08-07-2018, 02:35 PM | #31 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
It's hard to say how long it would really take. Lots of people take forever to learn such things because they don't actually want to learn them . . . to their ears, another way of speaking sounds harsh or wimpy, uneducated or overeducated, overly terse or wordy, too modern or old-fashioned, etc. Energy they could be using to adapt ends up wasted on criticism or trying to force the other guy to change.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
08-07-2018, 04:36 PM | #32 | |
Icelandic - Approach With Caution
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
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Þorkell, who is also not a native speaker, so there....! :-) I think I even can speak sarcasm in English, and perhaps even puns. |
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08-07-2018, 05:16 PM | #33 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
Sarcasm and Puns are the lingua Franca of the Internet, so that means you’re really speaking French?
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08-07-2018, 06:01 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
I rather like "Conversational" - it's what a lot of intermediate level language courses are actually titled and gets across what is the key improvement from Broken (you can hold a *conversation*) much better than "Accented" does.
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-- MA Lloyd |
08-07-2018, 06:37 PM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
Quote:
(b) It's entirely possible to be better at the formal version of a language than at the conversational one. I can read scholarly French without too much trouble, but colloquial French is a bit beyond me.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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08-07-2018, 11:51 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: France
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
Yes. I added it as soon as I realized that others sometimes didn't understand what I wanted to mean and that I sometimes totally misunderstood their point.
Last edited by Gollum; 08-08-2018 at 03:00 AM. |
08-08-2018, 12:02 AM | #37 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: France
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
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08-08-2018, 01:21 AM | #38 | |||
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: France
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
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But that kind of little nuances is beyond roleplaying game rules, though it still can be handled with perks, as Kromm showed it above. |
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08-08-2018, 08:00 AM | #39 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
Quote:
I was born and spent the first 23 years of my life, the years most important to the development of my language skills, in a decidedly Anglophone area (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Then I moved to Montréal, Québec – a Francophone region – and spent five years at an Anglophone university, surrounded by Americans and English-speaking Canadians. And then I embarked on a 24-year-and-counting career in editing and writing English-language publications, largely in American English. So by origin, education, and vocation, I'm a profoundly Anglophone person. Bizarrely, I was able to spend the next 23 years (1990-2013) in a Francophone community without having much more than rudimentary French. However, I always took French courses as electives in school, so I developed the ability to read largely formal, largely academic French. Which was also largely useless French, at least for daily life in Montréal. For one thing, few people in the real world talk that way. For another, it's idealized Metropolitan French, which isn't the French of Québec. What changed in 2013 is that I started dancing – and not just dancing, but accompanying dancers without partners, and even giving basic-level dance classes. That required me to speak to people on the regular . . . and in Montréal, that meant speaking French. More recently, events in my life have found me in a serious relationship with a québécoise who has minimal English. So now I speak French far better than I used to. However, it's the colloquial French of Québec, and not just that, but the dialect found in Montréal with words from my girlfriend's dialect, which is from another region completely. This is much more useful in daily life! To bring it home: I'd support not just the idea that each person gets one "dialect" or whatever for free, treating the rest using rules similar to familiarity for skills, but also that this can differ for the spoken and written versions. My written French is of the international academic variety. My spoken French is informal Québec French, and a mongrel version at that. I'd also say this is separate from the idea of "accent." Whether I'm writing or speaking, it's immediately apparent that I'm an Anglophone.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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08-08-2018, 11:10 AM | #40 |
Icelandic - Approach With Caution
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
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Re: Language: Costs and Comprehension
Je ne parle pas francais.
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