Can’t hear the difference: 04 (Australian / New Zealand / South African / Zimbabwean accent)

 

I twigged on the Aussie vs Kiwi accent quickly enough, mainly because of the more obvious long vs short vowel sounds.

    An example:  “pin” in Aussie accent would be more like “peen” (to my ears), whilst Kiwi accent would render it more like “pun” (to my ears).  

    Ha!  Trying to get the IPA for them, I come across this from googling:

Quote

The best example I've heard are the words 'pin/pen'. So your stereotypical Australian accent would say 'pin/pehn' while the stereotypical New Zealand accent would say 'puhn/pin'. That said, I know lots of people from either side of the Tasman with pretty similar accents. 

Unquote

    The South African accent was the next hill to climb, but after I got the Aussie vs Kiwi difference sussed out, the South African accent then started to stand out a bit from them, although I tend to identify the S.African one on a process-of-elimination basis, i.e., it doesn't sound Aussie nor Kiwi, so must be S.African since there're fewer Zimbabweans over here.

    This process-of-elimination criterion was used by a caller on the telephone back in the early 80s when I was sharing a house with six other people (all white and British).  She couldn't see me on the phone, and she couldn't quite place my accent, so she asked if I was from South Africa.

    Again, it comes down to exposure, which leads to the last in this group:  the Zimbabwean accent.  I only knew one Zimbabwean but that was in the second half of the 1980s, and I’d only spent a bit of time with him, which hardly counts.

    My solution for this batch is to now ask, if unsure, “Are you from the southern hemisphere?”, which covers all four of them.

Can’t hear the difference: 03 (American accent vs Canadian accent)

This is another one where lack of exposure also causes problems.  Luckily, they don’t mind when I identify them wrongly.

    A Canadian hitchhiker in Scotland to whom I gave a lift to Glencoe back in 1984 didn’t have long enough time to go into the details, so he told me that the rule of thumb is that the American accent is more nasal.

    Someone else told me there’re some vowel sounds that give them away.  “Mac” rings a vague bell.

    Googling has produced this:

Quote

Vowel Sounds:  Canadians tend to have a slightly different set of vowel sounds compared to Americans, particularly in the “a” sound.

Unquote

(from googling) Canadian and American English are closely related, with Canadian English often described as a variant of General American English. The most notable difference is Canadian Raising, where Canadians raise the vowel sound before voiceless consonants in words like "house" and "bike," resulting in a higher pitch. Americans tend to pronounce these sounds with a lower pitch.

Can’t hear the difference: 02 (American English)

 

Although I am still amazed that students cannot distinguish between the different tones in Mandarin, I am equally guilty when it comes to American English.  

    There are sounds which, even after half a century of exposure to it (although admittedly only intermittent exposure), I still cannot differentiate certain vowel sounds, e.g., can vs can’t.  I have to ask them for clarification by saying, “Do you mean ‘can’ or ‘cannot’?”

    When I was working in Taipei for Conoco Taiwan in 1975–76, the three daughters — aged 10, 7 and 5, of the administrative manager (naturalised Aussie, originally Malaysian Chinese) and his white Australian wife — came home from school one day with a joke.

    School was the American School in Taipei, so this joke was based on the American pronunciation(s):  Your lips are like petals — bicycle pedals.

    The joke works on “petals” and “pedals” sounding the same for the middle consonant, which is another of my problems with American English.

Can’t hear the difference: 01 (Mandarin Chinese tones)

 

A lot of, if not a vast majority of, students learning Mandarin cannot hear the difference in the tones, so they’ll end up misinterpreting what they hear or render wrongly what they’re trying to say.

    In my second year of teaching on the evening programme (where students came along to learn for fun), the last lesson of the school year saw only one student turning up, so I asked him if he had anything he wanted special focus on that we couldn’t find the time for in class when there was a crowd.  

    He said “tones”, so I took him through pronunciation drills, reading him sentences, which he would repeat after me.  I’d correct the wrong tones.  After a while, he said, “Why do you keep correcting my tones?  I’m saying it exactly as you have said it.”

    A common feature with Westerners is that they will end a sentence with a falling tone (which is the fourth tone in Chinese), and pause in the middle of a sentence with a rising tone (which is a second tone in Chinese).  This means that all final sounds in a sentence get changed to a fourth tone, e.g., I have lots of books / wǒ yǒu hěn duō shū becomes wǒ yǒu hěn duō shù / I have lots of trees.  This has happened with English and French speakers in my experience that I can remember.  

See https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/08/chinese-tones.html

The guardian angels in one's life: 03 (The ex-tutor)

Having sort of decided to try out Linguistics as an MA subject by attending the free evening classes first, thinking, “That’s at least one decision made for now, phew!”, I then happened to mention it to Paul Thompson, my ex-tutor (academic and personal on the BA course) and ex-supervisor (on the Chinese computer research projects).

    Having the sort of mind he did, always exploring different arguments, testing them out, Paul Thompson then laid out his arguments for my case:

Quote [in the spirit of how he’d said it, as far as I can remember it]

So, you are trying out the MA option because you don’t know if you’d want to do a PhD.

[The reason he said “trying out” is:  an MA can be converted to a PhD if one so wishes and if one passes the exam at that level, or one could just leave it at an MA.]

And you’re trying out Linguistics because you don’t know whether you want to do an MA in Linguistics [or in Education].

So, you’re going for the evening classes in Linguistics to try out Linguistics, and you’re going for the MA to try out if you’d want to do a PhD.

You’re therefore trying out [Linguistics for the subject field] for the trying out [doing an MA or a PhD].

How long is that going to take you?  You might as well just go straight ahead and do the MA Linguistics, which means that you’ll at least get a master’s degree at the end of it.

Unquote

    Once he presented it like that, it was dead easy to decide.

    What a wise man he was!

(More in another blog about his earlier counselling as my BA Personal Tutor.)

(London, 1992)

The guardian angels in one's life: 02 (The senior colleague)

I was taken aside one day by a senior colleague who asked what I wanted to do with my life.

    That is a difficult question for a drifter to answer.  I said I was just happy to carry on with being a part-time teacher, having no ambitions at all in life.

    What I didn’t know at the time was that she was preparing me for taking over her post after her departure for her home country (a year or so later, which was not known at the time by anyone except herself).

    I said I didn't care about titles and all that.  She said having a first degree was not enough for modern-day employers, if I wanted to survive in the jobs market, suggesting that I go for at least an MA, if not a PhD.

    The next question was what to study.  She proposed Education or Linguistics since I like both.

    Being a Libran (described by some people as “the unbalanced balance” sign, constantly yo-yo-ing), it’s difficult for me when presented with a choice.  (I’m very good, however, at managing other people’s lives and making decisions for them...)  Well, this senior colleague had pointed out the way for me, and narrowed it down to two subject options.  All within five minutes of a face-to-face conversation.

    As staff could attend for free, I thought I’d try out the basic Linguistics course on the university’s evening programme, and see how I’d feel about Linguistics on an MA level.

    With the balls set rolling for doing post-graduate studies and which subject to pursue, the ball was now in my court to act on it.  (Enter the next guardian angel, in the next blog.)

(London, 1991)

The guardian angels in one's life: 01 (The Peruvian boy who adopted me)

[This story was first published as Cuzco chico (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/cuzco-chico_15.html), but I cannot do a series on guardian angels without him leading off the collection, so here he is again, in case you haven't already read Cuzco chico.  Re-reading it myself still brings tears to my eyes, as when I first wrote the story.]

Being one who always gets in the wrong queue, trust me to go and choose to be the adventurous traveller at the wrong time in Cuzco in November 1987, and go on standby for a plane to Lima.

    There had been a spate of train robberies, even on the Pullmans where carriages could be locked up to ensure robbers couldn’t get in — yet, somehow they did.  So, everyone decided to fly.

    On top of that, I had also gone and set up a domino effect by building up onward flights practically back-to-back:  Lima to London — arriving about 8pm, stay the night, then London to Zurich on the first plane the next day.  This meant that I could not afford to miss the mid-day flight out of Lima.  I also had to fly in from Cuzco the day before and stay the night in Lima, as there were no flights from Cuzco to get me into Lima before mid-day.

    When I got to the Cuzco airport, the queues for the (only) two airlines were at least 50 deep, with two flights per airline to Lima.  Gulp.

    David the Canadian and I decided to take a queue each, and call each other over when we got to the counter.

    Airline A’s flight 1 filled up, then Airline B’s flight 1.  Double gulp.  Two down, two to go.  Then that’s it for the day.  Eek.

    I thought I’d talk to the blonde gringa in front of me to make me feel better — you know, “fellow sufferers in the same boat”kind of thing.  She turned out to be an off-duty KLM stewardess, and would therefore get preferential treatment as airline staff.  Oh dear.  I could see myself scrambling for another flight to London, and another one to Zurich.  And she had her husband with her, which meant one more seat taken.  Groan.

    I’d put my name down for Airline B’s waiting list for flight 2, and saw that I was number 129.  Fat chance of getting on.

    As I stood in Airline A’s queue, about 20 behind, telling myself I just wasn’t cut out for the last-minute standby style of travelling, my quiet panic was interrupted by a voice, in Spanish, “Señorita, is this your bag?”

    I found myself looking down at the face from which had emanated that question — it belonged to a boy of about 8.  I nodded mutely, not twigging what it was about.

    The boy spoke again, in Spanish:  “Give me your passport and air ticket.”  I handed them over.

    Picking up my soft bag, he marched past the other 20 people in the queue, and went straight up to the counter, where the clerk was checking in a gringo passenger whose luggage was already on the weighing scales. 

    The boy slapped my documents onto the counter and said to the clerk, in Spanish, “Hola, Juan.  This is my señorita friend’s passport, plane ticket, and here is her luggage.”

    Juan pushed aside the items he was in the middle of processing, dealt with my case, handed over my passport, plane ticket and boarding pass to the boy, then went back to the previous passenger (who, surprisingly, did not protest, probably because he wasn’t quite sure what was happening, as it’d all taken place so quickly).

    When the boy came back to me, I was still standing in the queue, stunned by what my eyes were witnessing.

    He said, in Spanish, handing over each document as he called them out, “Señorita, here is your passport, here is your plane ticket, here is your boarding pass.  Now follow me, quick!  The plane’s leaving soon!”

    I followed him in a daze through the crowds in the main hall.

    At the departure lounge gate, he greeted the burly guard with cheery familiarity, in Spanish, “¡Hola, Pedro.  This is my señorita friend.  She’s catching the flight to Lima that’s leaving very soon.”

    Pedro let me through with only a cursory glance at my boarding pass — any friend of the boy’s was good enough, it seemed.

    The boy pointed out the plane on the tarmac, saying, in Spanish, “That’s your plane.  Quick go!”

    Then, he solemnly shook my hand, said, “Adios, señorita,” and turned to leave.  He wasn’t even expecting to be paid!

    I recovered in time from my dazed state and pulled out all the Peruvian notes and coins I had in my trouser pockets, calling out, “Chico!” and put the lot into his little hand.

    He looked taken aback.  I closed his fingers around the money and gave him a bear hug, blinking back the grateful tears.  (Crying now as I re-read this.  I shall be forever moved by the memory of it, however many times I recall it.)

    I got on the plane very shortly before it took off for Lima.

    To this day, I have no idea why the boy singled me out.  I was standing there minding my own business — even if panicking inwardly.

    The only explanation I can think of is that I was the only one in the queue who looked local, as the rest were all gringos and gringas.  I’d been mistaken for one everywhere I went in Peru and would get — without asking for — lower quotes for things like camping equipment than those for gringos fluent in Spanish. 

    He probably adopted me as I looked like a Peruana.

    The boy was my heaven-sent guardian angel.

(Peru, Nov 1987)