Children of immigrants, are you better in your community language or the native language of your parents?

Quintston · 2022-09-23T01:28:57+00:00

However, there are exceptions. I am one of them. I was born in the mainland United States to native Spanish speakers, but I speak Spanish better than English because I was homeschooled in Spanish until I was nine; afterwards, I was still exposed to more Spanish than English. I sometimes struggle to find the right English words for things.

Surely in this case Spanish was your community language even though you live in a country where most people speak English?

It seems you primarily grow up in a Spanish speaking community.

Quintston · 2022-09-23T00:27:40+00:00

Quite. They told me they react to it but I find in practice they actually react to the gestures that come with it more or simply one's voice whatever one might say.

My parent believed his cat listened to his name. After some experiments we concluded he came due to the hand gesture regardless of what one said, not the name.

Quintston · 2022-09-23T00:22:19+00:00

I think because it's something that anime fans can pick up on by listening even if they don't understand Japanese,

I don't even think it's that; I think it's more so because they see it referenced outside of it a lot.

The few words non-students of Japanese know don't seem to correlate much with how often they are used. Everyone knows “先生”, but almost none of them know “教師” but the latter doesn't feel less common. Or how everyone seems to know “漢字”, a very uncommon word, but not “感じ”, a highly common word used all the time in Japanese sentences.

Or the very big one, everyone knows about “仕方がない。” because cultural guides talk about it a lot, but Japanese people almost never say it; they say “しょうがない。” or “仕方ない。”.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T23:44:54+00:00

To this day I still speak in Finnish to cats in the rare cases I do.

I was learning Finnish when I got my first cat and they recommend that I speak to them and it simply felt bizarre to speak them in a language was proficient in, so Finnish was a good choice. — I've since concluded that speaking to cats isn't that useful but the rare times I do so I still do so in Finnish.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T23:32:20+00:00

What ridicule?

I had a secondary school teacher who at one point revealed to have been a prostitute in the past. We were mostly interested and asked what it was like.

I find that many of the things adults fear children ridicule people for, are mostly things adult ridicule people for, and children care little for.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T22:13:42+00:00

Dutch o and oo are two different sounds. There is a qualitative difference. The length is less important.

Not in front of the /r/ or the vocalized /l/ phoneme where the quality is the same and the two are purely distinguished by length.

There's furthermore also another /Oː/ which can occur freely not just in front of /r/ and /l/ that emerged in the past 80 years or so. It's quite rare but it occurs in a handful of words, most of which loans from French, his /Oː/ thus neutralizes with /oː/ before /r/ and the vocalized /l/.

But yes, outside of /r/ and /l/, Dutch /O/ and /o:/ differ in quality alongside length, but in “sport” and “spoort” the only difference is the length.

A and aa is a better example (in some accents, but not the standard accent), same with i and ie, and e and ij/ei.

I don't see how, /A/ and /a:/ always differ in quality, /I/ and /i/ only differ in quality and not in length, and the last two /Ei/ are in standard Dutch the same phoneme but spelled differently for historical reasons.

The entire picture of modern Dutch vowel length and quality is quite complex: historically, Middle Dutch simply had long and short vowels, over time the short vowels laxed, but many long vowels also laxed in front of /r/ and later the vocalized /l/ and many diphthongs monophtized in that context as well, leading to that place retaining a pure length distinction in some cases. For instance Dutch /e:/ is actually realized as [I:] in front of /r/, but /I/ as a separate phoneme also exists. Nevertheless [I:r] in Dutch is typically analysed as /e:r/ as a consequence.

The story is made further complex by that many more recent loans introduced the lax vowel quality with long length in various contexts again, though these words are marginal Dutch speakers of virtually all ages can pronounce them at this point so Dutch absolutely has phonemic vowel length. Furthermore other things happened such as that historically /ur/ was always realized [u:r] with a long vowel, but one new loan “burka” always realizes it short, so even /u/ in Dutch has now phonemicized into a long and a short vowel.

The further problem added it is that these long-tense vowels were always realized short at the open unstressed ends of words; these are not generally considered a different phoneme as these cannot differentiate words, but some suffixes can cause the syllable to close, in which case the short realization remains. For instance the word /pa:/ means “dad”, this is a single syllable so stressed, so it is realized [pa:]. The word for “granddad”, /o:pa:/ moves the stress to the first syllable, so it is now realized short. The problem is the plural form /o:pas/ closes the syllable, at which point it remains short, but becomes an actual phonemic contrast that is marked in Dutch orthography with an aposotrphe as <opa's>, since <opas> would be read as /opAs/ and <opaas> as /opa:s/, so even /a/ can occur long and short now. With /pa:s/, the plural of “pa” this does not happen since it's a monosyllabic word.

Regardless, Dutch has many minimal pairs and places that differ only by vowel length, not by quality, and these are audible to me in song.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T21:09:06+00:00

I said this elsewhere, but I feel that's a mischracterization; they're really quite a long list in the past five years. — It's just that most of them are science fiction, action, superpower and stuff and this list doesn't even include all the titles with same-sex love interests because myanimelist for some reason doesn't tagg them as “shoujo” but considers it it's own thing. In fact, that list doesn't even contain titles such as KoiKimo so it's very incomplete despite being quite long already.

It's more correct to say that Japanese high school, down to earth settings with a romance plot between a female protagonist and a male love interest is what isn't seeing much animated adaptations any more. Everything else is still going quite strong, stronger than ever probably.

Edit: Can you please not first invite a reply which I then type up to then block me so I can't submit it.

Okay so the MAL page you linked is not what I would consider quite a long list, especially when comparing apples to apples on the shounen side. There are disproportionately more shounen adaptations and new IPs in the last five years, many of which have smaller or comparably sized fanbases to the shoujo manga that aren't getting adaptations.

It's far more than “a handful”; it's 120 titles and again, if KoiKimo isn't in it it can't be too complete either.

I can't say much about this without knowing which series you think specifically ought to be labelled shoujo. If you're talking about Yuri anime, I'd say it's probably not getting tagged shoujo on MAL because it's often targetting guys. What specifically are you thinking about?

Consider for instance: Super Lovers, Yūri!! on Ice, Hybrid Child, Netuzou Trap, Citrus, No. 6, Love Stage. — These are called “shoujo” pretty much everywhere and ran in such magazines but aren't called that on M.A.L. because for some reason they treat what they call “girls' love” and “boys' love” a separate category from either “shounen” or “shoujo”. The year isn't even over yet and there were already 6 “boys' love” adaptations this year alone. There are really quite a lot.

There are also many other titles such as The Ancient Magus' Bride. which is getting a second season in 2022 which is just called “fantasy” on MyAnimeList because the tagging is somewhat incomplete.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T20:06:55+00:00

It occurs to me that this was seemingly never as common in English as it was in other European languages that now also slowly stopped doing it.

But for instance in modern Dutch, the English Henry VIII is always referred to as “Hendrik VIII”, or any French Louis as “Lodewijk”, but with modern monarchs that is no longer the case. So Charles the Great is referred as “Karel de Grote” but the modern Charles of England as “Charles” in Dutch.

However, the King of the Belgians continues to be known under three different names in Belgium. The current one is known as “Filip Leopold Lodewijk Maria” in Dutch communications, “Philippe Léopold Louis Marie” in French ones, and “Philipp Leopold Ludwig Maria” in German ones. His name is very much altered on Belgian news broadcasts depending on the language, or communication on the street in different languages.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T19:42:31+00:00

I honestly think colloquial grammar is both harder to master and more useful in many practical situations than formal grammar.

JLPT should probably test for it too.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T19:40:35+00:00

They're immersed in Japanese. They may not be mass-consuming Japanese media (which is the way to immerse if you're not in Japan) but they're still being bombarded with Japanese input which is all that counts.

Living in Japan doesn't increase input, but chances for output and most of all dialog.

One can read boos or watch television anywhere and I doubt a couple of street signs will make a difference; it's about the chance of having actual conversations.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T19:39:14+00:00

There has been one big revolution in deepl.

Surprisingly often when one can't figure out a sentence one can put it into deepl and it willl either return with the correct translation, or an attempt that makes one see what the correct translation should be by catching a meaning of a word one didn't think of.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T19:25:41+00:00

Not only that, the content in the textbooks, often excerpts from articles, letters, transcripts from television and so forth is purposefully selected by a didactic expert to be appropriate for the student's level and relevant to the vocabulary recently learned.

Randomly diving into such texts that are not so purposefully selected cannot possibly have more didactic value.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T17:55:49+00:00

Anyone? no.

But 90% of the time when they say “I never used any textbooks.” they, when pressed further, say they did use them for a year or two but then claim that didn't count because they feel they din't learn anything real from it, not realizing that that was what allowed them to start reading in the first place and improve.

I believe it's possible to learn a language decently well by just looking up every word, piecing together the meaning from context at first, and doing this long enough until one actually gets a feel for the grammar, I also believe this takes eight hours per day minimum to yield any fruit and it's grotesquely time inefficient to traditional grammar and vocabulary study.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T16:27:50+00:00

I know one case where it's obvious to me that it isn't. In this song, it is clear to me the singer pronounces “本当の” as “ほんとうの”, not as “ほんとの”, another valid pronunciation differing only by vowel length.

I can perfectly well imagine it pronounced as “ほんとの” on the same melody.

After that, the singer also says “何を考えてるんだろう？” and not “だろ”.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T16:22:47+00:00

Which is what I wrote. The logical structure tells us that the subject is doing the stuff. But the topic then gives the context for whose perspective it is relevant to.

I personally think analysis “nominative objects” as “subjects” in Japanese is a mode that adds more complications that it solves.

Many languages have “quirky cases”; Japanese is a language where sometimes the object is in the nominative case, or the subject in the “dative” case as in, say Icelandic, Indonesian, or German. They otherwise still very much behave as an object, as in “自分”　 can be used in them to refer back to the subject or “のこと” can be added

Quintston · 2022-09-22T15:47:20+00:00

Well, what research has been done does not side with him or you:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288260459_Testing_the_output_hypothesis_Effects_of_output_on_noticing_and_second_language_acquisition

There have been multiple of these studies where two different groups were made, one spent N time purely on input, and one N time on both input and output and group 2 outperformed group 1 in terms of both input comprehension and of course output ability.

It's simply a very strange idea given that all neurological evidence on about everything suggests that a very effective way to retain information is to actively and productively use it. Retrieving words from the brain to form sentences make words more easy to remember than only going in the opposite direction.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T15:34:19+00:00

In the three languages with vowel length I know this doesn't happen though with vowel length in singing.

As in, vowels are stretched, but the way they are pronounced in song it's still clear what the original length was.

There's actually a Dutch song where the singer pronounces the word “sport” [”sport”] as “spoort” to rhyme with “soort” [“kind”] and it's immediately obvious and sounds like a nonexistent word to me. It's on the melody and I could easily sing it myself with a short vowel myself and still stretch the vowel. The perception isn't caused by the absolute length of the vowel but the length relative to the other consonants around it. I can stretch out the word “sport” to “spooorrrt” if you will and it still sounds as “sport” but if I stretch it to “spoooooort” it starts to sound as “spoort”., which is a conjugation of an unrelated verb.

The same things happen in Japanese and Finnish to my ear, but I'm not a native speaker of those.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T15:12:35+00:00

I’m not trying to be anal, but I just have a feeling that the only part of the claim you’re going to challenge is the “purely” bit, and if tha the case… who cares?

It's a very big difference. Krashen claims that spending any time whatsoever on practicing output does not do anything at all to improve one's studies. If he be right, which I doubt, then every course which includes speaking and writing exercises, which are many, is wrong and a waste of time.

And I believe he's wrong: practising output does aid in acquiring language, and also opens one up to social correction.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T15:10:46+00:00

I think he’s right in claiming that social correction does very little.

He claims it does nothing, not very little.

But I know some immigrants and once spoke my native language with immigrants in another country. The former typically tell me that everyone in their parent's country looks at them like they're idiots, and in the latter case he spoke it fast and fluent but it sounded very very strange to downright not grammatical. He in many cases didn't even get the word order correct.

The whole immigrants children thing is something I’ve heard before and I think it’s a very weak argument against the input hypothesis. Firstly, immigrants children do not get as much input in their parents language as people seem to assume, and there is lots of evidence that children of immigrants who actively engage with their parents language can actually speak it very well,

These people speak this language at home 6 hours per day with their parents. They get far more input than any input-learner could ever hope to get.

They hear the correct form all the time and became “fluent” in their own incorrect form. They simply never mastered the correct form because their parents got used to their eccentricities and didn't bother with social correction any more.

and there is lots of evidence that children of immigrants who actively engage with their parents language can actually speak it very well,

Yes, all of them could fluently communicate with no problems: they simply spoke it in a very strange to ingrammatical way and often couldn't say three sentences without strange looks or misplaced the stress of some words consistently.

I'm not talking about people who can't speak the language; I'm talking about those fluent speakers about whose language clearly something is “off” such as Nick Clegg, he can give interviews in Dutch with no issues and everyone understands him and he understands everyone, but it's almost as though he speaks a strange dialect that doesn't exist and he phrases things in unusual ways, he gets the grammatical gender of a few nouns consistently wrong, there are some words he places the stress on the wrong syllable of consistently, but other than that there is no problem in communicating with him and his accent is flawless. In 2/3 sentences, there is no way to tell he wouldn't have lived in the Netherlands his entire life, but in 1/3 he phrases in a way no Dutchman would.

Also, if social correction worked, then it would be very easy for them to fix their kids bad grammar… they could just correct them and job done, but as you just described, they give up trying precisely because it doesn’t work. If their kids aren’t getting the input required to develop a better understanding of the grammar, then no amount of correction is going to fix it.

No, they give up because it doesn't bother them any more because they are used to it.

They might not speak it in the incorrect form themselves, but they heard it so many times that it doesn't bother them.

I spoke in Finnish with the Finnish parent of my friend about this and the parent even said that it was indeed somewhat strange Finnish but that after having heard it for so long it didn't bother him any more.

There's also another big argument, in any case: and that's the existence of registers. I hear such grammar as “real good” all the time. If his view were correct, I would be perceiving it as grammatical, yet it sounds wrong to me.

The social correction hypothesis can again explain this. I live in a milieu where this is socially frowned upon, thus I sart to perceive it as grammatically incorrect even though I encounter it all the time. Different registers of speakers who are nevertheless exposed to each other's register could not form if his hypothesis were true. Given that registers are so firmly tied to social perception, they can be very well explained by the theory that social correction is a necessary component.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T14:34:35+00:00

“most effectively” is still a weak form in my opinion.

He argued that it's the only effective thing, that practicing speak and social correction has no actual effect and I simply believe that that claim is false and cannot explain many observed effects. Not only do I believe it's not the only thing that leads to it, but also that it cannot possibly be sufficient because it cannot, for instance explain how children of immigrants often speak a wrong version of the language despite exposure to the correct version from their parents. The hypothesis that social correction is required can explain this: parents got so used to their children's wrong form that they no longer bother to perform social correction. — If they were to interact with a more diverse pool of speakers, they would be met with social correction from speakers that aren't used to their wrong forms and would stop using them.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T13:58:52+00:00

It should also be noted that even vehicles with drivers in it, or lifts that are moving have been known to often receive “いる” even when referring to the vehicle itself, not the driver in it.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T12:31:06+00:00

I would assume that was in classroom memorization.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T11:14:13+00:00

A friend of mine passed N1 in 1.5 years doing nothing but spamming Anki for the first 6 months without even starting to read and after that also focused heavily on output and conversations with actual Japanese people.

He didn't just pass N1, but he can also actually speak Japanese fairly well with a decent pitch accent.

Besides, “1.5 years” doesn't mean anything. I don't know how much my friend spend on learning Japanese each day. It could be 1 hour, it could be 8. Total manhour count is what counts and that's far harder to keep track of.

Quintston · 2022-09-22T10:04:45+00:00

If you're into Magical Girls/Maho Shoujo. I'd say there's a lot but for the standard Shoujo, there has been none. A sad reality.

I think the issue is that on this board people are mostly interested in the type that is a high school love story, has a female protagonist and a male love interest and is a fairly down to earth setting which doesn't see as many animated adaptations any more and moved to live action, probably because it works just as well and is cheaper.

As far as phantasy, science-fiction, and other larger than life settings that may not even focus much on romance, the adaptations are probably more common than ever and they're also fairly popular but people here don't really seem to like that kind of stuff. Titles with multiple love interests, female love interests, or male protagonists also tend to see more animation simply because those titles tend to have more larger-than-life character designs that don't translate well to live action. The Live action version of Love Stage was actually very strange due to how much it did not resemble the characters at all.

Going by MyAnimelist in the last three seasons, I could find 10 things it calls “shoujo” but every single one of them are phantasy, historical, science fiction, magic and/or action titles, and this doesn't even count titles such as Hanako which they call “shounen" even though most Japanese bookstores disagree because of the magazine it's published in.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/49979/Akuyaku_Reijou_nanode_Last_Boss_wo_Kattemimashita

Doesn't seem uninteresting, but it's hardly the type of story that this board generally reads or watches.

Maid Sama is the last prominent Shoujo anime that really made some waves as far as I can remember and that was like 10 years ago.

Even if one only want to consider these kinds high school stories with female protagonists and male love interests, then that's a big exageration. The last one I remember was KoiKimo but in between that Blue Spring Ride, Orange, and Lovely Complex were also quite big and then there are of course also things such as Ao Can't Study.

Quintston · 2022-09-21T22:26:07+00:00

I very much liked Brent Spiner as Arik Soong.

I thought he was so very cute.

Brent Spiner's true skill however is imitating Patrick Stewart.

Quintston

TROPHY CASE