might do a little slowspeak at first but would ratchet it up to natural soon enough, that also the idea was that I was teaching them for the real world, and I asked how they were supposed to get used to normal speech if not engaged with it. Also there was the point that the rest of the group was able to understand a lot better, so I'd be doing them a disservice by dumbing it down to slow and broken up for foreigners. But, of course, I'd be doing her a disservice too, for all the above-mentioned reasons. The only room to criticise it is if a student doesn't understand what to do, or maybe if they don't understand an explanation (in the very rare instances that I would resort to explanation, and this was maybe a key issue, that that manager saw explanation as a core part of language teaching, which it definitely isn't). But then, as I said, I make sure they've understood, I check comprehension, I get them to explain it back, I check what they're doing, etc., etc., etc., and if I need to I paraphrase it, rephrase it, shift the context or something, give some example, show maybe. But the one thing I've long done is refuse to develop a habit of 'moderating my speech', even if that was mentioned in training. I asked 'Did she eversay she hadn't done any of the activitities in class successfully or not learned any of the things being taught'. No, she hadn't. Oh yeah, and explanation isn't teaching, but anywhere where I might need to explain something, I'd use the same tactics, and maybe only slow down as a last resort, but never, never, allow myself to slip into the habit of speaking unnaturally. Slow and simple speech can play a role, but as an exception to natural and naturally fast speech, which should be the default always. I also have a bad relationship with textbooks and formal materials, though some are good and most have some positive aspect it's hard for me to reproduce, so I always try to use authentic materials in class; ideally good video material with native speaker talking real stuff to other native speakers, completely naturally, no filters.
As a French, this video was incredibly fun to watch and made me feel a bit better about foreign languages I'm learning There are MANY more examples of these shortcuts in spoken French, that are not slang at all, and not "informal" (at least I feel like). I never thought it could be so confusing lol. Another example: "Je suis peut-être en retard": "I'm maybe late" the verb être can be cut in "êt" sometimes, and the word "peut-être" (maybe) can be cut to "p'têt" (note that the "t" in peut is originally silent unless you do the liaison, like in that case, when the following letter is a vowel). Finally, "retard" (late), can be pronounced "r'tard". So really, if you wanted to pronounce this sentence very quickly it would sound like "chui p'têt en r'tard", and it would look horrible in written French but people would naturally pronounce it like that if they read the formal sentence Thanks for coming to my TED talk
/ʃɥi / is even very often reduced to /ʃy/ us very unommon. The most common orthographies are and I don't think her prononciation is casual at all. She's overdoing it. The normal pronunciation of is /ɛt/. /dytʁ/ just sounds plain weird to me. should sound /ɛloredyɛtmakije/ I don't think people drop the first syllable of very often but I'm going to pay attention today to know wether I'm wrong or right.
We do this in our own native languages too. I always keep in mind that whatever happens, people will choose the path of least resistance. That means dropping the d and the t and every hard "closed" sound as much as possible. At least that's my experience. It's like skimming over waves and punctuating once in a while with the opening of the sentence or the hit of the phrase.
Exactly! Mark Liberman once pointed out to me that on words with multiple sounds like t,d,n,l, and r, American English speakers almost never pronounce all of them. I can’t I hear it. Especially things like “saturni live” which is only “Saturday night live!” when they yell it in the cold opens.
@@languagejones6784 It's also present in choral singing (and probably other forms). It's all about keeping that sound open. So it's "powah", not "power" . It sounds pretty and it's less work.
It's like how most English speakers don't pronounce the H in "come here"
I like the indepth explanations.
Interesting quirk of Lingopie is if you grab text from a Netflix show you can't reply the video in the flashcards, just the audio for the single word you selected. I'm also watching Call My Agent (love!!) and I was confused as to why I couldn't loop the video as you did with 'Je suis pauvre'. So I assume that came from a video within Lingopie rather than Netflix. I wish I could do it with Call My Agent. Please let me know if I've missed something! Anyway, I don't know if you noticed this. Love your work! 😀
This is mainly why I feel like I'm learning German a lot faster than Spanish, even though I work entirely with Hispanic people and use Spanish daily. German doesn't have nearly as many instances of vowel dropping or combining as Spanish does, so when I'm listening to a new song I can actually hear each vowel and syllable. Sometimes I learn words from just listening because of the way the language is set up both spoken and written. Yet Spanish has a lot of mixing together. So you really have to study it and know why to keep an ear out for.
The author of the videos presented an example of du être shortening into something like /dytʁ/ which, imho, doesn't happen in colloquial speech in French that often, so when it comes to such syllable-dropping - every language exhibits it from time to time in very informal language, and informal/casual German is no exception. There's textbook pronunciation, there's trained narrators' pronunciation (audiobooks, documentaries, etc.), there's more or less informal, but not too shabby regular spoken pronunciation, and then there's the kind of pronunciation where people just throw some sounds at you and hope you figure it out from context or something.
@@Drazzz27 Oh absolutely. Like when people drop the "e" at the end of an "Ich" verb. Like instead of "Ich warte" they may say "Ich wart". I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I'm able to understand it a lot more. In Spanish, they'll literally mix words together if they end then start on the same syllable. I feel like I have to see it spelt out correctly and formally to really understand it when I hear it. Of course, they're two extremely different languages as well. Also, German is a Germanic language like English, so the structures are going to be more similar to each other.
@@oshahott2532 Overall, it's just a question of getting used to. In German they like to reduce small and functional words (articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and possessives) and many affixes in colloquial speech. Vowels change, consonants and entire syllables drop. English has the same pattern, so it's more of a general Germanic thing. Quite a pain to get used to. Romance languages have their own patterns of sound change, and vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is not that prominent. Spanish instead likes to simplify clusters of vowels, and when it happens on the word boundaries, with the typical for Romance languages resyllabification, it becomes difficult to parse when one word begins and the other ends. When the vowels are the same one of them is just dropped (lo olvidé - lolvidé, la presa hace - lapresace, el aire entra - elairentra). Even when the vowels are different one of them turns into a quick glide (approximant), similar to /j/ or /w/, but weaker (se ha notado - [sjanotað̞o]), and in very fast speech, for functional words, just drops altogether (la esposa - lesposa, me iba - miba). Since the vowel clusters reduction happens very often even in normal, non-casual speech, it may throw a learner for a loop, but I personally found it not that hard to get used to (once I learned about this phenomenon and listened to it attentively). In casual and uneducated (and dialectal) speech there are many more simplifications (great number of consonants weaken, debuccalize, disappear, and the resulting 'consonant-less' vowel clusters simplify) that turn the listening task into a nightmare. I've watched some Colombian crime shows (like El Rastro from Caracol Televisión, can be easily found on youtube), and when they interview people with criminal/poor background you literally can't hear half of all the sounds (because they just don't pronounce them). French is another one that causes a lot of trouble for the learners (it has a great initial hurdle). The main culprits are enchaînement (which is basically the French version of resyllabification), liaison (which inserts an unexpected consonant between words, that can throw you off) and 'e muet' (the French schwa that likes to disappear from a word where you least expect it). It creates the same effect of the words running into each other, so that it becomes impossible to tease them apart without knowing the words in advance. And the disappearing 'e muet' often creates consonant clusters which heavily assimilate (the infamous 'Je suis' turning into 'Shui' /ʃwi/, or with nasalization 'un petit peu' - /ɛ̃mtipø/) and in some cases drop (like the end word clusters '-ble', '-tre', etc. pronounced as just '-b', '-t'). Most of that stuff is essential even in formal speech, and it produces a strong negative impression on the first-timers, but it's, again, just a question of getting used to. Beginning learners also make quite a fuss of the fact that French orthography writes too many letters compared to what is actually pronounced, but this is a complete non-issue, in my opinion, especially coming from the native speakers with the horrifically inconsistent English orthography. Just learn the right pronunciation (from a pronunciation dictionary) from the very beginning and don't let yourself be intimidated by all those silent letters. Once you get used to the regular pronunciation, of course, you're going to have to come to grips with the colloquial speech with all their simplifications and syllable droppings. Learn some common stuff (like "c'est-à-dire" - "sta-dire", "il y a" - "ya", "peut-être" - "ptet", "seulement" - "sment", "plus" - "pu", "mais alors" - "m'alors" and countless others) and prepare yourself to encounter even more, less common surprises. It will be a blast ;)
1:00 I just had a shock when seeing the transscript of a video featuring "aumonier" (in the now most usual sense of chaplain) transscribed as "omier" ... obviously recognisable, but I had never thought this could be the actual phonetic outcome. When I arrived in France in 2005, I said "je parle un peu lentement, parlez-moi en Suisses, s'il vous plaît" c. half the speed I was hearing them use. Some did, some didn't, but both together helped me get over it, now I'm at usual speed. I never suggested it was a fault on their part, more like a handicap on mine.
"parlez-moi en Suisse" lol 🤣
@@broccoli9308 it translates like "as a Swiss person" ... not "in Swiss" as if it were a language.
i want your entire breakdown of the spoken french language! :)
I think it is less your ability to hear the actual sounds being made (it can vary tremendously especially by accent, not that realistic to just memorise it) and more your familiarity with what is normally said. Language is unavoidably partly prediction. We are not just machines taking in words and turning them into meaning, we are already working with meaning and expecting it to be built on in a fairly predictable way. This includes environmental clues like where we are, what someone looks like, what time of day it is, etc. As learners we need those clues to be a little more obvious, as fluent speakers we can pick them up just from the first syllable of a word.
I completely agree, but we also do learn to map the sounds made by others to those of our own. For example, New Zealanders say “head” similar to how I would say “heed”. So my brain will naturally start to substitute sound for sound, making it less of a mental burden to understand that particular accent. It’s even more so for people learning English as a second language. And as you implied, it’s also harder to predict what they might want to say, due to cultural differences and perhaps because their grammar is not perfect, etc.
oui, tres bon! at first I sped up this video, a lot, because I got other things to do... then I got to the pulp, and slowed it more than normal. I realized, this is important stuff! It's easy to forget that all of medicine, and indeed all of our education, is evaluated according to prior knowledge, what is already established and known. Usually we favor a development or variation of a teaching when it is something we already know, stated more simply, or in terms of the meaningful consequence. And, it's not just intellectual things, look at music. The best music generally stirs up anticipation of it's continuance or closure, we like it when it is full of "satisfied expectation," and more so if it is a new style. We like what aligns to our sensibility and expectations. That said, we cannot just figure out the contractions in the examples, there is colloquial, context, association, poetical affinity, rhetorical bias, puns, formalism, informality, awkwardness, cultural immersion, and simplicity, altogether with whatever weights and sequence, for minimal expression while still being understood. Unlike this paragraph, haha. These examples are golden, and I will watch repeatedly as many native language cheat's videos that you manage to put together! Understanding these "contractions" goes a long way to understanding the speaker's disposition, context, and the most distinguishing components for effective use of the language!
The issue I've been having (w/ my Spanish) is I need more exposure to other accents so I can catch those little speaking patterns and nuances I've been able to find lessons for. The minute they hear me speak, however, they assume my Spanish is fine and I don't any help. BUT I DO. 😭😭 I also will be learning French come January so this is helpful to know. 😧
On the listening exercises on duolingo they do this where they slur words and stuff and drop letters and will use words that sound really similar when they are slurred to trip you up, it's one of the things that really messes with me because I will be a 100% on a thing and then it will have dropped A word from a sentence and I won't notice it and then I'll get something wrong when I thought i'd done everything right And it's really maddening when the sentence works with or without the And there's no contact to tell me if it's been dropped or not
More detailed explanations of spoken French please!
beautifully done video, I'll admit, I'm a native speaker of English and you don't know how many times language learners have chastized me for speaking too fast even though from my point of view I'm being very careful---smile Thanks for all of your videos.
2:41 I really appreciate a professionnel confirming to me that native speakers are often not aware of this themselves! People will deny pronouncing the same letter differently depending on the letters that comme before or after as long as the 'idealized sound' is the same. I could hear in Dutch that people pronounce 'ee' slightly differently when it was followed by 'r' and native speakers including language teachers were firmly denying it, telling me that I was imagining it and that it was exactly the same sound. I found one online source with a very detailed description of Dutch accents that described this phenomenon so I did not admit defeat right away. Finally, with friend who is a native speaker and was also convinced there is no difference, we experimented with two words that start the same until the 'ee' but end differently, with "r..." or with "n..." and not only could I 100% of the time guess which one he was going to say when he stopped at the 'ee' sound but he also admitted that at that point in the pronunciation of the word he could not switch to the other word anymore because it felt strange and sounded wrong if he tried. I am probably guilty of the same bias in my native language but I would appreciate it if more langage teacher were aware of these things or at least open about discussing it.
more details, love you
This is interesting, as a French speaker I didn't know what you wanted to illustrate with the sentence "elle aurait déjà dû être maquillée". I hadn't noticed she didn't pronounce the ê in être before you played the short sample in Praat.
This is similar to when I'm making guesses for kanji reading in Japanese. Each character can have multiple ways of being read, but I've found if I speak the options out loud, like 90% of the time, the one that rolls off the tongue easier is the correct reading of the kanji. Humans crave convenience, we'll shorten, slang, slur, and blend everything we can when we can. English does this a ton as well, we drop or squish together a LOT of stuff when speaking. It's pretty neat once you can start to pick up on it :)
Once the video got into the LingoPie section (about midway through the video), it fell off the rails somewhat and lost its focus. I'm not sure exactly what is being suggested for "better" listening in this video in no small part because of that.
Very good point made. However, I have a few points to make here and they kind of lead into eachother. One issue I have with the French examples in the video is something I see frequently on KZhead. You portray these tv shows' pronounciations as though they were just "How French is spoken". In reality, this applies to France. While European French is what many people learning French want to learn, it by no means represents a standard for the language or represents a majority of the language's speakers. For example, I'm from Canada and much of what you said does not apply to how I speak. If you were British and you were speaking in a European context, it wouldn't be as big of a deal that you didn't explicitly specify what dialect you were talking about, but you're American. Your context is North American, and so many people could easily get the wrong idea that you're describing tendancies that apply to the varieties of French in this continent, when you are not. It would be like a Mexican talking in Spanish about colloquial english and then presenting London speach as just generically "How English is spoken", when in fact all varieties of French close to them work very differently. I can easily see someoene from New Oreleans, in the USA itself, who's interested in local francophone culture watching your video, replicating what they learned and then being confused when Cajuns don't understand them. All in all, I agree that it's very useful to learn how a language is actually spoken, but an important consideration you left out is that before doing this, you need to decide what region or dialect you want to focus on. If you're learning French, it's perfectly fair to choose European French, but don't expect the lessons you learn to be accurate for everywhere. This is actually a really big benefit of making sure you have the textbook speak down as well. If you learn Parisian pronounciation but then aren't understood in Cameroon or Montreal, you can always switch to your textbook pronounciation and be understood. You won't sound like a local, but you'll be understood (side note: If you learned European textbook pronounciation, you'll have learned what I believe is textbook pronounciation around the world, but still with the very notable exception of North America, where the textbook Canadian variety still has many more and different vowel sounds and other diffeences. Still, there's enough immigration here that textbook European French should be well understood). More generally, this speaks to how you want to use the language. Many people learn English to talk to people while travelling or doing business, and not necessarily in anglophone countries. A Norwegian speaking to an Argentinian in English doesn't need to care about how English is spoken by native speakers in Toronto or Cape Town or anywhere. For their purposes, textbook English is perfect. If you want to learn French to travel through the very diverse French speaking world, you'll need to fall back on textbook pronounciations very often, and you may not find it worth your while at all to learn the colloquial tendencies of any country if you aren't staying in any single one for much longer than the others. In summary: 1) If you're talking about non-textbook pronounciations, I would always suggest you cite what dialect or region you're talking about. Otherwise, it seems implied that you're stating things on the language as a whole, regardless of your intent. 2) Learning how people speak is very useful towards many people's language learning goals but you need to decide what region/accent/dialect you're going for before you embark on that quest. 3) Not everyone cares about how native speakers talk normally. As with many things about learning languages, the things to focus on really depend on your goals with the language. Not to rag on you too much. I really like your channel. Thanks!
I have made heavy use of the Basic Spanish Course from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which was developed over sixty years ago, and which is more than a little old-fashioned in some respects. However, the course does use a fairly precise phonetic notation for transcribing many thousands of the sentences in the course. This notation is not IPA, but is very similar, and with much the same utility and precision. Also, the speakers in the recordings are using somewhat casual pronunciation, and they are speaking at normal conversational speed, as opposed to slowing down and over-articulating to make it easy for students, which many courses (mistakenly) do. So, unlike most language courses that I've seen, this course does do quite a decent job of preparing students to deal with casual conversation, because the phonetic transcriptions do give quite an accurate representation of the contractions and other changes that actually occur in less formal speech. In other words, the phonetic transcription gives a very nice bridge between the spoken forms and the conventional written forms. It still takes a very long time to fully master the spoken forms, but at least with this course you know very precisely what you should be trying to do.
I still remember when I realized that dunno means don't know. I felt like I just breached a castle and I was so proud of myself.
Details details details! Yes please 🙏🏼😊
At least now I know why french sounded so continuous when I listened to it, syllables were really getting dropped and mashed together. In my teaching on italki I do notice some students simply can't understand me when I use very connected and flowing sentences so I have to repeat while saying each word carefully. Then there are students that don't even understand when I say each word carefully and they simply lack vocabulary.
I'm learning ASL. No speaking at all. I'm struggling with finger spelling because some words don't have an actual sign for it. My brain knows how to spell a word in English but in asl i struggle even though i have all the alphabet figured out.
In fact, I don't know if there are even french speakers without a specific accent. For example, I'm belgian. Most french people will detect it quite easily after a few words. "Huit" in my case will sound "Hwit" (A bit like the "u" in "queen"), but for a Parisian it will be like "hUit" (very sharp U, the proper U). You go to the South of France, complete different accent. You go to the East of Belgium, completely different, etc etc. So if someone wants to speak french without any accent, I don't even know what it means. Best way to do it would be to look at a specific french accent you want to replicate. But note that Parisian Accent is not really a popular one amongst french speaker :D
I was at a bus stop in Greece when I heard some men talking English. I am from New Mexico USA so I said hello. They were from the Caribbean and spoke really fast. We could barely understand each other. They said they could not easily understand my slow English.
Acoustic forensics rising in language pedagogy! Phoneticians love to see it!
The problem for learners that you describe - of the difference between the French you learn in a class and casual colloquial speech - takes on a whole new level for the language I teach: Irish (Gaelic). The proportion of Irish to English speakers in Ireland drastically reduced in the 19th century (due to the Great Famine, starvation, emigration, and migration to eastern cities, etc.). This left only a tiny population of native Irish speakers, mainly scattered in small isolated communities along the west coast. During the 20th century, there was a well-meaning but problematic effort to keep the language alive through the education system. A board was established, which created a national curriculum, and resulted in an Official Standard form of the language - taking simplified aspects of two (but mot all) dialects - and creating a new ‘dialect’ that bore only passing resemblance to the varieties of the language actually spoken by the native speakers. A similar thing happened with Italian. But, as everyone spoke their own dialect, the Italians learned a new standard dialect, used for government communications, and it can be used to communicate with each other and with foreigners. But in Ireland, where the vast majority of the population, now spoke English, and had to learn their national language as a second language, often from teachers who barely new it themselves. This has resulted in a majority of (non-native) speakers who only know and speak the official ‘written’ language - without the contractions and elision used in the ‘Gaeltacht’ (Irish-speaking communities). The Irish people who learned the language at school have little understanding of how the language actually works at a phonic level, and have difficulty understanding the native speakers on the West Coast. The native speakers can understand the official standard, of course, but to them, many non-native speakers are so halting and precise in their enunciation that they sometimes sound like they are scolding (or spanking) children. 😆
This was excellent. One of the most classic examples of this is watching kids shows in your target language. Despite people often recommending to start with kids shows when learning a language, the irony is that the way kids characters tend to pronounce words in these shows is often extraordinarily different from what you'd see in a textbook. To some extent listening to adults speak is actual easier 😅 maybe its just me!
One thing that messes me up with Italian, is they merge same vowels like in french (-a a- > -a-) but this also happens with different vowels but not always and not always in the same way at that. I def need to listen to more shows and videos, but it seems when I think I understand I find an exception and don't understand anymore 😂😭😭
This is exactly the reason my supposedly B2 French meant fuckall when I came to france. Sure I could hesitantly express myself but understanding people? No way in hell. And even when you ask them to speak slowly they're more likely to switch to english than they are to just ENUNCIATE YOUR WORDS FOR ME PLEASE :( But to be fair it does get easier just with listening a lot. It's been 3 months now and while I'm not worlds better at least I can understand people okay in daily life. And watch television. Although damn it is hard to get used to the speed.
J'ai vraiment besoin d'une liste des mots raccourcis comme chépa pour jnsp, j'apprécierais si vous faisiez une telle vidéo. Merci!