9
votes
Accepted
How come I cannot get my "oral" English to a native speaker level after 25 years of trying?
It is not clear why some people acquire native-like competence in the spoken aspects of a second language (pronunciation, word boundary identification, etc.). Age has been suggested as a determining ...
- 10.6k
6
votes
Is ending a sentence with a possessive considered informal?
Here are the number of times that each possessive pronoun appeared at the end of each sentence in the British National Corpus per million words:
spoken fiction magazine newspaper non-...
- 3,431
6
votes
Language acquisition by 100% immersion -- any cases you know of?
Do linguistic field workers count?
In this case I offer the case of Daniel Everett who learned the Pirahã language from scratch by contact with the native people without having any common language. Of ...
- 29.8k
5
votes
Beginner to Dutch language: should I translate Dutch to English or to German?
In my experience learning 8+ languages, the best approach is to use the best translation (etymologically, or in terms of meaning) and/or explanation in language that I understand. That closeness ...
- 7,531
5
votes
The benefits of studying a second language with word-by-word translations in one's mother tongue
I don't know of actual research, but from my personal experience:
I agree that word-by-word translations will on the one hand lack features that are not available in the target language and on the ...
- 6,478
4
votes
How "fluent" do professional classicists get in reading Latin and Greek? How do they do it?
Until fairly recently, pupils in elite schools in European countries began learning Latin and Greek at a very early age, and gained a high level of fluency before going on to university; this included ...
- 23.8k
4
votes
Where is American English not chosen as the dialect of English taught as a second language?
There is generally no single policy across different countries as to what English is taught across the board. Countries in Europe and Asia default to British English - the most popular textbooks (...
- 10.6k
4
votes
Accepted
Ease of L2 acquisition of SOV and SVO/VSO word order
Many SOV languages are head final. Korean and Japanese are famous examples. In head final languages, sentences that begin with a subordinate clause are temporarily ambiguous. In other words, the ...
- 56
4
votes
Is it possible to talk about two different phonemes if they always have the same manifestations?
This (strong absolute neutralization) is theoretically possible although has not yet been shown to exist. The closest case is Yawelmani, where the phonemes u:, o: are realized as [o:] everywhere. ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Accepted
I don't know what my L1 is and want to find out
You have to first determine how you are going to define "L1", which isn't a scientific term in linguistics. It sort of stands for "first language", in which case Russian is your L1. Though perhaps ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to speak like a native speaker of English by mastering the phonology?
Learning the rules of phonology in a language might make the lowest levels of acquisition easier in some languages that have complicated phonologies (such as first-year Arabic or Klamath), perhaps 10% ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Accepted
How to read and understand linguistics articles?
This suggests a possible meta-study on intelligibility of technical works by native and non-native speakers. A technical paper in phonology might be unintelligible because of the linguistic structure ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Are markedness and the Sonority Sequencing Principle both language universals?
It has been claimed that markedness and sonority sequencing are universals, but whether or not they are depends very much on what is meant by "universal". The usual understanding of the ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Language acquisition by 100% immersion -- any cases you know of?
I bet historically that was not an uncommon occurrence up to the early 20th century. Nakahama Manjirō springs to mind, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Japan and then immersed himself in the ...
- 4,922
4
votes
Language acquisition by 100% immersion -- any cases you know of?
I recently learned about William Buckley on the Futility Closet podcast. Buckley was an English escaped convict who lived with Indigenous Australians for decades. He learned the language of the people ...
- 141
3
votes
I don't know what my L1 is and want to find out
How is "L1" used in these texts you're reading? Is it
a) about the influence of the L1 on the syntax and pronunciation of the L2?
b) is it just about the L2 label for a new adult learned language?
...
- 4,445
3
votes
How to know whether a word is context appropriate?
When I was learning German I was advised to buy a Stilwörterbuch (by Duden, as I recall) which provides this kind of context and usage. It's used like a dictionary, in that you look up the word (e.g. ...
- 201
3
votes
Are there resources that exploit phones of English, to teach how to phonate all IPA phones?
Addressing the question in the title, the answer is no, because no single language has all phones. The question is somewhat ill-conceived, being framed in terms of "phones", since a "phone" is a ...
- 82.2k
3
votes
Speakers of a foreign language in a nation sounding similar in 'mispronunciations'
In some cases this would likely be due to L1 transfer and differences in the markedness of features between the L1 and target language. Markedness in second language acquisition refers to a closed set ...
- 146
3
votes
Speakers of a foreign language in a nation sounding similar in 'mispronunciations'
In part, it is due to a third factor, the local dialect of L2. In the case of French as taught in the US, to the extent that there is a characteristic American-accented version of French, it is ...
- 82.2k
3
votes
Is there a concept to describe "a way of saying something that is incorrect, but occurs frequently due to the speaker speaking a second language"?
Since the question is tagged as "translation", the examples quoted in the question are just translation errors. There are more subtle effects that are not errors by still exhibiting the ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
One can learn faster if he listens to his own voice speaking in target language?
Listening to your own recordings, especially compared to recordings of native speakers, can help you to notice the differences.
Using AI to read an audio book in your voice will probably not do much.
...
- 151
3
votes
Why do nouns typically have their main stress on the penultimate while verbs on the ultimate (according to theories other than that of Hayes)?
One version of a "why" answer is to study the history of the system: I would recommend looking at this paper and references therein (Danielsson 1948; Dresher & Lahiri 2005; Fikkert, ...
- 82.2k
2
votes
How can you learn to read older dialects of your first language(s)?
One approach that linguists use is to train themselves in reverse chronological order. I'd suggest you do the same:
Read a few hundred pages in each century, going backwards. Choose similar genres ...
- 563
2
votes
What method of teaching foreign languages is more effective?
I would say that methods come in an out of fashion. Often this is like a pendulum swing (rote learning is popular, then falls out of fashion and is considered ineffective, then later its importance is ...
- 161
2
votes
How many words do we hear in a day?
Given that a day has 86400 seconds, and we spend around 57600 seconds awake and 56340 seconds according to one credible source (Statisca claims: "This statistic displays information on the amount ...
- 21
2
votes
Where is American English not chosen as the dialect of English taught as a second language?
I was taught BrE at school in the Czech Republic. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more common in Europe, simply because of geographical closeness and history.
- 1,218
2
votes
L2 acquisition as a factor in loss of "complex" grammatical features
First, I don't think English really did get simpler, it just moved its complexity into other parts of the language. Less inflectional morphology, but more complicated word order rules, and many more ...
- 2,625
2
votes
L2 acquisition as a factor in loss of "complex" grammatical features
I think you need to start with language change, rather than a question of complexity. One might "lose" some lexical complexity on the one hand, but introduce ambiguity which brings more cognitive ...
- 121
2
votes
Accepted
Do people "babble" while learning an L2?
I don't know if it's common, but I vaguely remember mumbling or muttering to myself when I was first learning Japanese. In my case, I think it was a way of trying to parse the stream of sounds that I ...
- 256
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