Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language?
Lembot_0004@discuss.online 1 day ago
but my speaking and reading are still bad.
Wow. For most people, reading is the easiest part, writing is more difficult, speaking is hard and understanding speech is the hardest.
housewife@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I find English pronunciation very irregular (not phonetic). So reading is hard. Speaking too, because when I construct a sentence in English I “write” it in my head (visually-mentally), then “read” it (vocalise what I visualise); but since my reading is bad in the first place…
Lembot_0004@discuss.online 1 day ago
Most people, when learning to read, don’t care about pronunciation at all. Like why would they? Here is the word. Who cares how it is pronounced if you see it clearly and know its meaning?
Lumidaub@feddit.org 1 day ago
Do you not hear the words in your head while reading?
Lembot_0004@discuss.online 1 day ago
Sometimes I do. But it doesn’t help me or stop me from understanding the word. Completely irrelevant parallel process. Especially in English. In my native language we have a strict bijection between letters and sounds, so pronunciation is trivial.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
When English-speaking kids are taught to read, it’s very much an out-loud process, and covers the various pronunciation of all the letters sounds. “Sound it out” is the first step in decoding written words. Then of course there’s using context clues to figure out what word you’ve heard before could be spelled using those letters’ possible sounds. And it’s not until later, once all the common rules and exceptions of pronunciation are automatic, that you start “reading to learn” and attempt words you’ve never heard before.
Lembot_0004@discuss.online 1 day ago
I talk about how grown-up people study a foreign language.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Tbf, you’re not wrong about the inconsistency of English, it’s because we stole words, phrases, entire dialects from so many sources. And sometimes we kept the original pronunciation, other times we rudely imposed our phonetic expectations of the time and place when we stole them. Also the “correct” pronunciation for many words is different in different English-speaking countries.
On the plus side for you, that means most people are pretty lenient about what we consider “fluent,” and make allowances for accent. Unless they’re a racist asshole in the first place. When you mispronounce a word because you’re following phonetic rules but that word breaks them, most of us can recognize that version because we did the same thing when learning to read.