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Old 06-07-2012, 04:51 PM   #62
ficbot
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Freeshadow, it's not just about caring and respect. I am a teacher and we had training in this; it was emphasized that a student should always be called what they prefer to be called. And yet, twice in my teaching career, I was faced with students who had names which were simply not pronounceable to English speakers. They contained sounds that we simply could not produce. I worked very hard on one of them, a little Russian girl who didn't speak English at all. I felt so bad for her because she didn't understand a thing we said---including her name. At the time, I was tutoring a child from this background and I asked about the name. She spent almost half an hour trying to work on it with me and she kept saying 'not quite, but very close. Not quite...' I just could not produce the sound the way she did.

This was the point I was making above. Someone said why should it be so hard to learn when tiny children do it, and I suggested a reason why it really might be so hard. It would be the same as if I said to you I came from a culture where ESP was prevalent and it was a matter of respect that you use ESP to read my mind. It is a matter of respect to TRY, but you just might not be able to do it. I am not being disrespectful to my Norwegian student by coming from a linguistic background which does not have a vowel that sounds like a bird chirping. What I *should* do is ask the mother what her baby is called. If she says 'her name in Norwegian is YYY but you can call her XXX' then that is fine, no?
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