Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 05:54:06PM -0700:
Stewart Stremler wrote:
When confronted with a non-native speaker, it helps to s l o w d o w n.
Stewart Stremler
Yes, but, it, helps, much, much, *much*, more, to,
enunciate, each, word, with, a, clear, break, in, between.
Ah, yes, you are quite correct.
Yeah, you don't even have to do it slowly. (Although slower is better
for the person attempting to speak that way, at least until he gets used
to it.)
On several occasions I've encountered someone speaking English LOUDLY
and s l o w l y, and getting nowhere. I come up and in a regular tone:
Say, exactly, the, same, thing, with, clear, breaks, in,
between, each, word.
And it's amazing how quickly they get it. It's sounds far more bizarre
than speaking slowly, and it does take practice to get used to doing
it.[1] But it takes a non-native speaker virtually no time at all to
hear the individual words and understand. It truly does give them the
*breaks* they need. (Pun intended.) It's much easier to read a
language that you don't know than to hear it because audibly, there are
very few breaks. In writing, they are mostly obvious.
Except in German, right? :)
I figured that if there were an exception, /somebody/ would mention it.
The next time you have a hard time understanding some Spanish speaker,
ask him to write it *or* say to him:
"No entiendo bien. Por favor, enuncia, cada, palabra, bien,
separada."
That's a good phrase to know.
Yeah, whether he obliges or not. Often they tend to forget that you
need them to take it easy. To remind them:
"Por favor, cada, palabra, separada?".
[snip]
[1] The hardest part is resisting the temptation to insert breaks, be,
tween, the, syl, a, bils, of, the, words. (And you
*do* have to concentrate in order to avoid it.) That would just throw
the non-native speaker for an even bigger loop and make a big mess of it
all. But it is *well* well worth it if you can pull it off.
Indeed.
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