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Carrion Luggage #1097658 added September 19, 2025 at 7:45am
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Tongue Tied
This might not be helpful to anyone else here. It's barely helpful to me. But, despite it being a Popular Science article, I might have learned something.
I'm still working on French. The thing I struggle most with now is pronunciation, so the article caught my eye. I'm also not very good at following spoken French, but, to be fair to myself, I need subtitles on my screen to follow the English.
In your language-learner dreams, you may be asking a local what time the train is coming in a perfect Parisian accent, or ordering scialatelli as if you’ve spent your entire life vacationing on the Amalfi Coast.
I'll settle for just not being mocked for my accent.
You know the brand Lululemon? I've never bought anything from them, but even as someone who goes out of his way to avoid ads, it pinged my radar a while back. I was curious why it was named that, so I looked it up, and the claim is that the founder called it something with three Ls so he could laugh at Japanese people trying to say it.
Dick.
If you’re learning a language that doesn’t share roots with your mother tongue, pronunciation can be hard. So hard in fact, that it may hinder the learning process altogether.
It's certainly an obstacle, especially at my advanced age. Not letting that stop me, though.
Mother tongues can also make picking up new lingo simpler or more difficult; it’s easier for an English speaker to learn the similarly-rooted German, and harder for them to learn Italian.
I have my doubts about this claim, but I haven't really tried to learn either. What I do know is that so many of our words come from French (or Latin via French) that English might be more properly classified as a German-French creole. It's considered a Germanic language, as I understand things, because of the grammatical structure more than the words themselves.
Consider the words “this” and “these.” For Spanish speakers, these words are tricky because the “I” sound in “this” doesn’t exist in their native language. They tend to pronounce it as “these.”
And, apparently, so it is in certain British accents. I always used to rag on the Eurythmics for rhyming "this" with "disagree," but that was before I found out about this concept.
The song still sucks, though.
The same happens with the French “R”—it sounds lovely, but if you have a hard time pronouncing it, you’ll still probably be able to communicate with locals during your trip to the Pyrenees mountains.
No, I won't, because the Pyrenees are *shudder* outdoors.
The article dives into specific tips for certain languages, including the bold claim that "Japanese is very similar to Spanish," which I guess is true from the point of view of what sounds are in the language.
The thing that learning another language has really done for me, though? Besides being able to ask a French person what color their cat is, it's that I've become more patient with people for whom English isn't their native language, and speak it with a heavy accent. Though it's embarrassing to me that I was ever not patient with that. |
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