(no subject)

[hnpcc]

Just had an interesting lunchtime discussion about the problems of parenting in a second language. Especially when your child hits about 12 and starts being embarrassed to be near you, hear you speak and criticises your English!

Not that this is a problem for me, given that I have no children and both Dean and myself are functionally monolingual anyway.. but it was still interesting.

And funny. You never sound like what you think, and just because you 'see' or 'hear' the word that you're trying to say doesn't mean that what everyone else is hearing that same word. Which is only exacerbated by trying to talk in a second language, when you can't necessarily hear how your accent is mangling words. I (and my friend, must be an Australian thing) kept referring to Australia as the world's largest moose in Dutch, the difference between 'eiland' and 'eland' being hard for us to say apparently. Or hard for everyone else to hear us saying at least. ;-)

Bluey's son was getting annoyed because he kept hearing 'greed' when she was supposed to be saying 'grid' for his practice spelling test. As she said, "that's what I'm saying! Grid! Grid!"

"No!! You're saying it wrong!!! It's GRID!" heh.

Even just when I'm hearing myself on (for example) the answering machine though, I don't sound like what I think I do. And my accent varies wildly depending on what I've been doing/thinking about. The answering machine message I recorded some time near the last World Cup sounds like I'm from the deep northern suburbs. The one after I'd been talking to my Mum, I'm from the country. Wierd.

Still the cake comes from Scotty's Mum, who sent a package to her work address today. Except her Mum thinks she works at Bigrobiology, which is odd. Apparently Scotty's accent has modulated enough that when she spelt it out her Mum still misheard it. :-)

Comments

[jamaisneutral.livejournal.com]

I start lisping when my girlfriend lisps...
it's very strange;

And I can imagine an Australian saying "eland" sounds like "eiland" :)

[hnpcc]

Well, the thing is, it doesn't to me. I could always hear the difference quite easily, I just couldn't make the sounds right for anyone else to hear it. :-)

Remind me at some point to do a post detailing "stuff that I said in Dutch that was hysterically funny." :-)

[jamaisneutral.livejournal.com]

how about an audiofile? :)

[hnpcc]

Not a chance in hell. And not just because I've no idea how to do that... :-)

Seriously? My flemish at the moment is pretty ordinary[1]. My accent is back to ocker. If I visit Belgium, then I'll catch up for coffee (or alcohol, I'm easy) and you can laugh hysterically at my combined Australian/Limburg accent. :-)

[1] Ordinary in the sense of bad. It just occurred to me that I've no idea if 'ordinary' is used in this context outside of Australia.