Languages

I'm a native English speaker, and I'm learning Czech. It's a lovely language - Slavic languages usually sound horrible to me because of all the whiny, nasally 'nyeh-nyeh-nyeh' type sounds, but one of the things that Czech has picked up from centuries of living in the political and cultural shadow of German-speakers is a much more hard, clipped sound, which I far prefer. It's a very difficult language, though. There are seven cases and four genders, which means (taking into account singular and plural) fourteen ways of declining each noun and 56 ways of declening each adjective (lots of them are repeats, but the fact that 'eny' is the nominative and accusative plural as well as the genitive singular just makes sentences harder to understand.I also just began attempting to learn Dutch, which has a much simpler vocabulary and grammar (for an English speaker), but which for some reason I'm incapable of pronouncing. I'm putting it down to lack of familiarity

Well, there aren't really 56 different ways fo saying the adjective, since the same pronounciation fills in for several grammatical forms. An adjective with a soft ending like 'perfektn' (which means exactly what you'd expect it to) is the same in all nominative and vocative forms, plural and singular, all singular feminine forms and all genders in the plural accusative.As for whether they understand you properly, a lot depends on the context of what you're saying. If you're waving your hands around it's much easier, but even on the phone people can often tell what declension you're supposed to be using from context. The biggest problems often come from the simplest sentences, because a slight change in pronounciation can change 'Eva paid Jana' ('Eva Jan platila') to 'Jana paid Eva' ('Ev Jana platila'). When you grew up with an accent like mine where most vowels tend to become the same sound anyway this can cause problems. Yes, there's masculine, feminine and neuter, and in masculine animate and inanimate nouns behave differently (not in feminine though. 'Man' behaves differently to 'table', but 'woman' behaves the same as 'lamp'). For me yes - I found it hard enough to even get used to pronouncing a terminal 'r', and I still can't roll them. But it gets even worse with '', a sound unique to Czech which is like a rolled r and the middle constanant in 'fusion' said at the same time. It also takes a bit of getting used to the fact that you can say whole sentences without using a single vowel, and they put letters next to each other which cannot be pronounced together by any normal person. The word for asparagus begins with a soft 'ch', like in 'loch', followed immediately by a ''. I can't order asparagus in restaurants.

That's funny - I've never noticed this, and it always annoys me. Far too many language books seem to be written as if there's only one way of speaking a language.It bothers me more the other way round, when they're explaining how you should pronounce foreign languages with reference to English. Every single Czech textbook I've ever seen describes the sound of the Czech 'a' as being like 'u' in 'cup'. I am not from the south of England, and so when i say a 'u', it does not sound like an 'a'. To be fair, the name is from Medieval Latin, so in that sense you could say it's more French than German. The German form, however, is much more similar to the original than is the French. It was first named Lotharingia, 'Lothar's Realm', in the Treaty of Verdun in 843.As for the language spoken in Alsace-Lorraine today, it's overwhelmingly French. Local German dialects are dying out.

Whilst it might cause a bit of confusion, I think you overstate the case a bit. There are scores of words in which the stress tends to be different in American and British dialects, but this doesn't usually hinder understanding. It just makes the American sound daft.

These words hadn't occurred to me.An ex-girlfriend of mine lived in China for a while, and she says that tones there don't really cause that much confusion. Even if you get them all horribly wrong, as she did, people tend to understand you still from context (just as I suppose you knew what the newsreader was trying to say, depsite his mistakes). I've sat here for ages trying to identify any difference between the two sounds at all and can't. I don't know if this is because we say them both the same in my dialect, or if I'm just incapable of distinguishing the sounds.

It is a good thing there is nobody else here in the office yet, as I have just sat here for a few minutes going "butter, putter, butter, putter, stop, top, stop, top". Colleagues would soon be doubting my sanity.Unfortunately, it hasn't really helped my understanding. The physical differences in 'b' and 'p' were easy to identify (forgive me if the following description is a bit strained, but I don't know the technical terms). You start making both letters by bringing your lips together, and then releasing the air. With 'b', the shape of my mouth doesn't change before the air is released. With 'p', however, my cheeks swell a bit, changing the shape of the mouth cavity and presumably meaning more air is being released.I can identify no similar difference between 'stop' and 'top' though. I'm used to the fact that I have a bad ear for unfamiliar sounds (you should see my inability to grasp Dutch diphthongs, or how long it took me to accept that other people do pronounce 'source' and 'sauce' differently). Kinda disheartening when I can't even spot the physical differences though! Now's that's bizarre! Thanks for this.

If anyone else is as confused as me by trying to work this out - I'll save you having to look it up yourselves - the 't' sound in 'stop' is voiced, whereas it isn't in 'top' - meaning your vocal cords vibrate to produce the first, whereas the sound for the second is produced only by the air released from your mouth. You can feel this by holding your fingers to your throat as you say it. Which means the 't' in 'stop' is actually pretty much the same sound as 'd'.ABE: Which is a bit of an oversimplification, since further experimentation suggests that my vocal cords do vibrate to produce the 't' by itself, just slightly less.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

You do use your vocal cords when whispering. Your vocal cords are brought together to create turbulence in the airflow when you would be making a voiced sound in normal speech (at least according to wikipedia). I just sat here whispering 'butter, putter', and they do sound more similar to one another than when speaking aloud normally.

I can feel the difference in my vocal cords now - but I'm fairly certain my tongue's movement is identical for both sounds.

I'll have to check this when the office is a bit more peaceful and I feel comfortable repeating words out loud again, but I think we definitely have a dialect difference that's impeding understanding here! Once again we're facing the problem of trying to describe something by example of how we say words, when we all say the words differently.I remember once I decided it would be fun to try and learn the Internationsl Phonetic Alphabet, so that I'd understand what the pronounciation guides in dictionaries actually meant. I didn't get very far, but the descriptions of the sounds for each letter that I had were clearly written from the perspective of mid-western American. I spent ages puzzling over some vowel (don't remember how it's written) that the writer obviously had no clear reference for. He was blathering on about imagining Captain Picard ordering "earl grey, hot", and it took me a long time to realise that the sound he was describing was, for me, just a normal short 'o'.Which, incidentally, brings to mind a pet-hate of mine on the topic of language - people who claim they don't have an accent. The very sentence is incoherent. RP English, mid-western American, Gooische Dutch, or whatever standard pronounciation you grew up with in your own language, is still an accent, unless you speak without making any noise.

Czech is the first language I've tried to learn (unless you count language lessons at school, but I can't say I really tried at them), but before you go getting all impressed with my skills, I have lived in the Czech Republic for five years and I'm still not fluent.It is a beast of a language to learn, at least if you don't already know a Slavic language. I can't speak for the 'hardest language' claim, though I've heard it often. The only languages I had any real experience of before Czech were Germanic or Romance languages, with which English shares a lot of words. Czech's been baffling because it shares very few, apart from a few Greek or Latin adjectives, and has a totally different grammatical structure.I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

Well, it's all a matter of perspective, obviously. If your native language is Slovak, the the easiest lanugage to learn is probably going to be Czech, since they're more like distinct dialects of the same language than anything else (that's one short sentence that should offend about 15 million people).If your native language is English, though, French is much easier than Czech (or, I'm sure, Slovenian), since it's so much more similar in grammar and vocabulary.Now, if you want a language all of us will find difficult, we could try learning Hungarian!

Mormon language-teaching must be something pretty impressive. There's a mission here in Czech Republic, and it never ceases to amaze me how these Americans turn up fresh of the plane, ready to start spreading God's word in fluent Czech or Slovak.

There are plenty of other countries that don't take advantage either - especially in the English-speaking world. When I was at school in Britain, we had only five years of compulsory language teaching, which didn't begin until you were 11 and only amounted to a few hours' a week. If I understand things right, they don't even have that now.Compare to say, Holland, where primary-school children have compulsory English, German and French lessons, as well as Dutch.

Well, in what other language can you say whole sentences without bothering with any vowels?Although, I will admit that, whilst Str prst skrz krk was one of the first sentences I learnt to say in Czech, I've never had cause to use it outside the context of 'hey - this sentence has no vowels!'