I did not end up learning Japanese in college as a young man. I've had much better luck twenty years later, indirectly following her advice, by learning Greek through falling in love.
The reason that would make your speech appear feminine is that some young Beijing women pronounce those consonants similarly, probably in a (potentially unconscious) attempt to sound cute. The closest analog in English I can think of is swapping word-initial l for w ("wuv", "widdle").
The phenomenon in Chinese is known as 女国音; I became aware of it through the talk page of the Wikipedia article on Standard Chinese phonology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Standard_Chinese_phonolog...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_spoken_J...
Interestingly, it also has pitch as a part of accent:
I do the immersion thing without even calling it so. My view is that if I’m living in another country, I should integrate and learn the culture. I stopped associating with Brazilians who were only interested in staying within a Brazilian bubble doing Brazilian things. Might as well just go back to Brazil if that’s what you want to do.
P.S. still have an accent, but it has been getting much better, and almost no one manages to guess where it comes from correctly. Heavy majority of the guesses go in the direction of Scandinavian countries :)
Really? Outside of communities that educate their children in their own language second generation children everywhere generally end up fluent speakers of the language of instruction, even in communities where their home language speakers are a plurality or majority of a school population. You do see Indian and Chinese kids in Silicon Valley with accents intermediate between FOB and more general Californian but they speak English perfectly.
There's a reason I left Brazil, and it mostly has to do with wanting to live in a better culture.
Same. Plus the insane violence.
I am German and I often get asked if I am Irish :-)
I don't think he treats random brazilian differently, just that he isn't seeking a brazilian community.
I went to South Korea for a business meeting and spent 6 months prior trying to learn Korean. Funny thing is that when I got there everyone I met wanted to take the opportunity to speak English with a native speaker and I rarely got to use it. Good thing too... I would have sounded like I have the literacy of a small child.
I think it may have to do with their language having a quite large inventory of phonemes (I have the feeling that learning new phonemes is one of the main factors in making a new language difficult to learn), but who knows.
I presume you mean they spoke no English before they moved to the USA. I recently read Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, which left me with the impression that what you describe is impossible, and that adults are never able to learn a language to 'native' proficiency. This article seems to refute that.
http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/March_2002_EBook_editions.p...
^ Basically the above study, sponsored by the NIH, found that when you correct for all relevant factors the critical period signal not only disappears but becomes anti-correlated: kids have a HARDER time in all aspects of language learning than adults, when the same level of interest and effort is applied.
That's, IMO, an unwarranted (and, taken strictly, almost implausible) assumption. (Especially on the interest side.)
https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm
What methods did you use to shave off ~40 weeks that are required for normal people to learn the language ?
That seems slightly presumptuous and sounds slightly accusatory... It’s not like it takes 44 weeks before you can say a single word in another language. The comment said “conversational”, and the page you linked said “professional working proficiency”. Is it surprising at all if those are two completely different criteria? This is data for their own course, which is based on class hours, not on full-immersion living with a native speaker. The top of the page also stresses the words “usually” and “average”, and goes out of the way to make clear that it can vary wildly.
Try any of the decent language learning audio courses and you’ll see it’s not hard to have basic conversations in a matter of weeks. I’ve used Pimsleur for several languages. I wouldn’t call myself proficient or even conversational, but it’s been enough to communicate abroad and occasionally impress a native speaker.
There’s no magic threshold where you’ve “learned” the language, simply different points at which you are able to express yourself more accurately and in greater detail and keep up with the conversation.
Between a reasonable degree of grammar correctness, some vocabulary, and the pronunciation needed to make yourself understood it takes some time to carry out any conversation beyond tourist level.
Given that I have plenty of polish friends and contact with the language the "few weeks" is either an exaggeration or, more likely, the bar for "close to conversational" is set relatively low and differs from other people's definition leading to this discussion. Unless it's someone who already speaks a language that's "close enough", maybe czech?
[%] Actual example used by my french teacher a few decades ago.
Obligatory Eddie Izzard: Learning French [1]
In my experiences, learning French well is more difficult than people think, German not as much.
Forget the books and turn on the radio and TV instead.
if you already know spanish or italian, learning french is a lot easier because a lot of the verbs are the same and conjugations follow the same patterns
i know english, italian, a decent amount of french now, and if I am trying to learn arabic, starting with just radio and tv seems backwards to me
A few years later, I ended up dating a Polish woman who did not know English. I learned become close to conversational within a few weeks, because (sorry, but it is relevant to the story) she was gorgeous.
It turned out that the oldest of motivations proved surprisingly effective for me.