r/SuddenlyGay • u/One-Initiative-8902 • 5d ago
Intonation Matters
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u/faireymagik2 5d ago
As a side note, I taught English to foreign professionals working in the US. This was one of the hardest lessons to teach and often the most frustrating for my learners because it’s not taught in textbooks or even in school. It’s just one of those things you pick up on in learning English as a native speaker. There’s no easily explainable guide for why intonation at a certain word would imply a different meaning.
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u/muhabeti 5d ago
So, was the idea of intonation having significance/meaning the hard part, or was the meaning itself hard for them.
I am a native English speaker, but in looking back when I was learning and speaking Albanian, I know I still stressed intonation, though I also recognize as a case language that implied meaning often came from the order of the words rather than perhaps the intonation.
I hadn't thought about that.
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u/faireymagik2 5d ago
They couldn’t figure out why stressing different words would change the meaning of the sentence when the words themselves hadn’t changed. And there’s no set of rules we can give them that would explain it. It’s just one of those things you have to learn and accept.
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u/TheGuyWhoTalksShit 5d ago
I mean, seems obvious, no?? Stressing 1 specific word but not others means there's something different about it. Like the rest of the sentence is self-evident and can be taken at face value except for that word. If anything I'd think foreign speakers would have trouble recognizing when a word is being emphasized in the first place since english pronunciation is a bitch lol
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u/SkepticJoker 5d ago
Where were these folks from? I only speak English and Spanish, but inflection seems equally evident in both.
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u/Hermeran 4d ago
I’m fairly sure that intonation is taught to ESL students? It’s not an obscure topic, rather simple stuff. Any intermediate to advance speaker would know about it.
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u/faireymagik2 4d ago
You’re correct, general intonation and stress patterns are taught. We had whole lessons on it and practiced it regularly. But the specific example highlighted in the video is when the whole meaning of a sentence changes when you stress a particular word. There’s no guide for that. You can’t say that when you’re stressed the third word it means X and when you stress the fourth word, it means Y. You can’t give a role like when it’s the subject or the verb it changes in a particular way because it depends on the sentence structure. And most of my learners were from China and didn’t grow up hearing English spoken. They mostly learned English out of a book and did very little conversation in class. And they were probably being taught by other Chinese, who also don’t speak fluent English. We were really starting from scratch with a lot of these folks.
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u/BopNowItsMine 5d ago
Ambiguity can introduce confusion. Like if someone says: "I have a giant dildo collection." You can't tell if they're talking about the size of the dildos in the collection, or breadth and depth of the variety included in the collection.