Pronouncing a language without knowing it (jera: Chinese writing systems)

 --- Jake X skrzypszy:

> > > >Knowing how to pronounce a language doesn't necessarily imply you
> > > >understand it, after all.
Depends on the language. I would say that I can pronounce Hungarian quite
correctly (without knowing more than ten words of Hungarian), but that's only a
matter of knowing the rules. Likewise, if you know the pronunciation of the
letters in Polish, you can pronounce it *almost* perfectly without knowing the
language.
In a language with a floating accent like Russian, it becomes difficult,
especially since the pronunciation of a vowel is often dependent on its
position in respect to the stress vowel.
And English of course, well, that's a different story.

> > >If that were true i'd be fluent in Tagalog by now :).
> >
> > Yeah if that was true I could speak about 20 languages :)
>
>  My aunt reads Cyrillic correctly, without knowing a word of Russian as far
> as I know.
Oh well, learning a script is not exactly the same as learning a language. In
my teenage years, I learned Greek, Cyrillic (both long before I actually
started to learn the languages), Armenian, Georgian, Devanagari, Hangul, some
Arabic... without even knowing a word in those languages.

Jan

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"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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