xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
    Or someone who very much wants to show that she’s better than you.

    Turns out she wasn’t from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’ve had Americans ask me the meaning of words I’ve used in a sentence. Like “what’s tranquil?” (I’m non-native.)

      I blame reading.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I’m amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.

        English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of “in”-vs-“on” or even in certain forms of past tense.

        However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn’t know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.

        All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it’s a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the “knowledge of foreign languages” also has some impact.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Got called a rich kid for knowing the word “carafe.” Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn’t have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.

          • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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            7 months ago

            The term “carafe” puts me in mind of a crystal glass container of between half a litre and two litres of volume for wine or water. What is it in relation to coffee? The glass bowl the coffee drips into in one of those dripping coffee makers?

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Exactly that. I picture it as one of those big jugs on an industrial coffee machine with the black or orange plastic to indicate if it has caffeine

        • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It’s a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.

    • RandomException@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      I’ve been learning German too myself, and the thing that the traditional language courses don’t teach you is the way natives speak. Listening to actual German speakers was pretty much alien to me even after two years until I bumped into a couple Easy German videos where they touch the very same subject as this xkcd and that actually got me listening to certain parts of speech more carefully and that way also understand it better.

      Now I actually find myself doing the same shortcuts sometimes when I’m progressing with the skill. It’s the same with English since I have to use it daily at work even though I’m not a native speaker. Funny how the languages work in real life vs. in theory.