romeo.alpha wrote:Ser wrote:Honestly I think you're exaggerating the influence prosody exerts in being understood. All aspects of pronunciation matter a lot.
Try understanding people speaking French among themselves, and not shifting their register up so that it is comprehensible for foreigners, and then come back and tell me you think I'm exaggerating the influence prosody exerts in being understood.
Yes, I'm telling you that I think that you're exaggerating the influence prosody exerts in being understood. And truth be told, if you cannot believe even me, there is little hope for meaningful discussion here. I may not be a polyglot or know very distant languages, like many people here, but when it comes to experience with French and with understanding normal natives, you won't find many more experienced people around here. Or perhaps even at your local university
And I also have a not negligeable amount of experience with understanding normal Spanish natives too, so I can compare. And truth be told, I don't think either of them is significantly harder or easier to understand by foreigners (when not dumbed down of course), there are just a bit different kinds of difficulty in each.
Prosody is not unimportant, but it is definitely not the single most important part of the whole. Just look at people with really bad prosody in English,who still get understood, it can't be that hard to imagine for you! It is language learning, not prosody learning with a bit of vocab thrown in
Yes, prosody is one of the many things a learner needs to focus on. But it is simply
completely unimportant as a factor in choosing a language. And even more as a factor in the global popularity of any language.
Money is important. The languges of rich people are popular.
The amounts of natives are important, but much less than their money.
Tradition and availability of teaching resources is important. People learn what they can realistically imagine learning and what they can get their hands on. The language learning related politics of every country plays a big role. People pick from the few choices at school and very often stick to that choice for their whole lives, no matter how far they get or how many times they restart later.
How difficult a language is, that is important, but it is heavily influenced by marketing and by prejudices. And also by the things people can perceive. People take into account ortograph, a different script, a complicated looking grammar, when they are choosing. Not prosody, sorry.