XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: kehoea@parhasard.net   
      
    Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Peter Moylan:   
      
    > [...] When it's someone speaking Irish, an extra factor comes in: my   
    > vocabulary is so limited, and my command of Irish spelling so poor, that I'm   
    > struggling to understand anything at all. Under those conditions, I can fail   
    > to distinguish two words even though their pronunciation is different.   
      
   OK, so no deep-rooted lack of perception, “just” a deficit in practice.   
      
    > There's also the fact that recognising an accent does not imply being   
    > able to analyse the features of the words being spoken. I used to live   
    > in Melbourne, at a time when it had many recent immigrants, and when I   
    > was in a crowd -- on a railway station, for example -- it amused me to   
    > guess which languages people were speaking. I think those guesses would   
    > have been very accurate. These were languages that I didn't speak or   
    > understand, but I could pick them because different languages have   
    > different rhythms and dominant sounds, and one can respond to that   
    > without knowing what any of the words mean. A lot of what registers is   
    > subconscious.   
      
   Yeah, I get you, but I do think this can be leveraged to pick up on phonemic   
   distinctions when learning another language.   
      
    > Here's another example. I once got lost in central Paris at midnight, so   
    > I stopped a passer-by and asked for directions. He told me where to go,   
    > I thanked him, and we went in our different directions. It wasn't until   
    > I had walked a whole block more that it suddenly hit me that that man   
    > had been speaking French with an Australian accent. The recognition was   
    > in my head, but it hadn't come to the surface. And he, presumably,   
    > hadn't noticed that I was an English speaker.   
      
   Clearly the French of both of you was good enough for the task to hand, no bad   
   thing.   
      
   --   
   ‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /   
   How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’   
   (C. Moore)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)