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[water rat]

This article is from 2011, but fascinating nonetheless. Comments?

http://www.adn.com/article/language-study-japanese-spanish-fastest-spoken-tongues

I had always thought Spanish and Japanese just 'sound' faster than English because of the rhythm of the languages, and I find that even when I speak them (they happen to be two of my best three foreign languages) it sounds like I am speaking more quickly than I normally do - normally I speak English of course.

[buravirgil]

[water rat]

Hey BV, how do you create a link like that so that you just click on the underlined text? I know how to do it on another forum, but it doesn't seem to work here, or I forgot the procedure. Not sure which...

[MotherF]

Huh. I'm certain that when I was studying prosody there were studies that showed Japanese was not actually and faster in real sound terms but because its a mora timed language it's perceived by non speakers of Japanese as faster but analysis of the sound waves shows it is not truly faster. In fact it showed all languages about the same.

Water rat
This forum is a little more rudimentary than others. You need to due it by hand. The following with out spaces which have been added to fool the program.

[ url =
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics) ] name of your link [ / url ]

[esl_prof]

[water rat]

[BadBeagleBad]

Interesting. I don´t know about Japanese, but I don´t agree about Spanish. I think the perception is that a language someone is not fluent is is faster. I know when I was first learning Portuguese everything seemed fast, yet now, at an intermediate level, it doesn´t. When I was in college there was a candidate for office who claimed ties to the ¨Hispanic Community¨ (I hate that term, and there is, in fact, NO such thing, not in the US) and said she spoke fluent Spanish. She decided it would be a good idea to appear at the college campus and allowed questions. So I decided to ask her a question in Spanish to see just how fluent she really was. I asked a fairly simple question - Are you a member of the Democratic Party - being careful to speak slowly and enunciate carefully (at the time I had a lot of Cuban friends, and anyone who speaks Spanish knows what a nightmare a Carribean accent is) yet she refused to answer - because it was obvious she didn´t understand - but it was actually reported in the newspaper that ¨questions were asked in rapid fire Spanish¨. Not sure if that was just the newspaper´s tendency to exagerate, or if that was really their perception. But, I also took a lot of Spanish classes in college (to get an easy A, I am only slightly ashamed to say) and even the more advanced students said the Cuban teachers spoke faster than the others, but I thought just the opposite. Plus, they drop so many letters that they can pack a lot more meaning into more syllables. So my not so expert opinion is that they just thought it was faster because it was harder to understand.

[MotherF]

[esl_prof]

[esl_prof]

[mitsui]

I think so.
When my Japanese students give speeches I often tell them to speak slower.
Sometimes they are nervous but often they speak too quickly.
It could be first language interference.

[JN]

I think that when giving a speech in any language a person has to be careful to articulate. I've heard a few speeches in English by native speakers that were given too quickly, although as a native speaker I did understand them.
I also remember that when I first thought I had a good handle on speaking German, I realized I had to slow down so people could understand me. Now I tell many of my students, who are usually German, to not speak too fast.

I don't know Japanese and only a few phrases and songs in Spanish, but I've always thought that just being a non-speaker of a language would make me think it is spoken more quickly than a language I do speak.