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I fooled a native speaker | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| owshawng Senior Member United States Joined 6668 days ago 202 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 56 02 February 2007 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Tonight I briefly fooled a native mandarin speaker into thinking they were speaking to another native mandarin speaker. Granted it was only a few short lines of dialogue before I was found out (I made a grammatical error on my fourth line) but it was a big event for me!!
One of my wife's Taiwanese friends called her mobile phone. I answered it and in mandarin said hello. In english she asked to speak to my wife. I then asked her in mandarin who is this? She seemed confused and asked in mandarin for my wife. I replied in mandarin who is this? what do you want? There was a pause and she sounded even more confused when she asked in mandarin who was I and where was and she asked for my wife by name again. I tried to sound annoyed and asked her why was she calling me and who was she, but I used the pronoun for you when it wasn't needed and the jig was up. She aked if this was Aaron and my wife burst into laughter. The woman confessed to my wife that she had thought she had dialed the wrong number and wound up talking to a Taiwanese guy by mistake. It was only a short 3.5 line exchange before I was found out, but it was another step on my road to becoming conversational in mandarin. I am now so tempted to crank call my mother-in-law in Taiwan in another month to see how many lines I can say before I am found out. Edited by owshawng on 02 February 2007 at 7:47am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6797 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 56 02 February 2007 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
Congratulations!
Are you sure you want to do that? ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7100 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 56 02 February 2007 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations as well! Fooling a native speaker, even for 3.5 lines is not easy feat. So keep working on that accent and I'm sure you'll get even more lines the next time.
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| tujiko Senior Member United States Joined 6315 days ago 140 posts - 144 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 56 02 February 2007 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha, that is awesome. Every bit counts!
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| owshawng Senior Member United States Joined 6668 days ago 202 posts - 217 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 56 03 February 2007 at 6:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the kind words. I'm looking forward to trying out my better mandarin on a couple of friends I haven't seen in a while.
The next time I go to Taiwan I want to pretend when I'm talking with strangers that I'm from a non English speaking country and only use mandarin and really bad, broken english. When Taiwanese discover a native english speaker in their midst, they bring out any english they know. If they are conversational in english they only want to speak in english. Hopefully my plan will stop that. Edited by owshawng on 03 February 2007 at 6:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tike Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 6276 days ago 18 posts - 25 votes Speaks: German*, Russian, English Studies: French, Czech | Message 6 of 56 14 February 2007 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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My congratulations as well!
This reminds me of a funny incident some years ago. I then had learnt Russian only for a year and was far away from having mastered the grammar, but quite good at pronunciation. At a debating tournament (in German) I met a Russian native speaker. At the beginning we spoke German, but then I decided to go for it and addressed him in Russian. We then had a little chat in Russian and after a while he, amazed, asked me: "How long have you been learning the language?" I answered: "For about a year" and he: "Wow! Only one year - and you're already that fluent in German!" I took this as a real compliment ... :-) 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crimson_King Newbie United States Joined 6310 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 7 of 56 14 February 2007 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! So the Russian guy thought you were a native speaker of Russian and thought you had been studying German for one year
Did you actually tell him that German was your 'Muttersprache' and that you were studying Russian? I havent really had the opportunity to test my spoken German skills with a native yet, but during spring break of 2008 I will most likely be visiting Germany (CAN'T WAIT!!) and during the summer of 2009 I'm going to an immersion camp. This just makes me want to study even harder so I can maybe impress a native when the time comes :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tike Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 6276 days ago 18 posts - 25 votes Speaks: German*, Russian, English Studies: French, Czech | Message 8 of 56 16 February 2007 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Think so ... At least I hope that there was nothing wrong with my German on that event :-D One question should be discussed: Do you think, it might be easier to fool a native speaker if the language you spoke is not that "common" as a foreign language? What I mean is, maybe there are a lot of people who speak English, French, Spanish well, but these are languages that are taught quite often. Native speakers would be used to their language being spoken by a non-native and thus be more likely to "detect" one. One the other hand, there are probably not that many people speaking good Mandarin, Finnish, Russian etc. as a foreign language, so natives might take them for a native speaker automatically if they're good. What do you think? (Of course I don't want to discourage anyone (if anyone understands my post like that, it is not meant that way), it's merely a question concerning culture.) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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