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Poll: Where are you guys from?

Where are you from/located?


  • Total voters
    1,492
  • Poll closed .

pseudoid

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No idea why,
Could it be that Latin became too structured to the point that it turned monolithic?
Reminds me of another language. ,)
Wait, wait! But you are a NewYorkan (born and/or resident). I learned my English in NYC-metro and everyone assumes I have a native Joisey accent!
 

EJ3

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James Island, SC
Correct.

This map does not say that 30, 50, 60 or whatever % actually do speak fluent English (30-49% in France? Absolutely no way:p). It is an estimation of "knowledge of English" as a second language (except for Republic of Ireland).

On peut arranger ça !

Audiophile level: Autocrat OCD
:D
I don't go to their house & tell them anything about their system (unless they ask me what could they do to make it better). I just accept that: they have what they have and probably are fine with what they have or they would do something to change it. If they have something better than mine (many do) I comment that it's a wonderful system. I have what I have because I like what I have.
What I have has been together many years and has changed a bit from time to time. That will continue to happen as I learn & afford new things. But the change process is slow (taking years between even one item changing), so that even my close friends don't necessarily perceive a difference unless they see something different in the equipment. They may ask "what's that for?" or "Why did you change that out to this other thing?" Then I'll tell them that "I think" it looks better or sounds better. And then ask them what they think about the change (since it was noticeable to them). It won't change my mind because I will have already decided that it belongs or not). Them not telling me what to do & how to do (or what not to do & how not to do it) it my own home has nothing to do with autocracy (unless it is their issue), in which case they wouldn't be on my property or in my home to begin with. There is a person in my neighborhood that has a sign on his gate that says: "Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again". While I am not prone to being armed, I agree with their premise.
 

EJ3

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For the most part, nobody cares about audio anymore. Outside of a few forums and the few readers of the couple of magazines that exist it's just not on people's radar. As has been stated elsewhere people get their music in other, vastly more convenient ways.
And more often than not, those ways are inferior sounding (please note that I did NOT say that they all are). The sound doesn't have to be perfect, but I would rather listen to my surroundings than listen to inferior sound because it is convenient. Therefore I don't usually listen to music in my car or outside of my home. To me, low quality sound is inconvenient. I won't listen to it if I don't have to. I guess that I am different than the averages.
I will put up with many inconveniences to have great sound.
It's probably part of the reason that I was 48 when I got married (18 years later, we are still married & she doesn't seem to care about audio at all).
 
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Adaboy4z

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US, Texas
 

Katji

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Part two

(for those who want to know more)
:-o wow! Part 2, and I'm excited after reading part 1. A favourite topic. :)

I hate dubbing. Usually not a problem, I can think of only one example now - the many Turkish telenovellas, all dubbed into Afrikaans, usually looking somewhat absurd - but I'm not interested in watching them anyway.
SABC seems to have about 8 voices/people, but the worst thing about it is that the dubbing is all done in the same room, and all sitting in front of the microphone. So the person walks across the room or goes out into the yard, but the voice stays the same, like right in front of you.

By the way, a week or so ago, I watched a Danish film that showed up randomly on SABC. (I watch randomly; go and sit there and see what's happening.) So I missed the beginning, didn't know what it was, thought I must google but then the next morning I'd forgotten, of course, and then I saw a reply from you and that reminded me. :) ...The Guilty. Very low-budget, almost all in one room - the police/emergency services. I was a bit surprised to see that it had won award/s but then 2 nights later, it showed up again and I watched most of it again. English subtitles. I wished that I could switch it to Danish subtitles, alternate, so I could see what they were saying. Maybe that will become more common, with digital tv and machine translation. I think the only words I could understand was ja and slange. (Because the woman had cut her child's stomach open to remove the snakes.)
And there was also one around 2 weeks ago - about a father with two daughters who had finally decided to become a woman, and the reactions of the daughters.
So with that, and two Dutch films and one Lithuanian film, I was hoping it might be a trend. [Any relief from the usual.]
[...]
 

dasdoing

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dubbing is all done in the same room, and all sitting in front of the microphone. So the person walks across the room or goes out into the yard, but the voice stays the same, like right in front of you.

I am glad brazilian dubbing is superb. hate watching anything with subtitles as you lose half the images.

worst dubbing is eastern europe. they leave the original audio and just speak on top of it. sometimes a single voice for all caracters
 
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Katji

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This, I believe, we can ascribe to the low (almost non-existent) sound signature of vocals in Croatian language. (Also, I believe this is why Croatian often sounds horrible when sang.) Modern Croatian has 5 and a half vocals. (I know, it sounds silly.) It's; a, e, i, o u, and a half tone. Those five vocals [...]
Vowels.
The main factor in accents.
It is a problem in SA, the English 'i' sound versus the African accent which pronounces it 'ee' (as per transliteration standard, like in transliteration of Hindi.) There is a sort of feedback loop problem, it leads to misspelling - including in tv subtitling. So people are spelling tweeter as twitter. And people are "leaving in" some place. :'(
 

Katji

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I am glad brazilian dubbing is superb. hate watching anything with subtitles as you lose half the images.
I watched a Brazilian series a while ago...Arianas? (Amazon, gold, water pollution, oligarch/whatever versus eco organisation and progressive tv journalist.) Dubbing was ok, as good as it gets, good enough synchronising with mouth movement.

[edit:] *Aruanas
 
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LTig

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I am glad brazilian dubbing is superb. hate watching anything with subtitles as you lose half the images.

worst dubbing is eastern europe. they leave the original audio and just speak on top of it. sometimes a single voice for all caracters
German dubbing usually is excellent as well if done by the major companies. One awful exception is Ran by Akira Kurosawa. All voices recorded in a room with reflections which sounds horrible when the actor is outside.
 

Luke Lemke

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'a' we pronounce like US speakers do in 'arm', or like in the shout of realization 'ah!' (variant is like when you catch cold and pronounce 'a')
'e' we pronounce like US speakers do in the word 'end' - all our pronunciations of 'e' are exactly the same as in 'end'
'i' we pronounce like US speakers pronounce 'e' in the word 'English' or 'irrational'
'o' we pronounce like US speakers pronounce it in the conjunction 'or' or in the brand Osh-Kosh
'u' brace yourselves, we pronounce like US speakers would pronounce 'oo' in 'wool' it's the sam
Interesting, this is very, very similar to how we pronounce vowels in Portuguese...
 

Luke Lemke

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If anyone's interested, here's an opinion on foreign language skills from a MA linguistics prof. (It's still just an opinion although I arrived at it after exchanging it with lot of professionals from the field.)
There was this one recurring question among my people that asked how come we're so good in foreign languages. This got me interested, but I was never in a position to investigate, although I wanted to. Next best thing, I started gathering info on the subject. First, I was interested what other countries shared this trait, and, more importantly, which countries had a reputation of being bad at foreign languages.

You're guessing right, I was going for economic status and indirectly for school programs and school finance. But that wasn't it. Italy always had significantly more money in education but they are far worse (FAR worse) in foreign languages than we are. Italy was dubbing everything. In fact this is how Japanese cartoons taught Croatian kids to speak Italian. A very interesting cultural exchange. You couldn't see Mazinger Z or Astro Boy anywhere else on TV. Kids went crazy for them and tuned their antennae to pick up Italian TV (back then, coastal Croatia could use aerial antenna to watch programs from Italy since Italy is just across the Adriatic.) We used to think those were Italian cartoons.

It was a lucky thing that I compared Croatia with Italy because it made me think about dubbing and subtitling. Italy is traditionally a dubbing country and Croatia WAS traditionally a subtitling country (a-holes changed this sucking up to the market). But this gave me a frame I could work on. I started checking other countries for this exposure to foreign languages in the age before cable TV when most people watched just a few national channels.

And sure enough, it fits like a glove! Regardless of economic wealth or historical significance, countries that used to expose young people to foreign languages did better in FL skills. Most notably Poland did very poor!! (It was in fact Poland that used to have one single voice for all the roles in foreign films. People now day wrongly ascribe this to less developed countries like Moldavia or Romania, possibly because they just can't believe it's Poland. It was Poland. All dubbed and all using just one person to dub). I was in Warsaw, not long ago. Center of the city. Souvenir shops. Not a single word in English. You would expect it at least in these situations. (I, on the other hand, speak English, Italian, French and could find my way around German)

At one point in time, I was honestly worried and angry because I thought we're gonna lose this comparative advantage because of the septic tank otherwise known as free market. My countrymen invested heavily in the gut wrenching awful discipline of dubbing foreign kids' movies and animated films in order to attract wider audience and sell more tickets. And it's just dreadful, horrible. A shame, nothing less.

Luckily, new media and new technologies came to rescue (!!!!! and this is one of the rarest occasions when I speak positively about new media, so you all need to tune in). Output of gaming world, YouTube, movie industry, the rest of the Internet, cable TV is faaaar bigger than any national studio could ever dub. The kids, once again, are exposed (in never before imaginable quantities) to foreign languages, so no real damage was done. Kids today are even better in English than I was when I was their age.

What happened to other countries (Italy, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and also states of former Yugoslavia considering that dubbing took root)? Yes! they all improved by an amazing percentage. Kids in Italy speak English all of a sudden. And so do German kids etc. And quite well.

Listening to a foreign language coupled with instant translation below at a young age is a very fast and reliable way to learn foreign languages. You would spend hours watching cartoons trying to understand what was being said. So you would listen to voices and read bellow what it meant. Soon enough, you could understand an Italian person (as long as he was speaking about robots :D:D:D:D ) After some time, you could even put a sentence or two together.

Now imagine all the movies, cinema, YouTube, popular songs, most of Internet...
Brazil is also a dubbing country which is one of the reasons we suck at speaking foreign languages. Maybe Netflix / Youtube will change that.
 

killdozzer

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Interesting, this is very, very similar to how we pronounce vowels in Portuguese...
A! You're Portuguese?! I love Portugal. I know you shouldn't really say that today, but who gives a f. And I really, REALLY like the way you pronounce your palatal and velar phonemes. I see you read my two posts so you probably stumbled upon my idea why Croatian often sucks for singing. One of my workarounds was to adopt the Portuguese pronunciation to make palatals softer and more velar. I'm working on a song right now and with out a doubt I'll be posting it here when it's done so you can hear.

one of the big reasons I listen to a lot of fado is the language. I know you're probably tired of it as a native just as I am of my traditional acapela singing, but I get why foreigners fall for it.
 

Luke Lemke

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A! You're Portuguese?! I love Portugal. I know you shouldn't really say that today, but who gives a f. And I really, REALLY like the way you pronounce your palatal and velar phonemes. I see you read my two posts so you probably stumbled upon my idea why Croatian often sucks for singing. One of my workarounds was to adopt the Portuguese pronunciation to make palatals softer and more velar. I'm working on a song right now and with out a doubt I'll be posting it here when it's done so you can hear.

one of the big reasons I listen to a lot of fado is the language. I know you're probably tired of it as a native just as I am of my traditional acapela singing, but I get why foreigners fall for it.
No no I'm brazilian, forgot to mention that. I do listen to some Fados every now and then since my father in law is Portuguese.

Do you already have recorded songs that we can check out?
 

killdozzer

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No no I'm brazilian, forgot to mention that. I do listen to some Fados every now and then since my father in law is Portuguese.

Do you already have recorded songs that we can check out?
Well there's one silly political pamphlet of a song that is not representative of this experiment I'm mentioning. (It is made to be used in theater show) You'll get the wrong picture. But, go right ahead. I love when someone wants to hear it.
 

Katji

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...Interesting...interesting... :) ..........out of scope for me here and now.

...PS: Did you ever listen to Killing Joke? First 20 seconds, that's what i thought of.
 

Vacceo

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A! You're Portuguese?! I love Portugal. I know you shouldn't really say that today, but who gives a f. And I really, REALLY like the way you pronounce your palatal and velar phonemes. I see you read my two posts so you probably stumbled upon my idea why Croatian often sucks for singing. One of my workarounds was to adopt the Portuguese pronunciation to make palatals softer and more velar. I'm working on a song right now and with out a doubt I'll be posting it here when it's done so you can hear.

one of the big reasons I listen to a lot of fado is the language. I know you're probably tired of it as a native just as I am of my traditional acapela singing, but I get why foreigners fall for it.
I´ve said many times that if I ever vanish, look for me in Coimbra. I´ll be eating chocolate like there is no tomorrow.

I love my Iberian neightbours (I´m located in Spain); Portugal is trully a jewel.
 
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