I learned a little bit of German a while back, and my teacher commented that I had a "high german" r-- instead of the glottal r I make a kind of trill in the back of my throat that sounds a little bit like the Spanish erre. Actually, when I first started speaking Spanish I used this German r instead of the Spanish rr because it was easier (my Spanish teacher couldn't hear the difference)
There are two Spanish R's. The single R is a flap like the T or D in American English liter/leader; it's also the intervocalic R of some "upper class" British dialects. The double R (and a single R in certain initial positions) is a roll or trill.
The glottal or uvular R is a hallmark of the Germanic language subfamily and not common in the other branches of Indo-European. All the Scandinavian languages have it and I'm pretty sure it's what I hear in Dutch. English alone (possibly unique in the world) has our strange liquid R, which could almost be categorized as a semivowel and even functions as a full vowel in American English, e.g., "fur." The Franks were a Germanic tribe and they carried this phoneme into the Latin dialect that became French (along with several other Germanisms such as umlauted vowels and the replacement of the past tense with the present perfect). The Gauls were a Celtic tribe and in southern France you still hear the flapped Latin R of the other Romance languages.
But German has its dialects too and in some regions you'll hear a flapped "Italian" R.
His philosophy is that speaking quickly and loudly will make you look more confident, and therefore make native speakers assume your level is relatively high.
How silly. It will also cause you to make more mistakes! Not only are you saying things you haven't had a chance to think out thoroughly, but your vocal organs haven't been exercised enough to simulate a native speaker.
This is true in some respect: speaking loudly and confidently does fool me into thinking someone's level is higher than it is in reality.
I'm sure you're not that easily fooled. Once he's made a couple of mistakes no native speaker would make, the scam becomes obvious.
However, for students below intermediate level - or below advanced level and speaking about difficult topics - speaking quickly robs me of being able to predict their speech. If their pronunciation is so awful as to render certain words completely indiscernible - and it is - then speaking faster just creates a mess of gargled syllables.
They may also be getting the cadence wrong: the difference in stress, pitch and length among the syllables and the quality of the breaks between them. You might not recognize this consciously (perhaps you will now that I've given you the clues), but it makes it difficult to parse the sentences: to identify where one word ends and the next begins. This is something Chinese speakers have particular difficulty with. For one thing pitch is phonemic in Chinese and therefore is not used the same way as in our language. But for another, since a Chinese sentence tends to have a lower syllable count than its translation into most other languages (7:10 in English or French and more like 1:2 in Spanish or Italian, by my own measure), the language is typically spoken more slowly than we're accustomed to, and the syllables often come out in a steady stream, almost like a drumbeat. When they speak English this way--especially if they speak it too fast--we can't group the syllables into words.
For example, if you speak Spanish quickly--at the velocity of a native speaker--you MUST convert every set of adjacent vowels into a diphthong or triphthong. This is done mercilessly, even if such a compound doesn't really exist such as OA or IAE. You have to turn it into the same makeshift sound they do, or it will be hard for them to understand you. This gives you up as a foreign speaker just as clearly as speaking too slowly, but at least they will be grateful for the courtesy of letting them understand you.
You Chinese friends are being
discourteous to you. Perhaps if you explain it that way they will take notice. Courtesy is much more important in their culture than in ours. For example, if you walk into a group of Chinese people and start shouting, they might act like you're not there. Tell them that's analogous to what they're doing to you.
The thing I'm most confused by is the Chinese insistence on doing everything without help and their general belief that in any dispute between a native-speaker of English and a Chinese-speaker of English, the Chinese-speaker is correct.
We do the same thing. There are signs up in Spanish all over America that are rife with spelling errors. And as an earlier post pointed out, Brits practically pride themselves on pronouncing the names of Spanish drinks and foods wrong. After all, they turned
kha-GWAHR into JAG-yoo-er.
Language is arguably the most wonderful and important technology our species has invented. Language skills touch deeply into our psyche and we all want to feel that we're good at it.
Children and teenagers don't seem too plagued by this disease, but it certainly runs rampant among the adults.
Children have an instinct to learn (not to mention a greater ability), which is reinforced socially. Adults don't, something I have to deal with as a corporate trainer.
Only one staff member - who I've become quite good friends with - seems to have either the intelligence or modesty to ask for help; ironically, he is the best English speaker among them.
Obviously! That's how he got to be so good.
Moreover, I've had numerous arguments with students where they insist their Chinese teacher/friend is correct and that my English is incorrect.
Well these are the folks who call themselves the Middle Nation; all the rest of us are satellite peoples. The fact that they have the world's longest-running continuous civilization--by a factor of at least two--tends to reinforce that sense.
The Chinese cultural norm that asking lots of questions makes one appear stupid is probably the greatest hindrance to English language learners in this country.
That comes naturally from a culture that values stability over progress, in which change occurs at glacial speed. There isn't as much new stuff to learn, so by the time you're an adult you are quite reasonably expected to know
everything.