(Untitled)

[c4c]

So the Sydney scum managed a crappy draw with us and they make the finals instead of us. Disappointing but not the end of the world. A little more consistency throughout the season would have been nice, but still, we came up with the occasional awesomely spectacular game. Problem was that we also came up with the occasional total shocker.

Comments

[augustuscaesar]

Ooh, he is cute.

[c4c]

Cute and foreign! Did I mention that yet? :-P

Very appropriate icon. *g*

[augustuscaesar]

Not only appropriate because of the swoonage but also because those men are foreign too! French, rather than German, but eh ;)

[c4c]

France is close enough to Germany for them to be almost the same...um, without actually being very much the same at all. Shut up, it's only 10am and I've only had one coffee. *g*

The man on the left in that icon has a very aristocratic profile. And nice hair.

[augustuscaesar]

Hee, that's my beloved Jerome Pradon. Unfortunately, that was in 1991 and the nice hair no longer exists ;)

*uses most recent icon of him*

[c4c]

Hmm. Older, balder, but the aristocratic profile is still there. *g*

[augustuscaesar]

And that's the most important thing! (maybe)

[c4c]

I like his name, too. I would completely fail at pronouncing it properly because French totally defeats me, but it looks nice written down and it probably sounds nice when said by someone who isn't me. :-P

[augustuscaesar]

Well, it's actually Jérôme Pradon, if that helps, pronunciation-wise ;)

[c4c]

That just makes it harder! I've only ever spoken English and a bit of German, which are both quite guttural. I find the Romance languages very difficult to pronounce because they're just so different. Spanish slightly less so, because I've had more practice, what with my stepmother being Central American. Italian I can almost manage. French and Portuguese, however, are insane.

[augustuscaesar]

Well, there's a classic clip in the Making of Martin Guerre where he pronounces it as an English speaker would. So really, you have his permission to make it sound weird ;)

[c4c]

Excellent! I am incapable of making it sound anything else, so that's a great relief. *g*

Why can't all languages have nice, easy phonetics like German? It would be so much easier to become multilingual that way. I suppose Japanese is pretty easy pronunciation-wise but it makes up for it by having really stupid grammar and a ridiculously complex system of forms of address.

[augustuscaesar]

I think all languages should be pronounced just like English. Except not, because most of them sound prettier than us!

Actually, the one language I doubt I'd ever be able to pronounce is Cantonese. It's just sooo far from English.

[c4c]

English is a pretty stupid language too, when you think about it. Cobbled together from everything else and most of the original stuff invented by one bloke who wrote plays four hundred years ago. *g*

German is supposedly one of the easier languages for English speakers to learn - the grammar is similar to English and the phonetics aren't too difficult, although some people have trouble with the 'ch' sound. The dative case is murder though, and the genders are painful too.

I love listening to Cantonese. Tonal languages are cool. It's one of the reasons I refuse to watch dubbed Jackie Chan movies. *g* The other reason being that they were mostly dubbed twenty years ago and they sound like really bad westerns. :-P

[augustuscaesar]

I'd hate to have to learn it as a second language. It's weird enough as a native speaker *g*

The problem with the 'ch' sound in German is that it tends to vary depending on the area. We were taught it very gutturally at school, but it's so much prettier a language with the softer 'ch'

I love listening to Cantonese too, but I doubt I could ever learn it. I'll leave it to the native speakers, I think!

[c4c]

So would I. The spelling is completely random and often not phonetic at all, and gramatically there seem to be more exceptions than rules. *g*

Yeah, I've been taught a few different ways too. My primary school German teacher was Danish; she taught a fairly soft 'ch'. In high school I had an Australian German teacher; she taught quite a guttural one. In university I had an Austrian teacher; he was somewhere in between - fairly guttural for 'ch' following 'o', 'a' 'au' or 'u', quite soft following consonants, 'i', 'e', 'ä' and 'ü' and somewhere middling for a lot of the diphthongs and 'ö'. I like his pronunciation best, even if he was extremely dictatorial about rolling the 'r', which I've never mastered. He was a pretty good teacher, actually - learned a lot about regional variations with him too. And he made stupid bilingual jokes. *g*

Yeah, Cantonese seems pretty hard. Speaking it would be difficult enough, but writing it even harder. At least French, while unpronounceable, has a moderately sensible alphabet. :-P