Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home 200
sciencehabit writes "Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they'll have trouble speaking English, even if they usually speak it fluently. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that reminders of our home country can complicate our ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country."
Re:Canada (Score:2, Insightful)
Then as a fellow Canadian anglophone, let me assure you, you didn't pick up French in Quebec.
You picked up something the locals believe is French, but which people from actual French-speaking countries barely recognize or understand.
Quebecois French is, in the main, a borderline illiterate patois. Some people are a lot better, but the average person you meet speaks Frenglish.
Re:And this needed research? (Score:0, Insightful)
Welcome to the research world of us universities. Rewrite the obvious in academic speak; perform a study that at best tells you about local students. Then give out a few masters or PhDs and celebrate. Oh and for extra fuck you points they make you pay to read the full article that taxpayers already paid for.
Re:And this needed research? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point.
A billion Indians disagree.
Assimiliation resistance has become... (Score:0, Insightful)
...a CIVIL RIGHT.
Explains it all. Sometimes the truth is bigoted. However, it does not make it untrue.
Perhaps it's time to expand Godwin's Law to cover the word "racist". Oh, wait...that would be considered speech control.
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Another fine opinion from The Fucking Psychopath®.
Re:Canada (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part is that they drifted so that they would sound less like us. Talk about sour grapes
A lot of change in pronunciation comes from this mechanism, whether it's the cool girls on the playground making up their own inflections, or the aristocracy saying "sarvant", language becomes a means of class identification and differentiation.
As to US English sounding more original, I've seen a lot of debate on this. Some say particular UK accents are closer to Old English and the US is closer to Modern English (16th century), whereas others claim the idea is simply part of American mythology.
Re:Canada (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's exactly my point, which Brits exactly?
Even in Elizabethan England some areas of the country had a hard R, others didn't. The same remains true to this day, if you think the UK has no rhotic accents then you've obviously never heard someone from the South West, Ireland, or Scotland speak.
If you've only ever listened to BBC presenters or the Queen speak then you can be forgiven for thinking there are no English accents in the UK that don't pronounce there Rs but that's not representative of even close to the whole population, and that's exactly my point.
If you want an explanation then I'd offer the fact that places like Bristol harbour, a city which very much has a rhotic accent was one of (if not the) most important harbour for departure to the new world from England (It's at the Western side of the country and was the second biggest harbour after London which is in the South East at the time) and so it's not that American English is born of some generic old English accent (which doesn't exist, there was no singular generic old English accent across the country) but that it was born of the large amount of migrants that departed from the region that is associated with Britain's south western accent that was rhotic in nature and still is to this day.