Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language?
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day agoi’ve never understood this, i’m slightly older than 9 months and i’ve been perfectly able to pick up new sounds, and people learn new languages all the time…
Have you tried learning Japanese / English after learning the other? I studied Japanese and learned how to pronounce the /r/ in Japanese correctly.
For some people, the difficulty is less in production, and more in interpretation for someone who is native Japanese speaking and later learned English.
I can’t hear the difference between the Rs in Rohr (from German Rohrbacherstrasse). I can do just fine with all other German phonemes, but these, I can’t hear or speak it.
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Perfectly? In a language system different than your own. English to French/Spanish doesn’t require these sounds. English to like Thai or Chinese has a lot.
People learn new languages because you can get the ability back with training (hooray neurplasticity) but it is more difficult and takes longer.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
that’s moving the goalposts, the previous poster claims that you simply cannot tell the difference between sounds that don’t exist in your native language, which is fucking obviously false and they should be ashamed of posting something like that
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
oh my god… relax. they’re called allophones, it’s when two different sounds are treated as the same phoneme in a language. so like whether you make a click sound with your K or not, it’s still a K right? well in some languages it would be a totally different phoneme. but to you, whether you can hear the difference or not is irrelevant to you because it either way it just means K. that’s what they’re talking about. can you chill with the “you should be ashamed” and try more of “i should generously try to understand what they mean and ask questions to get there instead of raging at any perceived weakness”