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Who speaks TL better - Kerry or Gingrich? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5140 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 25 of 39 01 March 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
It is common among intellectuals, scientists and writers (and even politicians, whose currency is speech) who possess a high level of proficiency in a foreign language to nevertheless display terrible pronunciation, as this is seldom the priority or focus for most of them. In fact even though I believe my command of English is reasonably good, if I were to speak it it would not rank much higher than Gingrich's Spanish. Listening to the entire video again, as a native speaker, there is nothing Gingrich said which I did not clearly understand, and as I stated before, besides euphony, it was delivered with coherence and in perfect agreement with the content of his speech, leading one to believe he indeed possesses at least some objective knowledge of the language. If I were his teacher -and without more information this is impossible to assess- I believe I should give him passing marks. In the case of Kerry, I find his pronunciation also somewhat grating, though certainly to a lesser extent. For someone however who received a French-language education and spent time in a French-speaking environment -in his youth, no less-, this is a much greater indictment of his foreign-language merits and abilities.
So you're the reason why Western civilization has failed. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5578 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 26 of 39 01 March 2013 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, because the powerful all run their decisions by me before doing anything... 
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| BrianDeAlabama Groupie United States Joined 4314 days ago 89 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 39 02 March 2013 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was impressed with John Kerry's French! Wow! I never knew that about him. Now I have something nice to say
about the poor ole guy. ;) Gingrich's Spanish seemed to be read from a teleprompter. For someone to speak that much Spanish they SHOULD have a better accent than that but IF he was not reading from some sort of screen then I am truly shocked about his vocabulary range. One politician that has shocked me with his ability to speak another language is Ron Paul. I've heard that man speak Liberty FLUENTLY and with a native accent every time he spoke. I know its already 2013 but I am so tempted to shout Ron Paul 2012!!!! but I'll refrain since this is a apolitical, language forum. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 28 of 39 02 March 2013 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's a difference between "he understood what he was saying" and "he could've produced it himself".
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 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6174 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 39 02 March 2013 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Please, let's keep politics out of this thread.
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5578 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 30 of 39 02 March 2013 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
True, but the same could be said of a lot of speeches made by politicians in their native tongues! Of course certain politicians (not naming any names) don't even understand much of their speeches in their native tongues, let alone being able to produce it...or am I misunderestimating them? Now I know that most politicians aren't very sincere anyway, but if you don't even understand what you are saying*, then logically it is quite impossible to sincerely mean what you are saying, so if he chooses to address the Latino community in Spanish about an issue that affects them and has any wish at all to seem credible, then this is quite an important achievement on Gingrich's part. *or at least think you do Edited by Random review on 02 March 2013 at 11:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 31 of 39 02 March 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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hehe true. I mostly meant this in linguistic terms. like, he may not know all the rules but he knows which word is which and what he is saying where. basically like Juan said earlier.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4925 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 32 of 39 03 March 2013 at 12:48am | IP Logged | |||||
I can only respond as a native English speaker that speaks Spanish, but I have to disagree here. His cadence, prosody, and physical demeanor - right down to arm movement and eyebrow raising, come off as very rehearsed, and looking at his eye movement, a teleprompter was used. It may not be common knowledge, but teleprompters are set up to deliver all sorts of communication hints to the speaker, including pronunciation and physical movement in addition to just words. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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