this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
194 points (97.5% liked)

World News

39082 readers
3055 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Summary

Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.

The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 4 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Pitch accent isn't a tone system, also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 9 hours ago

also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways

If English speakers¹ can deal with oo being pronounced at least six different ways (moon, book, door, blood, cooperation, brooch) they should be able to deal with this...

1— Disclaimer: as a non native speaker, I not only can't deal with it, but at this point have absolutely no intention to.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I mean according to Wikipedia,

Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

And yeah ん is messed up but aren't three of these the same sound? I'd say it's more five different pronunciations rather than seven, which still a lot but would match with my understanding of it as English+2.

[–] loppy@fedia.io 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I think he titled it 7 because he explicitly presents 7 different cases. I'm not sure what you mean by saying three are the same though? Two are obviously exactly the same. Personally, I would only consider it three different "things":

  • A uvular nasal at the end of an utterance.
  • The nasalization of a following consonant when that consonant has the tongue contacting the roof of the mouth.
  • The nasalization of a preceeding vowel when the following phoneme has the tongue not making contact.

I think it's fair to even say that it's almost exactly one thing: an instruction to let air out of your nose whilst producing the surrounding phonemes.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 12 hours ago

I meant the same in terms of the actual sound that comes out.