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I think you must be really intelligent. I'm not always understanding your tags, even tho I love them! I'm not a native speaker, maybe that excuses it a bit.

I think you're very generous.

I'm not a native speaker, either. The near misses in understanding probably come from our combined language alignments that sometimes end up in weird places. :-)

Here's to loving things we don't completely understand--a daily activity for any fan of Paul McCartney.

🔻<-- does it count as a polygon?

#asks #non-native speakers

Hi, do you maybe have some beginner's tips for someone who would like to read some Shakespeare? Reading the Old English is a pain (especially as English is my second language). I read Hamlet, Macbeth, Rome and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew so far but only in translations (and watched a couple of British plays). How to start with it all? Is there some life hack for understanding the original text so I could actually read it and enjoy it instead fighting my way through it (and missing things)? xx

I’m sorry for taking so long to answer your question, friend! I hope you’re still interested.

Given that Shakespeare is quite tricky even for the majority of native English speakers, I admire your courage in trying. But my first suggestion is that you throw away any notion that one can understand Shakespeare completely or enjoy it without any effort. To some extent, reading Shakespeare is always going to be about fighting your way through, and unless they’re an absolute expert, any native speaker who tells you they can just read it without notes or help is exaggerating, lying, deluded, or not aware of the things they’re missing. The moment you slow people down and ask them at word and grammar level what’s going on, you will find that things people understand broadly they don’t understand correctly or in detail. Essentially, native English speakers tend to read to get a general sense and ignore what they don’t understand, where non-native speakers tend to feel they need to understand every word and every sentence.

So one way of enjoying Shakespeare is to accept that you can enjoy his work without understanding everything. Just take in things as you go and look up anything that strikes you as interesting instead of trying to grasp every single word (unless you want to become a complete expert). There’s also absolutely no shame in just enjoying Shakespeare in your own language.

Bearing that in mind, I do have a little advice that I give my non-native students who want to enjoy Shakespeare in English.

Watch more productions. You can watch productions in your first language if that helps too. Any amount will help you to gain familiarity with the text so that you’re not having to figure out the plot as you read it. Much of the enjoyment is about language and how the story is told rather than the story itself. Watching lots of English productions is also good, because having someone speak it for you helps immensely, and because it familiarises you with the flow and sound of the language.

Find a side-by-side edition in English and in your native tongue. Then if you get stuck with anything, you can look over to the other page and see how the translator has rendered it in your own language. If you’re feeling particularly studious, you can also supplement this with a good English edition which will have explanatory notes. Sometimes translations will change things if they don’t work in the language, so it’s not always the equivalent of having proper notes. Still, it is quicker, easier, and more enjoyable than going straight for a full English version with a bilingual dictionary in hand.

So there are a few things that can help you. Ultimately, there’s no secret that’s going to unlock Shakespeare for anyone, but the more you know, the more enjoyable Shakespeare gets, and the more you watch and read, the more you’ll find out what you like about the works (and what you don’t like, perhaps!). The critical thing is to take pressure off yourself and do away with any feeling that there’s something you ought to be doing to enjoy it. You have just as much right to enjoy Shakespeare as native speakers, none of whom are native early English speakers anyway.

#Good luck!#I hope that helps #Shakespeare #non-native Speakers #ESL #Shakespeare beginners #lazynoodlepuff #asks #study help

In conversations between native and non-native speakers, the burden of success is typically placed on the non-native speaker. But in conversation it takes two to tango.

An article about having effective conversations between native and non-native speakers of a language. Excerpt:

Since listeners bring so much of their own experience to the table during communication, I suggest it’s unfair to place the entire burden of communication on the non-native speaker. If that’s the case, what can the native listener do to improve communication outcomes?

The answer is easy: Practice!

Recent research suggests that native listeners can improve their ability to understand speech with relatively little exposure. In lab-based studies, listeners practice transcribing non-native speech. Individuals who partake in this practice, improve their ability to understand a new accented talker as compared to listeners who did not.

This benefit exists within individual accents and across accents, given sufficient exposure to a variety of talkers. If a native English listener spends some time listening to Mandarin-and French-accented English, not only will she get better at understanding speakers from China, France, and Thailand, but the effect seems to extend to those from Guatemala, Korea, and Russia.

Read the whole thing.

#linguistics #english #conversation #psycholinguistics #native english speakers #non-native english speakers #non-native accents #non-native speakers #communication #melissa baese-berk #melissa baese berk

So there’s no real way to ask this without presumably getting the results I don’t want, but I’ll ask anyways:

Is it okay as a non-native speaker to attempt to speak another language to a native speaker of that language?

I mean in a serious context as well, not like you’re speaking the language in a mocking way.

I just mean is it annoying or genuinely offensive to some people if you totally butcher it because you just don’t fully know the language but are trying to?

And if your reason for saying no is “white people shouldnt speak other languages” then please just don’t respond because that’s not what I’m talking about here.

#personal #languages #native speakers #non-native speakers #learning languages #learning a language

being a non-native speaker who picked up stuff from different tv shows, movies and the internet and then getting asked about how you got so good at english is definitely challenging cause you have to go “idk, picked it up i guess” because you can’t just stand up to a grown ass adult person and say “it was dem memes alright”

#non-native speakers #bilingual #language #learning

I actually think that if you fail to provide subtitles for every movie/TV show you show, then you're failing as a streaming platform BC why TF would you make this media COMPLETELY inaccessible to an entire demographic of people?

#There's more nuance to that then just this #Non-native speakers #People with a processing disorder #But y'all know what I mean

New Words: Main Characters

Image by lisa runnels from Pixabay New Word #123 protagonist vs. antagonist vs. deuteragonist protagonist: the leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text. antagonist: a person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something. Often a protagonist in a movie or a book has an antagonist. deuteragonist: the person second in…